Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: A Little Bit of Politics

 

 Mark Fisher: illustration by Amreetha Lethe

 

'It is beginning to look as if, instead of being the end of history, capitalist realism 

was a thirty-year hiatus. The processes that began in the Sixties can now be resumed. 

Consciousness is being raised again.' 

                                                                                                  - Mark Fisher (2015) [a] 

 

 

I. 

 

I would guess that I'm not the only reader of Mark Fisher's work to find his cultural criticism more interesting than his political analysis. It would be foolish, however, to try and draw a hard and fast distinction between the two. 

 

For like Nietzsche, Fisher understands how philosophy and literature have a "profound and congenial relation to each other" [b] and part of the appeal of his text is that he promiscuously draws upon all manner of considerations, including those previously regarded as irrelevant to serious investigation.

 

In fact, I would argue that Fisher's devising of a charmingly idiosyncratic literary-philosophical mode of language and thought and his application of such to a wide range of contemporary concerns is one of his finest achievements. Fisher demonstrates how writing - at its best - is capable of providing a sense of solidarity; i.e., "fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere" [c]. 

 

Fisher's work therefore demands - and deserves - to be read in the round; from the early k-punk pieces to his later stuff on all things weird and eerie via his seminal (but overrated) text Capitalist Realism (2009). 

 

That being said, when tasked with editing Fisher's collected and unpublished writings from the thirteen-year period 2004 - 2016, Darren Ambrose does separate out the political writings as best he can and it is part four of k-punk (2018) that I'd like to comment on here - picking out those things that either inspire or irritate; delight or disappoint.      

 

 

II. 

The lines quoted at the top of the page from Fisher are found in a short piece that is included in part three of k-punk - writing on music - and not in part four containing his political writings. But these lines pretty much sum up Fisher's attitude: neoliberalism bad; acid communism rooted in the countercultural ideas of the 1960s, good [d].

 

Such revolutionary optimism contrasts sharply with my own rather more cynical and pessimistic philosophy; i.e., the kind of ironic nihilism that Fisher equates with postmodernism and which he despises as a form of reflexive impotence preventing radical change or commitment and thus ultimately complicit with capitalist realism.

 

And so, unfortunately, Fisher's political writings, combining psychedelic utopianism, pulp modernism and ghostly lost futures, more often than not cause me to sigh rather than nod in agreement - but at least they allow for a (hopefully amusing) collision of perspectives ...  

 

 

III.  

 

The danger when you produce work that is very much up to the minute - full of names in the news and references to contemporary pop culture - is that your writing is instantly dated. 

 

And Mark Fisher's political writings are full of such names and references, although, reading his work now, in 2026, produces the rather strange effect of making the period in which he was active (2004-16) feel even further in the past than my own childhood. 

 

Tony Blair ... Gordon Brown .... David Cameron ... I know who they are - I remember them - but they seem to have less reality than Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, and Edward Heath.     

 

I'm not sure why that is: perhaps Mike Yarwood was a better impressionist than Rory Bremner. Whatever the reason, it perhaps helps to explain the following sentence: "There was a time when elections at least seemed to mean something." (377)

 

And it also helps us understand what Fisher is getting at here: "Realism has nothing to do with the Real. On the contrary, the Real is what realism has continually to suppress." (380) [e] 

 

That's a sentence that resonates with Baudrillard's philosophy, although the latter refers to raw, unmediated experience as the symbolic rather than the Real and, being a cultural pessimist, he sees it as something that is gone forever - an extinct category - rather than something that continues to threaten realism and thus still needing to be repressed. 

 

I might be wrong, but I get the impression that Fisher thinks we can return to the Real if only we all raise consciousness, join hands, and leap together into a lost future [f]. Baudrillard would regard this as a nostalgic delusion.  

 

 

IV.

 

According to Fisher, Islamofascism is a pseudo-concept: 

 

"There are any number of reasons to consider the idea that there is such a thing as Islamofascism a nonsense. Here are two. First of all, fascism has always been associated with nationalism, but, like global capital, Islamism has no respect for nationality; the first loyalty of the Islamist is to the global Umma. Secondly, fascism is about the State - Islamism has no model of the State, as could be seen in Afghanistan under the Taliban. (390)

 

To be fair, they're quite good reasons - though in response to the first, one might wonder then if Fisher would be more approving of the term Islamocommunism ...? [g]

 

What puzzles me, however, is how he then happily uses the term Islamophobia which is another highly contentious neologism and equally a pseudo-concept; one designed to stifle legitimate criticism of the religion masquerading as a term that operates within an anti-racist framework. 

