Notes on Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) 2: Chapters 4-6

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism 

(Zero Books, 2009) [a]

 

This is the second part of a three-part post: part one can be accessed by clicking here.  

 

 

I. 

 

Fisher ties his analysis of capitalist realism (or neoliberalism and postmodernity) to three areas; bureaucracy, education, and mental health. 

 

It's the last of these things with which he is most concerned and why, as a matter of fact, the book has proved to be so popular. For we are in an age obsessed with mental wellbeing; everyone from King Charles to Z-list celebrities feels the need to bang on about anxiety, depression, stress, eating disorders, learning difficulties, and reflexive impotence.  

 

And Fisher, convinced by his reading of Oliver James's 2008 book The Selfish Capitalist [b], is able to reassure us that the mental health crisis is due to an inherently dysfunctional society and not caused only by "chemical imbalances in the individual's neurology and/or by their family background" (21).

 

 

II. 

 

That last term in the above list - reflexive impotence - was coined by Fisher to describe a widespread modern mindset where individuals recognise that the world is fucked up, yet feel utterly incapable of changing it. This belief creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, fostering depression on the one hand and political disengagement on the other.   

 

According to Fisher, depression is endemic in the UK and "afflicting people at increasingly younger ages" (21). But it's a new form of depression - one he terms depressive hedonia:

 

"Depression is usually characterised as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure." (21-22)

 

In other words, kids today have too much of a good thing - "the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana" (23) - and it's spoiling them and wrecking their health (physically and mentally). 

 

"There is a sense that 'something is missing' - but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle." (22)

 

Hmmm ... That sounds like the sort of thing those who are promoting national service or Jesus usually say! 

 

Obviously, I'm not saying that's what Fisher is doing. Nevertheless, there is something amusingly kids today-ish about what he writes of his experience dealing with young students in further education; their inability to read more than a couple of sentences without getting bored; their wanting to consume Nietzsche with the same ease they eat a hamburger; their need to constantly listen to music or check social media:

 

"The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus." (24)

  

That could well be the case, but, the funny thing (unless I'm very much mistaken) is that back in the day Fisher and his pals in the CCRU - were all for cyberspace and schizophrenia, the fragmentation of time and subjectivity, etc. 

 

His complaint in Capitalist Realism seems to be that all this was co-opted by those whom he thinks of as neoliberals and that it didn't lead to the revolution he was hoping for, but, rather, to a generation suffering from "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" (25); a pathology peculiar to late-capitalism and "a consequence  of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture" (25) [c]. 

 

 

III.

 

Once upon a time, Marxists used to call for permanent revolution and anarchists dream of permanent insurrection. But what we have today thanks to neoliberalism is permanent instability - McJobs and zero-hours contracts. Now there's no such thing as full-employment or jobs for life; workers are expected to be flexible and willing to periodically learn new skills. 

 

New buzzwords emerged, such as deregulation and outsourcing. And now, in 2026, everyone's talking about AI.  

 

And if permanent instability places intolerable strain on family life, too bad: "The values that family life depends upon - obligation, trustworthiness, commitment - are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism." (33) 

 

Today, we have to all live like Neil McCauley, De Niro's character in Heat (dir. Michael Mann, 1995), and not let ourselves get attached to anything (or anyone) we're not willing (and able) to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if need be. 

 

In brief, the world has changed - though, crucially, the change was in part "driven by the desires of workers" (34) themselves. The moral of which (not drawn by Fisher) is: be careful what you wish for - because even freedom and happiness can become burdensome and make miserable.

 

 

IV. 

  

The urgent task today, says Fisher, is to repoliticise mental illness; that's the way to challenge capitalist realism. 

 

And there seem to be many on the radical left who agree with him, which is perhaps why so many of those pink-haired young people with rings through their noses, campaigning for a wide range of progressive issues and causes, are keen to tell you about their struggles with anxiety and depression. 

 

Ironically, however, recent research suggests that viewing everything through a lens of activism can become mentally exhausting and the fact that they find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism undoubtedly adds to their levels of distress and unhappiness [d].    

 

Oliver James was widely criticised for his anti-medication stance in The Selfish Capitalist (2008); he explicitly attacked the use of pharmaceuticals as a pacifying social element that enabled damaged individuals to be returned to the work force. James also dismissed cognitive behavioural therapy and suggested it too was designed to serve neoliberal interests. 

 

I mention that because I do wonder if - inadvertently - Fisher's book harms some of the people he most cares about by feeding into their political neuroses and validating their psychopathologies ... 

 

Perhaps a reader who already finds the world cruel and unjust and blames society for his or her own feelings of what used to be called alienation, might come away from Capitalist Realism feeling even more depressed; particularly as it doesn't actually offer an alternative, functioning more as a diagnostic tool.     

 

Just sayin' ...

 

V.    

  

Fisher's ideas on market Stalinism, the triumph of PR, and bureaucratic anti-producion - ideas which form the basis for chapter 6 of Capitalist Realism - are interesting; but not so interesting that I have much to say about them here.     

   

These are the things into which all that was once solid have dissolved ... The things which that spectral authority known as the big Other [e] believes in even if (even when) nobody else does. 

 

Fisher rejects the claim made by some (including Nick Land) that capitalist realism has "given up belief in the big Other" (45) - that it has become as incredulous to the latter as to all metanarratives and doesn't need such to act as a guarantor. Either the Symbolic hasn't been as abolished as once believed, or, even if it has, this abolition did not lead to "a direct encounter with the Real" (48) - it led to what Baudrillard termed hyperreality. 

 

Oh, and bureaucracy hasn't gone away either (which is why we can still learn much by reading Kafka) - just ask any teacher or university lecturer. It's no wonder, then, that Fisher felt less than happy working in the education sector and one can't help wondering why he felt so compelled to belong to it and desperate to secure a permanent post ... 