 

Christopher Hitchens - not an author referred to by Fisher and not one I would imagine him liking - is often associated with the description of Islamophobia as a word 'created by fascists and used by cowards, to manipulate morons' [h]. 

 

And the French writer Pascal Bruckner - one of the so-called nouveaux philosophes who came to prominence in the mid-late 1970s - wrote a famous article on the origin of the term for Libération in January 2011, arguing that it was invented by Iranian fundamentalists with the aim of declaring Islam inviolate [i].    

 

It would seem to me, that either both terms should be avoided, or both should be free to use (whilst open to interrogation). What you can't do is declare the legitimacy of one whilst dismissing the other as a pseudo-concept [j].   

 

 

V.  

 

As a nihilist, Fisher's call for "new kinds of negativity" (432) is something I can get behind. 

 

I'm not quite sure how we square such with his eternal optimism, but let's leave that to one side for a moment. The key thing is to abandon faith in those older forms - such as art - which some on the left still believe to be full of vital revolutionary potential; people such as the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri ...

 

"Art, Negri maintains, is intrinsically rebellious and subversive. Even though Negri himself recognises the dangers of taking too much consolation in art, he ends up retaining faith in it." (432)

 

As Fisher points out, Negri's praising of art as a source of freedom and transformation seems strangely nostalgic - and not just nostalgic, but laughably naive: "For the era of capitalist realism has also seen all kinds of synergies between art and business, nowhere better summed up than in the concept of the 'creative industries'." (432)    

 

It's to his credit that Fisher rejects (or at least challenges) the argument that the art that dominates within capitalist realism is somehow fake art; "a betrayal and dilution of art's inherent militancy" (432). 

 

Why not, says Fisher, simply push Negri's own logic of negativity to the point at which one recognises that "there is no readymade, already-existing utopian energy; that there is nothing which, by its very nature, resists incorporation into capital" (432).

 

Recognise this, and one is obliged to drop the idea that art is opposed to capitalism and that power only restricts and denies creativity (is only ever repressive). As Foucault pointed out, power is itself inventive and creative; it produces new forms and discourses, induces new pleasures [k]. Thus, overcoming capitalism "will not involve inventing new modes of positivism, but new kinds of negativity" (432).   

 

Zarathustra would go along with that [l] - and I go along with that.  

  

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, 'No Romance Without Finance', in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 373. The piece, dated 9 Nov 2015, originally appeared in Bamn: An Unofficial Magazine of Plan C. 

      All further page references to k-punk (2018) will be given directly in the main text.  

 

[b] Nietzsche, 'The Struggle between Science and Wisdom', in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1993), p. 134. 

 

[c] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 18. Whether this in turn opens up the possibility of a new becoming or provides a genuine alternative to the reality principle shaped by neoliberalism, is debatable. 

 

[d] I'm aware of the fact that the idea of acid communism was a late development in Fisher's work and that all that remains of a proposed new work with that title is the (unfinished) introduction. Nevertheless, I'm going to use the term here, somewhat anachronistically, as I don't believe Fisher would object to such retro-intertextuality or prochronism.  

 

[e] Fisher will later describe realism as "not a representation of the real, but a determination of what is politically possible" (380-381).  

 

[f] If Fisher does not in fact think of the Real as a location to which we might return, then he certainly does like to imagine the Real as some kind of external limit in much the same way as Deleuze and Guattari imagine schizophrenia. Or  as "an event completely inconceivable in the current situation, but which will break in a re-define everything" (383).    

 

[g] Today, we are witnessing a strange marriage of convenience between Islamists and those on the far-left; Zack Polanski and the Green Party are playing a dangerous game as they flirt with religious sectarianism on the one hand and political populism on the other. 

 

[h] Apparently, this was actually said by Andrew Cummins and is therefore misattributed to Hitchens - understandably so, as it closely reflects his own view of a term he dismissed as stupid and one designed to suggest that fear and prejudice lie behind perfectly reasonable concerns about a powerful and aggressive religion.  

 

[i] The English translation of this article by Bruckner - titled 'The invention of Islamophobia' (03/01/ 2011) can be found on signandsight.com - click here.  