 

Shortly before resigning from Warwick and after his position there had become untenble, Nick Land once told me: 'I'd rather flip burgers from the back of a van than be an academic.'

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This is the cover of the first edition. I'm using the 2022 edition published by Zero Books and page references given here are to this edition. 

 

[b] In The Selfish Capitalist (2008), psychologist Oliver James asserts that the model of neoliberalism adopted by English-speaking nations since the 1970s is a primary driver of widespread mental illness. He contends that this system fosters affluenza - i.e., a kind of cultural virus, symptoms of which include an obsessive pursuit of money and status, which makes people prone to depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem for those who don't succeed in getting rich or becoming famous. 

      Thus, like Mark Fisher, James argues that mental illness is essentially a social consequence, rather than a genetic or neurological condition and he calls for an unselfish form of capitalism, in which workers have more pay, shorter hours, better conditions, and so on, thereby ensuring the wellbeing of the many takes precedence over the wealth of the few. 

      Critics point to his use of data and the fact that his thesis relies on correlation rather than proves causation. He also seems to have little real knowledge of some of the countries he champions as more caring and sharing; countries including Japan, which has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Ultimately, his proposed solution to the crisis in mental health is a bit like Fisher's; underdeveloped, to say the least.       

  

[c] It's probably due to his somewhat belated recognition that cyberfuturism and schizonomadism might lend themselves to neoliberalism - not to mention a neo-reactionary politics (à la Nick Land) - that led Fisher to retreat to acid communism (which is essentially an all too human model of politics).  

 

[d] Researchers in Finland at the University of Turku identified a negative correlation between progressive ideals and mental wellbeing. Their findings suggest that other Western nations may find similar patterns among socially conscious (or woke) individuals.

      See the study, authored by Oskari Lahtinen, titled 'Construction and validation of a scale for assessing social justice attitudes', in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, Vol. 65, Issue 4 (August 2024), pp. 693-705. Click here to read online.   

[e] The big Other is Fisher's development of Žižek's elaboration of Lacan's concept; a collective fiction or symbolic structure "presupposed by any social field" (44) and which organises and supports social reality via an invisible framework of rules, laws, and cultural norms. It is sometimes known by other names; such as the Market, or that coldest of all cold monsters, the State. 

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) 1: Chapters 1-3

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism 

(Zero Books, 2022) [a]

 

'The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction ... 

From a situation in which nothing can happen, 

suddenly anything is possible again.' 

 

 

I. 

 

It's arguable that since his death in 2017, Mark Fisher has gone from being merely a cult figure within certain academic circles to something resembling a posthumous spiritual leader to an entire generation; one who is "quoted feverishly by his disciples" [b]. 

 

That's not his fault, I suppose - I can't imagine Fisher would have wanted faithful followers forever asking themselves What would Mark think? when confronted with the latest political or cultural development. 

 

But we are where we are and the fact is that, today, Fisher has become an enormous cult and it amuses me to think of him doing his best Kenneth Williams impression up in Heaven, telling the angels of his status [c].

 

As one might imagine, there is an ever-increasing number of articles, essays, books, and films made about him and his work; particularly his seminal debut text, Capitalist Realism (2009), and it's this slim volume I would like to discuss here ... [d]  

 

 

II.  

 

The title of the opening chapter provides the book's tagline: "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." (1) 

 

It's a borrowed phrase by which Fisher refers to the fact that capitalism is more than an economic arrangement of society or a political ideology; that it has become a singular reality that is so all-encompassing that we mistake it for the natural order or inevitable way of the world. 

 

This, in turn, makes alternative models either unimaginable or seem foolish and utopian. 

 

It's a neat trick: though Wilde might say that capitalism's passing itself off as natural is merely an irritating political pose. 

 

Nevertheless, pose or not, it remains a huge problem for those who, like Fisher, want to bring about revolutionary change and a form of what he later calls acid communism - something which, apparently, will unleash post-capitalist desire, raise levels of consciousness, and reclaim the creative ideas and countercultural energies of the world before neoliberalism.       

 

For the record, I'm broadly sympathetic to this line of thinking. I don't accept the argument that capitalism is in fact natural and aligns with the human condition by fostering competition and the innate desire to trade, invest, own property and aspire to a materially more comfortable existence. 

 

Or, if this is in fact a valid argument, then, for me, it simply reinforces the Nietzschean idea that man is a bourgeois compromise and, as anti-humanist philosophers, we are obliged to value that which lies overman [e].    

 

Having said that, I'm a little more cautious - maybe even a little more liberal - than I was thirty years ago when developing my own politics of desire in the philosophy department at Warwick University [f], and just as I wince at some of the things I wrote then, so too do I cringe at some of the things in Fisher's book.

 

Capitalism may not be the same as the Real, but I seriously doubt there's anything particularly acidic (or in any way unmediated) about communism ...    

 

 

III. 

 

One of the pleasures of reading Fisher is that he doesn't seem to make any hard and fast distinction between fiction and theory, or the world of thought and that of feeling. 

 

I can see how this might irritate those readers who, like Jürgen Habermas, believe that the false assimilation of one enterprise to another robs both of their substance, purpose, and productivity [g], but, for me - as a lover of Nietzsche and Lawrence - I approve of this intertextual promiscuity. 

 

Like Fisher, I think that philosophy, the arts, and politics have a profound and congenial relation to one another and that the best writers are those who produce a text that is radically and openly figurative, drawing upon all manner of considerations; including those ideas and images found within popular culture that were previously regarded as unacceptable or irrelevant to serious critical debate.     

 

Fisher's devising of a highly idiosyncratic mode of accessible (but never simplistic) language in his writings - and its application to a wide variety of contemporary issues - is undoubtedly one of his strong points (and it's something I have tried to replicate in my own manner here on Torpedo the Ark).

 

The key thing is this: in Capitalist Realism Fisher is essentially trying to imagine an alternative reality principle; one that is capable of providing new forms of practice, new attitudes, and new historical possibilities - even if, by his own admission, "for most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism" (8) isn't really an issue. 

 

Further, he wants to provide an authentic sense of solidarity and community; to "fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere", as Deleuze and Guattari would say [h]. For Fisher, it's not capital which is the essence of reality; but the complex and shifting world of relationships between people [i].

 

But - and this is what worries me - hasn't Fisher's book already succumbed to the fate that met Picasso's Guernica in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006); the dystopian film that Fisher discusses in chapter 1?

 

That is to say, hasn't Capitalist Realism - "once a howl of anguish and outrage" (4) - simply morphed into another popular bestseller "accorded 'iconic' status" (4); just another cultural artefact available for free delivery with Amazon Prime? [j]

 

  

IV. 

 

Am I mistaken, or does Fisher hanker after something to believe in? 

 

That's a concern if true (and would explain how he ends up promoting acid communism). We will need to be on the lookout for signs of religiosity when (re-)reading through Capitalist Realism. 

 

Sadly for him, one of the things he can't believe in anymore is pop culture; the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994 "confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock's utopian and promethean ambitions" (10) and as for hip-hop, well, that was pretty much stillborn and complicit with capitalist realism from the get-go. 

 

Likewise, movies and comic books became equally hopeless; a mixture of neoliberalism and neo-noir (although that's a pretty seductive combination if, like me, you happen to like Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Frank Miller's Batman). 

 

 

V. 

 

Chapter 2 of Capitalist Realism poses an interesting question: 'What if you held a protest and everyone came?' 

 

Though it's perhaps a question that any teenager who ever decided to throw an open house party when their parents went away for the weekend might be able to answer. I refer readers to the 2012 teen comedy film directed by Nima Nourizadeh, Project X, which tells the story of three friends who attempt to gain popularity by throwing a party which then quickly escalates out of their control.   

 

I would remind readers also of Nietzsche's warning against the attempt to turn a subtle revolutionary idea into a mass movement by dumbing down one's philosophy and painting "great al fresco stupidities" [k] on the walls. 

 

I'm not saying this is what Fisher has done. But he does give the impression at times of being a political and social fantasist, inviting a revolutionary overturning of the global economy in the belief that "fair humanity will then rise up as though of its own accord" [l]. 

 

In such a dangerous (and delusional) dream, says Nietzsche, one hears "an echo of Rousseau's superstition, which believes in a miraculous primeval but as it were buried goodness of human nature and ascribes all the blame for this burying to the institutions of culture" [m].    

 

Unfortunately, history has taught us that whilst mass uprisings and revolutions can unleash "the most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages" [n], they can neither perfect man nor society. 

 

That said, Fisher is smart and honest enough to recognise that the anti-capitalist protest movement - with its hysterical demand for the impossible - invariably just reinforces capitalism itself: "Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism, and the anti-capitalist protests share rather too much with hyper-corporate events [...]" (14) 

 

Fisher particularly loathes Live 8 [o], which he describes as "a strange kind of protest; a protest that everyone could agree with" (14) and one which "the logic of the protest was revealed in its purest form" [14]; basically, a chance to scream at Daddy (or the Man). 

 

For it is "not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of the Father" (14) and he explicitly tells his readers the harsh truth that they themselves are complicit "in planetary networks of oppression" (15) - even when pumping their fists in the air or singing along with Bono and the boys at Wembley. 

 

Fisher writes: 

 

"What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, ad the zombies it makes are us." (15)

 

What this means, therefore, is that in order to reclaim real political agency, one must first of all accept one's "insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder" (15). 

 

This, for me, is Fisher at his most Landian - and I like it. His exposure of the myth that caring individuals "could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganisation" (15) - provided they bought the right products - is brutal and brilliant. 

 

 

VI. 

 

Chapter 3 returns us to the question of capitalism and the Real ... 

 

And a confession from Fisher that not only was the phrase about it being easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism not his - it was earlier used by both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek - but neither is the term capitalist realism an original coinage: 

 

"It was used as far back as the 1960s by a group of German Pop artists and by Michael Schudson in his 1984 book Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion, both of whom were making parodic references to socialist realism." (16)  

 

I don't really have a problem with borrowings like this and, besides, Fisher doesn't just adopt the term, he ascribes a more expansive (and more exorbitant) meaning to it. For Fisher, capitalist realism "cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions" (16). 

 

It is in fact, "more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action" (16). 

 

Fisher at this point openly reveals his hand, in a crucial passage worth quoting:

 

"If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism [...] only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort." (16)

 

Quite simply, I don't agree with that. I don't think it makes much difference whether capitalism is consistent or inconsistent, real or false - any more than whether God is an actual entity or virtual being. Marxists have been droning on for years about the many internal contradictions of capitalism and how these would one day trigger a crisis from which it would be impossible to recover - and yet, here we are.

 

Unfortunately for those who pin their hopes on this idea, contradictions have not caused a terminal collapse because the system is highly adaptive and able to stumble on from one crises to the next, sustaining production and restoring profitability, even without ever resolving the underlying issues (such as massive inequality).  

 

The masses are not going to be spurred into revolutionary action when it is revealed to them that capitalism is a fraud, anymore than the faithful simply abandoned God following the announcement of his death. Nietzsche famously concedes that God's posthumous shadow or ghost would be encountered for thousands of years, meaning humanity would continue to uphold the same moral values long after faith in the existence and authority of an actual deity had vanished (that's why the revaluation he called for will not happen overnight) [p]. 

 

Similarly, the overcoming of capitalism isn't as easy as simply revealing its structural inconsistencies and internal conflicts. Perhaps it will even require the kind of accelerationism that Fisher probably subscribed to when under the influence of Nick Land during his days at Warwick and involvement with the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit).       