 

[j] Without wishing to put words into his mouth, I suspect that Fisher would argue that Islamophobia is a legitimate sociological term identifying a factual well-documented phenomenon, whereas Islamofascism is a category error, designed to morally and politically justify Western interventionism and the War on Terror. 

      In other words, the former describes an effect of power (structural racism); the latter is a historically illiterate claim made by power to reduce complex geo-political issues to a simple struggle between good and evil.  

 

[k] See Michel Foucault, 'Truth and Power', in Power, vol. 3 of the Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al (Penguin Books, 2002). 

 

[l] For Nietzsche, only braying donkeys nod their heads all the time and only camels say yes to even the heaviest burdens - the lion, however, dares to say no and this saying no is a creative foundational act, not merely a refusal; it is, if you like, the active negation of the negative. 

      See 'Of the Three Metamorphoses', in part one of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and see also what Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo on the importance of No-saying as a necessary first step toward a revaluation of all values.  

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: On the East Midlands Accent Vs the Oxford Voice

Ay up, me duck! Three famous East Midlanders: 

Jason Williamson, D. H. Lawrence, and Mark Fisher  

 

 

Thanks to books such as Capitalist Realism (2009) and his influential k-punk blog (2003-16), Mark Fisher remains a prominent voice in cultural criticism and political theory. 

 

However, born in Leicester and raised in Loughborough as he was, that voice comes with a distinctive East Midlands twang; an accent which, by his own admission, lacks "urban glamour, lilting lyricism or rustic romanticism" and is "one of the most unloved in the UK" [a]. 

 

I'm not sure that's entirely fair or accurate - as a Lawrence scholar, I've been to Eastwood on numerous occasions and have always found the local accent (and use of terms drawn from dialect) rather lovely on the ear. However, Fisher insists that the East Midlands accent is "heard so rarely in popular media that it isn't recognised enough even to be disdained" (361). 

 

I can believe also that within snobby academic circles where the Oxford Voice [b] prevails, he was regarded as having some sort of speech impediment and advised to "suppress the lazy Leicestershire consonants and articulate [his] speech in something closer to so-called received pronunciation" (361). 

Something which, with a certain degree of shame, he did - unlike vocalist with the post-punk duo Sleaford Mods Jason Williamson, who makes "no such accommodation to metropolitan manners" and remains "disgusted at those who speak in fake accents" (361). 

  

Interestingly, although the appeal to the local (and authentic) is "usually smug and reactionary" (361), Fisher argues that's not the case when it comes to the question of accent. Because the English ruling class speak "in more or less the same accent wherever they come from" (361) - The Oxford Voice - the determination to retain a regional accent is therefore "a challenge to the machineries of class subordination - a refusal to be marked as inferior" (361).

 

A bit like Lawrence rubbing his readers' noses in hardcore East Midlands dialect and profanity in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) - "'Tha'rt good cunt, though, aren't ter? Best bit o' cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha'rt willin'!'" [c] - Williamson obliges listeners to "adjust to his accent, idiolect and references" (362). 

 

Obscenities course through his rhymes as freely they do the speech of Oliver Mellors:

 

"If Williamson's anger often seems intransitive - his fuck offs are sheer explosions of exasperation, directed at no one in particular, or at everyone - it's underscored by a class consciousness painfully aware that there is nothing which could transform disaffection into political action." (363) 

 

I'll end this post with the same question that Fisher ends his piece: Who will make contact with the anger and frustration that Williamson (like Mellors before him) articulates - and who can convert such into a new political project? [d] 

 

    

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 361. Future page references will be given directly in the post. 

     Fisher's review of the Sleaford Mods' album Divide and Exit (2014) and singles collection Chubbed Up (2014) originally appeared in The Wire, Issue 362 (April 2014), p. 58. It can be read online by clicking here. 

 

[b] The 'Oxford Voice' is a term coined by D. H. Lawrence to satirise the upper-class English accent that is often known as RP. In a poem of that title found in Pansies (1929), Lawrence mocks it as "so seductively superior". It can be found in Vol. 1 of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (2013), p. 376.  

      Stephen Fry reads Lawrence's verse - in his best Oxford Voice - on The Show People Podcast with ‪Andrew Keates‬, recorded live at The Two Brewers, Clapham, on 12 June 2025: click here. 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 177. This is Oliver Mellors addressing Connie. For a discussion of the use of dialect as erotico-elementary language in D. H. Lawrence, see the post published on 3 December 2020: click here. 