 

In other words, perhaps the revolutionary path is not to withdraw from the global economy into private fantasy or try to simply side-step the coldest of all cold monsters like a crab, but accelerate the forces that the market economy has itself unleashed:

 

"To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization. For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character." [q]        

 

From the viewpoint, that is, of the theory and practice developed by Deleuze and Guattari - writing here in Anti-Oedipus (1972) - who argue that, through its process of production, capitalism "produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy" [r], which it is obliged to repress but which, nevertheless, continues to act as capitalism's external (and absolute) limit.   

 

The task, therefore, is to accelerate the process, so that capitalism can no longer bind these schizo-revolutionary forces and flows which it has itself unleashed. Capitalism, like all great historical systems, will thus "perish more as a result of its successes than its failures" [s] or its contradictions. Admittedly, however, this is a risky (potentially fatal) strategy that will require an exterminating angel who scrambles all the codes.    

 

 

VII. 

 

Finally, we return to the idea of the Real ...

 

Fisher is right to say that "what counts as 'realistic', what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations" (16). And that the real trick, as we noted earlier, was to naturalise ideological values, magically transforming values into facts. 

 

"As any number of radical theorists [...] have maintained, 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 [...]" (16)  

 

In other words, radical theorists wish to give the game away - to pull back the curtain, like Toto the dog; or, if you prefer a recent cinematic reference, convince others to pop a red pill. The problem, of course, is that most people, given the choice, prefer blissful ignorance and eating virtual steaks. 

 

Who wants the Real - "a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in fractures" (18) - if it provides none of the comforts of reality - if it risks making one even more depressed (and impoverished) than the illusory world of capitalist realism?  

 

  

Notes

 

[a] This is the most recent edition of Fisher's seminal text published in 2009. It comes with a Foreword by Zoe Fisher, an Introduction by Alex Niven, and an Afterword by Tariq Goddard. All page numbers given in this post refer to this edition.

 

[b] Rosa Abbott, writing in a post titled 'Ghosts of Mark Fisher' (5 Feb 2021), published on her Bad Taste Substack: click here.

 

[c] I'm referring here to Williams's hilarious interview with Terry Wogan in which he declared himself to be an enormous cult (Wogan BBC TV): click here and go to 1:49. 

 

[d] For some reason, I have resisted doing so until now, despite having previously written about two other books completed by him; Ghosts of My Life (2014) and The Weird and the Eerie (2017) - click here and/or here. 

 

[e] I'm not familiar enough with Fisher's reading of Nietzsche to know for sure how he relates the idea of the Übermensch to his own political thinking (or if he did so). One assumes that he would interpret the concept in communal rather than individualistic terms (i.e., as the realisation of a collectively imagined future that breaks the spell of the capitalist realism and the perpetual present).     

 

[f] Whilst Fisher and I were both doing doctoral research in the philosophy dept. at Warwick in the 1990s - he completed his PhD on cybernetic theory-fiction in 1999 and I submitted my study of Nietzsche-Lawrence-Deleuze the following year - we didn't know one another, nor, I believe, ever cross paths. He was far more involved with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) than I was, even though Nick Land was overseeing my progress in 1994-95. 

 

[g] See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Polity Press, 1994), p. 210.  

 

[h] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 18.   

 

[i] As Alex Niven writes in his Introduction: "At its most basic level, whatever political and theoretical nuances it might otherwise have implied [Capitalist Realism ...] was a book which called for a joining of human hands." [xiv] 

 

[j] This isn't, of course, Fisher's fault; he himself noted that capitalist realism works by rapidly absorbing dissent and neutralising it. And maybe I'm being unduly pessimistic; people on the left still insist the book remains relevant and its central argument remains valid (even if it is not the key to unlocking the future that some had once hoped). To date, Capitalist Realism has sold over 250,000 copies and it has been translated into many different languages.    

 

[k] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 438, p. 161. Nietzsche goes on to quote Voltaire at this point: Quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu ... 

 

[l] Ibid., I. 8. 463, p. 169.  

 

[m] Ibid. 

 

[n] Ibid. 

 

[o] Live 8 was a string of benefit concerts that took place in July 2005, in the G8 states and South Africa, marking the 20th anniversary of Live Aid. The call was to make poverty history. More than a thousand musicians performed at the concerts, which were broadcast on 182 television networks and two thousand radio networks. The BBC estimated the global audience to be around 1.5 billion. 

 

[p] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, III. 108. 

 

[q] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 239.  

 

[r] Ibid., p. 246.

 

[s] Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life (Routledge, 1997), p. 178. 

 

 

Parts two of this post can be accessed by clicking here. 

 

Part three of this post will follow in due course.   

 

You Are Reading a Post About Making a Film About Mark Fisher

We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025)

Poster image by Joe Magee 

closeandremote.net

 

We are assembling a post about Mark Fisher and, 

now that you're reading this, so are you ... 

 

 

I. 

 

There was an interesting piece in The Guardian a couple of days ago, by Lauren Kelly [1]. It was on Mark Fisher; a cultural theorist who, somewhat ironically, continues to haunt the media almost ten years after his death and seventeen years after he published the slim volume - Capitalist Realism (2009) - that ensured he would be born posthumously.

 

It's a good book [2]. But, like many other works regarded as seminal, it now risks becoming a kind of foundational text - i.e., essential reading for those who wish to have an understanding of contemporary neoliberal culture conveniently packaged and given a stamp of approval by critics, commentators, and other left-leaning intellectuals who secretly envy its astonishing popularity and sales figures [3].

 

Ultimately, it's easier to keep referencing Fisher c. 2009 and regurgitate his critique, rather than imagine an alternative future oneself. Of course, that's not Fisher's fault and, in his later work, he seemed keen to stress that Capitalist Realism was only ever intended as a starting point and not meant to be the last word on any of the subjects it touched upon.

 

Fisher spoke about developing post-capitalist desire and acid communism, but it's his debut book that most readers seem to fixate on and find most relevant [4], in the same way that orthodox punk fans still think Never Mind the Bollocks was the Sex Pistols' finest moment, rather than The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.       

 

 

II.  

  

Whatever one thinks of Fisher, the fact is he's an increasingly influential and pervasive figure and there's currently an experimental documentary doing the rounds that aims to disseminate his ideas to a still wider audience by mixing theory with real-world footage.

 

Titled We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025), this 65-minute film written and directed by Simon Poulter [5], cheerfully places itself outside the world of mainstream production; it was funded by Poulter and fellow artist Sophie Mellor (who edited the work), using an Instagram account to recruit a network of seventy collaborators - including a technical crew - to assist with the project.

 

There was no advance budget; no studio backing; and no institutional permissions - just the determination to make a film that affirmed Fisher's belief that decapitalised cultural production and collective agency was still possible among the ruins of neoliberal atomisation.

 

Methodologically, the work draws from both situationism and the rhizomatic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari - rejecting arborescent models in favour of open systems of exchange:

 

"By way of archival recordings, interviews and fictional performance, Fisher's philosophy of 'hauntology' recurs throughout [...] maintaining that modern society, as a result of 'capitalist realism', is haunted by futures that failed to happen [... as] narrator Justin Hopper explains." [6]  

 

Since the autumn of last year, Poulter's film has been screened "in universities, back gardens, cinemas, living rooms and art galleries located everywhere from Coventry to Brisbane, Australia, via Malmö, Sweden" [7]. 

 

I've not seen it yet - I'm hoping to attend the screening at the ICA on 19 May - but would like to offer support to the work carried out by Mellor and Poulter working as Close and Remote. I might not share all their political views and moral values, but, nevertheless, I feel a certain level of comradeship - not least of all because Poulter is an old punk rocker and a man who loves butterflies ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lauren Kelly, 'The man who saw the future: the legacy of cultural theorist Mark Fisher', in The Guardian (17 April 2026): click here. 

 

[2] Funnily enough, I haven't written a post critically reviewing the book, even though I have done so for other works by Fisher: click here, for example, for fragmened remarks on Ghosts of My Life (2022); or here for part one of a two-part post on The Weird and the Eerie (2016). I am planning to examine Fisher's most well-known text shortly. 

 

[3] According to Lauren Kelly in her Guardian piece: "As of December 2025, more than 250,000 English-language versions of Capitalist Realism have been sold, with translations available in Spanish, Italian, Arabic Mandarin, German, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Hebrew, Korean and Danish."  

 

[4] I think it's fair to say that Fisher's concept of acid communism has not attained the same widespread cultural recognition as his thinking on capitalist realism. Primarily, that's because his work in this area was cut short by his suicide in 2017 - acid communism exists only as an introduction and a few notes - but it's also the case that the former was a far more speculative concept, whereas the latter is a tangible malaise experienced here and now. 

      Given the choice, most people, it appears, prefer to feel depressed by the present, than imagine their future happiness based on the retrieval of old dreams and unrealised desires. A few academics, artists, and old school k-punk fans might be excited by the concept, but acid communism is a bit niche for mainstream readers (and maybe - since it relies on a certain level of political and countercultural utopianism rooted in the late 1960s and early 1970s - it seems a tad nostalgic and old-fashioned for younger readers who don't remember this time).  

 

[5] Torpedophiles will recognise the name of artist and aurelian Simon Poulter from a post published on 1 Feb 2026: click here.    

 

[6] Lauren Kelly ... see reference and link in note 1 above. It should be pointed out that Justin Hopper doesn't narrate as himself, but in character as Professor Parkins; a spectral guide to Mark Fisher's life and work.

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

 

Bonus: click here to play the trailer to We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025). 

Munch's Daughters: Tracey & Marlene

Edvard Munch / Tracey Emin / Marlene Dumas

 

I.

 

I have a highly intelligent and sensitive friend who loves the work of Norwegian sjelemaler Edvard Munch (1863-1944). 

 

Essentially, that's because Munch was an artist who didn't attempt to objectively capture the world, so much as distort its reality in terms of his own inner turmoil via non-naturalistic colours and swirling, dramatic brush strokes. That's very much his cup of tea.  

 

What's more, Munch gave visual form and expression to a variety of mostly negative emotions - anxiety, loneliness, sorrow, fear, etc. - and that also appeals to my friend as he is psychologically predisposed to exploring (and manipulating) such feelings as a self-confessed dark empath [1].   

 

What irritates me about this particular friend, however, is not his focus on the more morbid, melancholic, and miserable aspects of the human experience - believing these things to be far more profound and poetic than simple happiness - but his refusal to see how Munch has had a (somewhat surprising) but crucial influence on several contemporary female artists, including two that I would like to briefly discuss here: Tracey Emin and Marlene Dumas. 

 

 

II.

 

British artist, Tracey Emin, is probably the most obvious starting point for a post of this kind. 

 

For Dame Tracey openly credits the uncompromising expressionist style of Munch as a formative influence from an early age. If she has adored Bowie for an even longer period of time - and perhaps with an even greater degree of passion - Munch nevertheless comes a close second, Emin confessing that she has been "totally, madly in love" with him and his work since she was seventeen [2].  

 

This devotion culminated in 1998, when Emin created a haunting work titled Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children.  

 

In this short Super 8 film, the artist lies naked in a foetal position on a jetty in Åsgårdstrand, Norway, close to Munch's former home and a location central to many of his paintings, thereby explicitly linking her own personal trauma - she had undergone two abortions in the early 1990s - directly to his artwork [3]. 