 

[d] This question seems particularly pertinent today of all days when local elections are being held across England, Scotland and Wales and the two traditional parties - Labour and the Conservatives - are both predicted to do badly, whilst Reform UK and the Green Party are set to make significant gains.     

 

  

Readers who are interested in this post might like to check out the East Midlands Voices project at Nottingham Trent University (headed by Professor Natalie Braber, who teaches linguistics in the School of Social Sciences): click here.  

 

Musical bonus: Sleaford Mods, 'Jobseeker': click here. Originally released as a single in 2013, it also features on the compilation album All That Glue (Rough Trade, 2020) and seems to have been a favourite of Fisher's. 

 

 

Terminal Boardom: An Open Letter to Ian Trowell with Reference to His 'Holidays in the Sun' Exhibition (2026)

Ian Trowell: Holidays in the Sun: Sex Pistols, Scarborough and the Seaside 

Scarborough Library (2 - 30 May 2026) [1] 

'I do like to stroll along the prom, prom, prom! 

Where the punk band plays Tiddely-om-pom-pom!' [2]

 

 

I. 

 

In May 1976, the Sex Pistols decided to play their first gigs outside of the Greater London area and take their (nameless) subcultural revolution on the road - unaccompanied by Malcolm who was otherwise engaged - to Barnsley, Middlesbrough, and Scarborough ...

 

And this month, Scarborough's resident punk scholar, Ian Trowell, is marking the 50th anniversary of the Sex Pistols performing in the North Yorkshire seaside town with an exhibition mounted on half-a-dozen large display boards in the Community Space located at the rear of the main library.  

 

What is known by those within the Punk Scholars Network as archiving anarchy ... [3]

 

 

II. 

 

Titled Holidays in the Sun, the exhibition was designed in collaboration with Russ Bestley and gathers materials and testimony from the notorious band's visit to Scarborough in the spring of 1976, as well as their return visit as part of a secret tour in the summer of '77, by which time they had become public enemies number one. 

 

The images and artefacts are accompanied by a detailed and thoughtful narrative which helps create a startling contrast between the everydayness of Scarborough and the extraordinariness of the Sex Pistols. More broadly, the exhibition also reflects upon the intimate and enduring connections between  British coastal towns and youth subcultures. 

 

A series of planned events include a panel discussion on punk as anti-fashion and a talk led by Trowell on how punk has been written about over the last half-century, affording an opportunity to look at the manner in which history and memory are constructed through myth. 

 

 

III.  

So far, so press release-y. 

 

Here, I'll try to say something a wee bit more critical, in the form of an open letter that touches on the inherent friction between punk's chaotic origins and the orderly demands of curation. 

 

 

Dear Ian,

 

Firstly, congratulations on the exhibition, in which I know you've invested a good deal of time and effort (not to mention your own money). The boards provide an interesting mix of Sex Pistols lore, local history, and wider cultural context and I applaud most of your aesthetic choices. 

      Use of Jamie Reid's iconic Never Mind the Bollocks colour scheme, for example, is a nice touch. Not only does it make the display visually stimulating, but it succeeds in tying the exhibition together; i.e., it provides chromatic consistency and creates the intuitive flow between panels you were aiming for.   

      However, the black lettering works much better on the lemon-yellow background rather than Board 3's bubble-gum pink. I can't say I'm a great fan either of that headache-inducing razor font used for the main title. Personally, I'd have gone with the more familiar blackmail-style lettering; sometimes, the cliché is best.

      I also think your pedagogic will to inform coupled to a writer's love of word play [4] has, unfortunately, hindered rather than helped you here. Phrases such as 'subcultural sartorial markers' create an intellectual barrier as most people not only do not use language like this, but feel intimidated by it. It's a shame, I think, that the texts read less like a punk manifesto and more like something torn from the pages of a museum guide. 

      Their length as well as their complexity was also an issue. With board word counts doubling the recommended 150-word maximum, the narrative risks losing the casual observer, whose attention span is notoriously fleeting [5]. 

      It's for a similar reason I also wonder if it was the best decision to have a fixed sequence of display boards. For a majority of people like to float freely from one board to another, like butterflies going from flower to flower, depending on whatever catches their eye rather than follow a progressive narrative. And so, whilst you may wish to construct a logical order to the display allowing for a continuous historical narrative, it could be argued you are denying the viewer's agency to drift - a quintessentially punk mode of experiencing.