 

The piece featured in the Royal Academy exhibition Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul (18 May - 1 August 2021) [4]. 

 

The exhibition also included a significant number of Emin's paintings - some displayed for the first time - hung alongside a selection of Munch's oils and watercolours. When seen together, "the dark territories and raw emotions that both artists navigate" create a "moving exploration of grief, loss and longing" [5].       

 

More recently, Emin curated the group exhibition Crossing Into Darkness (18 Jan - 12 April, 2026) at the Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate [6], which again featured works by Edvard Munch. Emin provides an excellent description of this exhibition:

 

"Crossing Into Darkness brings together a group of artists whose works confront the darkness inherent in human experience, not as something to be feared but as a necessary threshold toward renewal. In times marked by upheaval and uncertainty, this journey feels both universal and deeply personal." [7]

 

She continues (in clichéd quasi-religious language that I find problematic, to say the least, even if my friend mentioned earlier enthusiastically gobbles up this sort of guff):

 

"I feel that we have to cross into darkness to find light. I’d like this show to be very emotionally immersive and people to feel the strength and vibrations within the works. I want people to know that art isn't just something that you look at. That it has a deeper purpose and can penetrate all souls." [8]

 

One of the twenty or so artists contributing to this project is the South African born painter (now based in Amsterdam) Marlene Dumas ... [9]

 

 

III. 

 

Dumas - whose work I have previously discussed on Torpedo the Ark [10] - is another artist who might be described as a daughter of Munch, although she's less of a daddy's girl than Emin. 

 

In other words, her relationship with Munch isn't quite so intense and intimate and she enters into a more intellectual and technical dialogue with the latter, although, like Emin, she is known for her expressive, psychologically charged works exploring themes of human vulnerability and sexuality [11].  

 

For Dumas, Munch is primarily a modern storyteller who used paint to convey emotion - including love and passion, not just angst - rather than merely represent forms. And like him, she also likes to think her canvases have a tale to tell, but, where Munch uses swirling, heavy oil paint, Dumas often employs a ghostly, ink-wash technique. 

 

This can clearly be seen in her 2018-2019 exhibition, Moonrise: Marlene Dumas & Edvard Munch, at the Munch Museum, in Oslo. By placing her washed-out pictures alongside his more vibrant oils, she obliges us to see Munch as a direct ancestor to the way contemporary artists still struggle to capture the shame and desire of being human. 

 

Interestingly, one of the things Dumas was keen to do in this show, was deconstruct some of the more dated (and arguably misogynistic) myths and stereotypes of womanhood that Munch reinforced in his works such as Vampire (1893) - a picture Dumas admits she found particularly problematic [12]. 

 

And that does make one wonder quite why it is so many female artists - not just Emin and Dumas, but also Louise Bourgeois and Maria Lassnig, for example - seem so attracted to Munch and ready to buy into his romantic mythos. 

 

It's a question addressed by the art historian Patricia Berman ... [13] 

 

 

IV.

 

Berman argues that despite being "one of modern art's foundational misogynists", Munch's willingness to reveal his more feminine side and paint his pain has ironically made him a spiritual mentor to "generations of women who explore the body and memory, and the body as memory, in their art". 

 

Munch, it is said by his female champions, displays "a vulnerability rarely acknowledged by a man" and has an empathy with women that allows him to intuitively understand something of their inner life; Munch is seen as an ally or, as Emin once said, a friend in art. 

 

Obviously, I smiled when reading this; doesn't Tracey know that not only must we find it within our hearts to love our enemies, but also learn how to hate our friends [14] - and that empathy comes in various shades, some of which - as we noted earlier - are very dark indeed?  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] A dark empath is a term coined in a research paper published in 2021 by Nadja Heym and her colleagues to describe a more devious (and arguably more dangerous) form of narcissist; one who is highly attuned to another person's thoughts and feelings and uses this skill in order to manipulate and further their own goals. 

      The study concluded that being empathic doesn't necessarily make someone a good human being - especially when, beneath their charm and intelligence, they also harbour aggressive psychopathic tendencies.  

      See Nadja Heyem et al, 'The Dark Empath: Characterising dark traits in the presence of empathy', in the journal Personality and Individual Differences Vol. 169 (Feb 2021). It can be downloaded as a pdf from the Nottingham Trent University website click here.    

 

[2] See the video posted on the Royal Academy YouTube channel (6 Dec 2020) in which Emin introduces a carefully considered selection of Munch's paintings alongside her own works in the exhibition Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul (18 May - 1 August 2021): click here.  

[3] My favourite description of this work is by Patricia Berman (see note 13 below): 

      "The dreamy setting of water, sky and the artist's coiled naked body is abruptly shattered by a horrific scream that seems to go on forever. Although the film is only one minute long, the scream enters and shakes you to your very core, resonating like an afterimage. It calls forth Munch's most famous motif, The Scream, animating it and reinventing it."

 

[4] For details of the exhibition, an image gallery, further reading, and a virtual tour, please visit the RA website: click here.  

 

[5] I'm quoting here from the press release for the Royal Academy exhibition, which can also be found on the website via the above link.  

 

[6] For details of the exhibition, etc., please visit the Carl Freedman Gallery website: click here. 

 

[7] Tracey Emin, quoted on the Carl Freedman Gallery website linked to above. 

 

[8] Ibid.

 

[9] Dumas's inclusion in the exhibition is titled Utøya (2018-23); a medium-sized oil painting that deals with memory and tragedy, darkness and rebirth. This work can be viewed on the Frith Street Gallery website: click here. 

 

[10] See the post titled 'Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas' (13 Nov 2024): click here.  