      Ultimately, the most anarcho-nihilistic iteration of this project would have been to have erected six entirely black boards à la John McCracken, thereby confounding visitors, referencing your own black square project [6], and suggesting also those imposing alien artefacts that catalyse cultural evolution in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [7]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Amusingly - and somewhat depressingly - the Sex Pistols (feat. Frank Carter) are due to perform at the Scarborough Open Air Theatre on Sunday 2 August, 2026, supported by The Stranglers and The Undertones: buy your tickets here. 

 

It would be great if they could have Trowell's boards on display in some capacity - and I really hope Ian gets some seaside punk rock confectionary made for sale on the day. 

 

 

Ian Trowell (2026)

 

  

Notes

[1] Readers who wish to know more are encouraged to visit Trowell's Substack - SUB>SUMED - where he discusses his 'Holidays in the Sun' project in a post dated 5 March 2026: click here.

      The image used to illustrate this post is a detail from Board Number 1, taken from Ian's Instagram account: click here. 

 

[2] Lyrics (with one minor change) from the popular British music hall song 'I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside', written by John H. Glover-Kind in 1907 and made famous by music hall singer Mark Sheridan, who first recorded it in 1909. It was composed at a time when yearly visits by the British working class to the seaside were booming. Click here to play on YouTube. The Sex Pistols incorporated this song into their act in 2007, as a segue into 'Holidays in the Sun' - click here for their gig at the Brixton Academy (10 November 2007).

 

[3] I'm not entirely hostile to this process; of the three ways that the spirit of punk is exorcised - commodified by capital; Disneyfied by cunts in the media; absorbed into cultural history by academics - the latter is probably the least objectionable. See the post 'On Torn Edges and the Need to Archive' (25 March 2024): click here. 

 

[4] By his own admission, keeping text within a tight word count isn't Trowell's strong point; "I like to waffle, to draw in interesting tangents, and to play with language". See his Substack post linked to above. 

 

[5] It has been calculated that, on average, a visitor to an exhibition will only spend 10-15 seconds reading, before moving to the next thing on view. 

 

[6] I discuss Trowell's black square project in the post titled 'But Malcolm, They'll Not Be Able to Find It ...' (24 March 2024): click here. 

 

[7] As far as I remember, the featureless black monoliths in 2001 are highly advanced, multi-purpose machines built by an unseen race of aliens with very precise dimensions in a strict 1:4:9 ratio.

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: On Mark Fisher's Sense of Wonder

'Is it possible to reproduce, later in life, the impact that books, 

records and films have between the ages of fourteen and seventeen? 

The periods of my adult life that have been most miserable have been those 

in which I lost fidelity to what I discovered then ...' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Having now read the opening three parts of Mark Fisher's k-punk - his collected and unpublished writings from the period 2004 - 2016 - I have a pretty good idea of his taste in books, music, film and television, and if I were to compile a short index of his favourite authors, pop stars, and directors it would certainly include the following names: 

 

J. G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, William Burroughs, Ian Curtis (Joy Division), David Cronenberg, Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music), Fredric Jameson, Franz Kafka, Jacques Lacan, Nick Land, Dennis Potter, Simon Reynolds, Mark E. Smith (The Fall), Spinoza, and Slavoj Žižek.    

That means - to paraphrase Barthes - that whilst we share certain points of reference, his body is not my body and in order to enjoy his work I have to overcome a certain irritation and remain silent and polite when confronted by ideas and tastes which I do not share [2].  

 

 

II.  

 

I suppose everyone has favourite books, records, films and TV shows. 

 

But very few people are affected so profoundly as Fisher was affected by those books, records, films and TV shows that he encountered in his adolescence and which - woven deep into his consciousness - stayed with him throughout his life and gave shape and meaning to his own work.

 

As D. H. Lawrence writes of the nonconformist hymns that, despite their banality, meant so much to him, we might say of those post-punk songs that Fisher continued to adore at forty just as he had at fourteen; "there has been no crystallising out [...] no hardening into commonplace" [3] - they still filled him with an experience of joy and wonder (despite his now also possessing a sophisticated theoretical appreciation of their genius). 

 

That's why Fisher is more than simply an excellent critic; he has retained his sense of wonder. When the sense of wonder has gone out of a man, says Lawrence, he may still possess the most marvellous intelligence, but he is essentially dead inside. 

 

 

III. 

 

The fact that Fisher retained his experience of wonder - understood as an openness to that which lies beyond standard perception and cognition - explains also why he was so highly sensitive to the weird and the eerie [4].

 

Indeed, I would argue that Fisher's hauntological fascination for the past - particularly for lost futures - was also born of wonder, not mere nostalgia, and that while capitalist realism acts as a pervasive grey curtain of apathy, boredom and depression, a sense of wonder enables us to rip small holes in it (thus letting in a little speckled chaos).   

 

As mentioned earlier, I don't share all of Fisher's loves and hates - or even most of them; from the above index there are only two or three names that I would add to my own list of favourites and some in whom I have no interest at all. 

 

However, I do agree with him on the importance of continuing to read the books, play the records, and watch the films and TV shows that meant so much to us as youths, in order that 'worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of wonder implanted in the teenage soul' [5].       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Mark Fisher, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 -2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 24.  

 

[2] See the fragment titled 'J'aime, je n'aime pas' in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 116-117. 

      Readers who want to know my favourite novels, films, pop songs, and sitcoms should visit the TTA Index page and go to the posts listed under 'These Are a Few of My Favourite Things ...'   

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Hymns in a Man's Life', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 130-131.

 

[4] See Fisher's book The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016). And to read the first part of a two-part post on the book, click here.   

 

[5] I'm paraphrasing Goethe in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96). 

 

 

For two earlier posts in this TTA goes k-punk series, please click here and/or here.   

 

 

Reflections on the Sarah Morris Exhibition 'Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers' (2026)

Sarah Morris seated in front of her diptych Bank of China (2025) 

Household gloss paint on canvas (289.2 x 582.4 cm) [1]

 

Ogni pittore dipinge sé ...[2]

 

 

I. 

 

It's said that just as dog owners often resemble their pets, painters often resemble their canvases. 

 

In fact, there's even a term for the tendency of artists to either consciously or subconsciously replicate their own physical features, personality, or emotional state in their work: automimesis ...   

 

An obvious example would be Van Gogh, whose impasto brushstrokes and vibrant colour combinations transform landscapes into surging, swirling (somewhat sensual) expressions of his own soul. One of D. H. Lawrence's criticisms of Vincent's landscapes was that they were too subjective; "himself projected into the earth" [2].    

 

Thus, even if they never paint a self-portrait per se, it's always interesting to consider how an artist mixes his or her colours and applies paint to the canvas.   

 

 

II.  

I was reminded of this concept of automimesis a few days after attending a new solo exhibition by British-born American artist Sarah Morris at the White Cube gallery in Mason's Yard (London). 

 

For it was only after seeing a photograph of her - staring at the camera with a ferociously defensive look, the organic expressivity of her face hidden behind a cosmetic mask - that somehow the paintings in the exhibition made sense and I began to appreciate Morris's large canvases much more than when I was actually standing in front of them and feeling a little dazzled by their intense, hard-edged colour and diagrammatic character.

 

If, on the one hand, the exhibition is a meditation on the signs, symbols and  structures of contemporary power as manifested in her hometown of New York City, so too is it a cognitive and emotional mapping of her own identity as shaped by the urban landscape and what Mark Fisher termed capitalist realism [4]. 

 

We journey into the world dominated by global corporations, pharmaceutical giants, large hotel chains, big brands, etc., but we care less ultimately about the steel and glass skyscrapers and more about the mysterious snow leopard who is, perhaps, Morris's totem animal [5] (and not merely the flow of money and data).  

 

We feel about tower blocks and high-rise buildings what Lawrence felt about Egyptian pyramids and the great cathedrals of his native land: "we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realise that it is better to keep life fluid and changing than to try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments" [6].   

 

Burdens on the face of the earth, are man's ponderous erections, says Lawrence [7]. And one suspects that Morris would agree (and would approve of Lawrence's language, as she seems  to think of capitalist realism as phallocratic or male-encoded in character).  

 

Thus, her paintings - whilst imposing in their own way - at the same time decode and deconstruct the impositional character of the built environment by abstractly transforming corporate entities such as BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and Johnson & Johnson into vibrant, geometric artworks that speak not only of their hegemony, but of her cold determination to survive and her refusal to be trapped or enclosed by systems not of her making.   

 

 

III. 