 

[11] If perhaps less intimate and intense, Dumas's relationship with Munch is just as long-standing as Emin's. She first encountered the astonishing lithograph series presenting his version of the creation myth - Alfa og Omega (1908-09) - at the Munch Museum in 1981, for example; an experience she later documented in her book, Omega's Eyes: Marlene Dumas on Edvard Munch (2019). 

      For Dumas, the great thing about Munch's work is its honesty and directness - particularly when it comes to the portrayal of bodies; he was not just concerned with psychological states, but with the physical character of touch and physical sensation (of what it feels like to kiss or to cry). 

 

[12] Munch was obsessed with the idea of the femme fatale and explored this theme throughout the 1890s, using the vampire archetype to depict women as dangerous and seductive creatures who would not only break hearts but drain men of their life-force (presumably he was projecting his own male anxieties and sexual fantasies).

      See, for example, the iconic Symbolist painting Vampire (1893) - originally titled 'Love and Pain' [Kjærligkeit og Smerte] - which depicts a red-haired woman kissing (and/or biting) a man's neck: click here. 

 

[13] See Patricia Berman, 'Munch's influence on women artists', RA Magazine (Autumn 2020) and available on the Royal Academy website (20 Oct 2020): click here. Berman is a Professor of Art at Wellesley College, Massachusetts and an expert in Scandinavian art. All quotes in section IV of this post are taken from this essay (as is the quote used in note 3 above). 

[14] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of the Bestowing Virtue' (3). 

 

 

From Pup Play to Babygirl Fetish: Sydney Sweeney Outrages the Internet (Again!)

Sydney Sweeney as OnlyFans content creator Cassie Howard 

in season 3 of the HBO TV series Euphoria (2026)

Images: HBO Max

 

 

I. 

 

Other than the fact that she has great jeans [1], I really don't know much about the 28-year-old American actress Sydney Sweeney.

 

However, it's hard not to know of her when she seems to be in the news every other day, causing outrage and controversy. I don't know if she deliberately sets out to be a provocatrice, but she certainly has a talent for upsetting people and apple carts alike, which I rather admire. 

 

And, what's more, she's one of those rare individuals who really doesn't give a fuck what her critics say, refusing to apologise for her actions, opinions, or acting roles even when under huge pressure to do so.

 

So, here's a new post on the further (mis)adventures of Miss Sweeney ...     

 

 

II.

 

Euphoria is an American teen drama created and principally written by Sam Levinson for HBO, based on an Israeli miniseries of the same name created by Ron Leshem and Daphna Levin. 

 

In its first two seasons [2], Euphoria told the story of a group of Californian high school students struggling to keep their lives on track while dealing with problems related to love, loss, sex, and addiction. 

 

Both seasons received generally positive reviews, although some critics found the relentless scenes of nudity and sexual content - not to mention the substance abuse and self-harm - problematic due to the high-school setting and its teenage characters.   

 

In the third season, set five years later, the group of friends - now young adults - will be seen to grapple with more spiritual issues to do with the problem of evil and the possibility of finding redemption.

 

Whilst Sydney Sweeney is not the star of the show, she's a central cast member and the one who seems to generate most of the show's publicity. Her performance as Cassie Howard in season 2 also earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination.     

 

However, whether she'll pick up another nomination for season 3, which kicked off a few nights ago, is doubtful. Disgusted viewers say the show has gone too far by having her character dress up as a sexualised puppy and an equally eroticised baby in order to provide content on her OnlyFans channel.

 

These same viewers say the show has crossed a line by normalising extreme pornography and promoting material that is illegal as well as grossly offensive and obscene [3]. And, if what you read online is to be believed, HBO is facing a massive backlash with some calling for a total boycott of the network.    

 

 

III.

 

I might be wrong, but I'm guessing that the puppygirl scene hasn't upset as many people as the one in which Sweeney, dressed in pigtails with a dummy in her mouth and wearing a sheer top and a pair of white (nappy-like) knickers, grabs her feet and lifts her legs in the air.   

 

For whilst there will be some who will argue that canine roleplay - or pet play more generally - is the first step on the slippery slope to zoosexual activity (or what used to be termed bestiality), I think most people will concede that it's essentially a BDSM fetish and so is more about the consensual exploration of power and control rather than a genuine desire to romance animals [4]. 

 

Puppygirls may wear collars, chew on toy bones, or beg for treats, but they remain adult human females when all is said and done and whilst pup play can be sexual in nature, that isn't always the case and for some participants it's primarily a form of fantasy and emotional escapism.  

 

Besides, Sweeney looks rather fetching in her puppy dog costume; whereas, dressed as a baby, she does present an altogether more challenging image ...

 

 

IV. 

 

To be fair, the same arguments used to defend pup play can be assembled to defend daddy dom / little girl fetish (or DD/lg, as it is written by its devotees); it's all about role play, age play, and exploring power relationships and has nothing whatsoever to do with paedophilia. 

 

The babygirl enjoys receiving care and protection (and occasionally punishment) from her dominant partner. Similarly, she takes pleasure in surrendering responsibility and embracing softness, vulnerability and dependency.  

 

However, the babygirl rarely regresses to infancy; rather, she knowingly mimics childish behaviours whilst, contrary to appearances, still maintaining a degree of adult agency (as well as sexuality). Like so much else in the world of kink, it's purely performative and consensual. 

 

Having said that, the fact remains that within the popular (non-kinky) imagination babygirl fetish - unlike pup play - remains highly suspect and seems genuinely perverse. And this is why it's the second of the images above, not the first, that has attracted criticism expressed in words such as twisted, sick, and repugnant (i.e., the language of physical disgust and moral outrage).   

 

Even critics who at one time celebrated Euphoria are now clutching their pearls and insisting it feels tired and dated - whilst The Guardian's Hannah J. Davies even goes so far as to write that the HBO drama has become "a grubby, humourless work of torture porn that's obsessed with and repulsed by sex work" [5]. 

 

Meanwhile, The Telegraph's Eleanor Halls said the show was increasingly feeling "like the misogynistic fantasies of a creepy old man" and she wondered if Sam Levinson - whom she describes as a debauched pervert - isn't actually extracting some form of revenge on "America's pin-up Sweeney" by turning her character Cassie into "a caricature of an airhead sex kitten" [6]. 

 

The critical tide, then - like public opinion - seems to have turned against Euphoria and against Sweeney in particular. But, as I noted earlier, I very much doubt she cares. When she started on the show, she was earning $25,000 an episode; now, she's rumoured to be receiving just under $1million per episode.  

 

And I would rather blissfully bathe with a bar of Miss Sweeney's soap than drown in a sea of tears wept by po-faced critics and other self-appointed custodians of virtue upset by a TV show ... 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post written on Miss Sweeney and the controversy surrounding her ad for American Eagle: dated 31 July 2025: click here. And see the Nietzschean-flavoured follow up post dated 2 August 2025: click here. 

 

[2] The first season of Euphoria, consisting of eight episodes, premiered on 16 June, 2019 and concluded on 4 August. Season 2, also consisting of eight episodes, was broadcast in Jan-Feb 2022. The third season kicked off three nights ago (12 April, 2026). 

   

[3] Obviously, terms such as 'extreme pornography' and 'obscenity' are almost impossible to define. As D. H. Lawrence noted in 1929: "What they are depends [...] entirely on the individual. What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another." 

      See the essay 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236.   

 

[4] Readers who wish to know more about pet play can click here for a blog post about such on the HUD App (a casual dating platform designed for hookup-focused connections rather than long-term relationships). 

 

[5] Hannah J. Davies, 'Euphoria season three review - grubby, desperate and absolutely not worth the wait', The Guardian (13 April 2026): click here.  

      Referring to Sweeney's character, Davis writes: "The way the show handles her cam girl ambitions, in particular, feels bafflingly dated [...] while storylines around sugar babies and kink feel simultaneously voyeuristic and judgy." 

 

[6] Eleanor Halls, 'Euphoria has descended into one man's creepy, sex-obsessed fantasy', The Telegraph (13 April, 2026): click here. 

 

 

Bonus: click here to watch an official Euphoria Season 3 trailer posted on YouTube. 

 

 

On Nietzsche's Moustache

Not Vital: Nietzsche's Schnauz (1993)

Aluminium (70 x 140 x 40 cm)

Image via Galerie Nordenhake

 

'Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache, 

sit as it were in its shade and feel safe there ...' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Understanding as he did the importance of first impressions, Nietzsche highly valued the protective and deceptive nature of his exuberantly styled facial hair. 

 

He even noted in one of his middle period books that a formidable moustache allows a gentle soul to mask their sensitive nature and be perceived as an "easily angered and occasionally violent" [2] military type and thus treated with more respect than is often shown to mild-mannered university professors. 

 

 

II.  

 

The style of 'tache adopted by Nietzsche as soon as hormones allowed, is known as a walrus moustache. It is characterised by thick, bushy whiskers that droop over the mouth and resemble the whiskers of the large marine mammal from which it takes its name. 

 

Nietzsche, of course, was not unusual in choosing to have a Schnurrbart of this type, as they were extremely popular among men in the latter half of the 19th century when he was doing his thing (revaluing values and so on).  

 

Soldiers, scientists, politicians, and poets - not just rogue German philosophers - favoured this rugged style regarded as a symbol of masculinity and, in Poland, a mark of nobility and traditionalism [3].     

 

 

III. 

 

Now, I have to confess, personally, I don't like this moustache - hate it, in fact.  

 

Nevertheless, I do like Nietzsche and I am interested at the moment in the work of the contemporary Swiss artist Not Vital who, in 1993, created a surreal aluminium sculpture titled Nietzsche's Schnauz ... 

 

Retrospectively asked about the piece in a conversation with the curator, critic and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist - a longtime friend of the artist - Vital recalled:  

 

"When I first went to the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria, what impressed me most about the death mask, drawings and photographs of Nietzsche, was this moustache that grew bigger throughout his life. In the end, you couldn't even see his mouth. That was fascinating: that this moustache would take over his face. So I made a sculpture of his moustache, and placed it in his bed. [4]

 

By isolating the facial hair, Vital's sculpture - part of a wider series exploring memory, identity, and the blurring of human and non-human forms - enables the moustache to assume a kind of object-autonomy. 

 

And, hearing Vital discuss how the 'tache appeared to take over Nietzsche's face, one is put in mind of the parasitoid entity (Manumala noxhydria) that attaches to the face of Kane (played by John Hurt) in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).

 

Fortunately, the facehugging moustache didn't prove fatal to its host and, according to Nietzsche's own philosophy, whatever didn't kill him made him stronger ... [5] 

      

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1997), IV. 381, p. 171. 

 

[2] Ibid.

 

[3] Some readers may recall that Nietzsche often claimed descent from an aristocratic Polish family (although there seems to be no genealogical evidence available to support his claim). 

 

[4] Not Vital, in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist (14 April 2021). The transcript can be read on the Thaddaeus Ropac (London) website: click here. The interview also featured in Wallpaper and can be read on their website by clicking here.  

[5] See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 'Maxims and Arrows' (8). 

 

 

Readers who enjoyed this short post might like to check out an excellent essay on Nietzsche's moustache available on the website nietzschesbody.com. The site is administered by Robrecht and I'm guessing this is the independent Nietzsche scholar, translator, and cultural critic Robrecht Vandemeulebroecke (apologies to both parties if I'm mistaken). 

      What this essay does well is bring home the fact that Nietzsche knew his moustache was distinctive and would become iconic: "Though not exactly unique, Nietzsche's whiskers were uncommon enough in intellectual circles to become something of a trademark, a fact of which he was not unaware."