 

Morris is obviously dedicated to her work: she has spent thirty years investigating what she describes as urban, social and bureaucratic typologies and producing her unique cityscapes executed in brightly-coloured household gloss paint on large square canvases:

 

"The finished surfaces are accordingly sleek, uniform and seemingly machinic in their appearance, their meticulous sequencing of dots, dashes, shards and parallelograms reinforcing an impression of mechanical reproduction, commercial manufacture and language itself. This apparent immediacy nevertheless belies the truth of the labour embedded within each work, which is in fact the outcome of the artist's slow, exacting and rigorous production." [8] 

 

Interestingly, Morris speaks of capturing after-images rather than representations; i.e., images that continue to haunt her imagination and which she can see in her mind's eye even after she has ceased to look at the actual object. That makes sense, when one recalls that her paintings are essentially concerned with forces and flows rather than forms of architecture.  

She also insists that all great art is a form of trespassing ... By which I think she means defying authority, overstepping boundaries, and making unauthorised copies of origami crease patterns ... [9]        

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This canvas is included in the exhibition Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers (11 March - 9 May 2026) at White Cube Mason's Yard (London SW1). 

 

[2] Ogni pittore dipinge sé: Every painter paints themselves. 

      As Benjamin Breen informs us in an interesting piece published on his Substack: Res Obscura (11 July 2023), the earliest attributed source for this proverbial Italian expression is Cosimo de Medici, the Florentine banker and arts patron. 

      The concept of automimesis is one discussed at length by Leonardo da Vinci in his Treatise on Painting and modern art historians remain fascinated by this idea. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 201.  

 

[4] I suspect that Fisher would probably argue of Morris's work what he argued of Warhol's - Warhol being an artist with whom Morris has long felt an aesthetic and conceptual affinity - namely, that it's less a critique of capitalist realism and more a brilliant reflection and extension of the latter, further neutralising our ability to stand outside or imagine an alternative.          

 

[5] It should be noted that Morris borrows the idea of a snow leopard from Peter Mattheissen's book The Snow Leopard (Viking Press, 1978); the zen-inspired story of a search for something that probably isn't there, or, if it is there, doesn't want to be seen or captured. 

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places, in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 32.   

 

[7] Ibid. My italics.  

 

[8] Quoted from the White Cube press release for the exhibition: click on the link above in note 1.   

 

[9] In 2011, Morris was sued by a group of six origami artists, including Robert J. Lang, who alleged that in a significant number of works in her Origami series of paintings she had - without permission or giving credit - copied their original crease patterns, coloured them with paint, and then exhibited (and sold) them as found designs or traditional patterns.  

      The case was settled out of court early in 2013; under the terms of the settlement, the creators of the crease patterns are now given credit when the works are displayed or reproduced, which seems fair enough, I suppose, although I'm very sympathetic to the argument of transformative fair use and don't like notions of intellectual property and copyright, etc.  

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: Book Meme

 

Mark Fisher and three of his intellectual heroes: 

Messrs. Kafka, Spinoza, and Ballard 

 

 

I. 

 

It hardly seems appropriate to comment on Fisher's reading habits as, for the most part, I have never read the authors that seem to mean the most to him; Kafka, Spinoza, Margaret Atwood, et al.  

 

Well, I've read some Kafka and I value Deleuze and Guattari's study of Kafka in terms of a minor literature, but I've never made of him the "intimate and constant companion" [a] that Fisher makes of him. 

 

I don't know why that is - what does make us love certain writers and the books they produce over others? 

 

Barthes famously answers this question in terms of desire. We privilege those writers whose texts have a sensual appeal; their language and writing style causes a certain frisson resulting in an intense form of pleasure that he terms jouissance. To put it somewhat crudely: it ain't what they say, it's the way that they say it (that's what gets results). 

 

In other words, our preference for certain writers and certain books is subjective and sometimes even authors that we like and like a lot, fail to produce that je ne sais quoi that is required for us to really love them, as Fisher loves Kafka. 

 

And sometimes, even brilliant authors whom everyone insists we should love - such as Joyce, Dostoevsky, Burroughs and Beckett - either leave us cold or rub us up the wrong way. 

 

 

II.           

 

Fisher says that reading a really great work of philosophy - he names Spinoza's Ethics - "is like running a Videodrome cassette: you think you are playing it, but it ends up playing you, effecting a gradual mutation of the way you think and perceive" (25).

 

And that's true, of course. Which is why philosophy is a dangerously perverse practice and why the Athenians were not wrong to charge Socrates with corrupting the youth.

 

Interestingly, Spinoza gave the Nazis a particular headache; as a Jewish philosopher, his works were viewed as un-German and so many of his books were confiscated and banned - but they just couldn't bring themselves to burn them, acknowledging the praise given to Spinoza by great figures in German cultural life including Goethe and Nietzsche. 

 

Having ordered the seizure of a valuable collection of his books from the Spinoza Museum in Amsterdam in 1942, Alfred Rosenberg determined to solve the Spinoza problem by reconciling the philosopher's genius with Nazi ideology - unaware of what Fisher calls the Videodrome effect.      

 

 

III. 

 

J. G. Ballard is an author that Fisher and I share knowledge of and love for, although I value his better-known novel Crash (1973) over his earlier (more experimental) text The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). 

 

That's because I require a little more in the way of plot and character development than Fisher, betraying the fact that I have a background in English literature rather than theory and doubtless making me a bourgeois romantic in the eyes of some.    

 

Still, despite my more conventional character, I agree with Fisher that Ballard helped rescue us from "decent humanist certainties and Sunday supplement sleepiness" (26) and, obviously, that's one of the reasons to admire him.   

 

 

IV.

 

I still find it a little surprising that punk scholar Russ Bestley doesn't much care for Greil Marcus's secret history of the twentieth century, Lipstick Traces (1989); describing the study as "deeply flawed - and unfathomably influential" [b] and a largely failed attempt to "make connections between the Sex Pistols, Dada, Surrealism and the philosophies of much earlier political agitators" [c]. 

 

That might be true, but it's often the case that we learn more from such failed attempts to form rhizomatic connections than we do from successful, self-contained books based on arborescent models that are proud of their own organic interiority, etc.  

 

And so, I agree with Fisher that the work's "vast web of connections opened up an escape route" (26) and brilliantly made the point that pop music "can only have any significance when it [...] reverberates with a politics that has nothing to do with capitalist parliamentarianism and a philosophy that has nothing to do with the academy" (26). 

 

It's not perfect by any means, but it largely succeeds in registering the impact and importance of punk - particularly the Sex Pistols - which is why, I suppose, Malcolm McLaren was always a big fan of the book.   

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, 'book meme' (20/06/2005), in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 24. All future page references to this work will be placed directly in the post. 

 

[b] Russ Bestley, Turning Revolt Into Style, (Manchester University Press, 2025), p. 13. I discuss Bestley's book at length in several posts previously published on TTA: click here.

 

[c] Ibid., p. 57. 

 

 

This is one of several planned posts in the 'Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk' series: click here.  

 

 

CRA5 H26 (A Brief Note on Serendipity, Synchronicity, and Coincidence)

CRA5 H26 (SA/2026)

 

'I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash ...' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

How odd that after reading a k-punk post discussing J. G. Ballard's novel Crash (1973) - a post in which Fisher describes the work as deeply indebted to the imagery of Helmut Newton and "a perverse counterpart to Kant's kingdom of ends" [2] - I should go for a walk and immediately encounter the above vehicle ...

 

Some might say this is serendipitous; others may see it as evidence of synchronicity; personally, however, I think the term coincidence covers it. 

 

But it's worth perhaps briefly considering these three distinct concepts separated by ideas of agency, meaning, and causality ...

 

 

II.

   

Serendipity involves the random occurrence of fortunate or pleasant events; i.e., unintentionally coming across things or finding oneself in unexpected situations that have some kind of positive value. I suppose we might see it as an elevated form of good luck and as something that allows happy accidents to become opportunities. 

 

The term was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, inspired by the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip (1557). For philosophers, serendipity requires sagacity - i.e., the active intelligence to recognise the value of an unexpected finding. 

 

Synchronicity is a bit spookier and refers to an acausal connecting principle bridging internal and external events; i.e., human psychology and the material world. Jung, who coined the term, described events that are connected in this rather special way as meaningful coincidences. For those who love to grant significance and structure to the universe and believe that their dreams really can come true, synchronicity is not only explanatory but evidence that these things exist. 

 

Coincidence, meanwhile, is purely a statistical phenomenon with nothing spooky, meaningful, or necessarily fortunate about it. It's all about probability, baby! And the Law of Truly Large Numbers, which teaches that if enough independent variables interact over time, highly improbable intersections will occur purely by chance, carrying no inherent meaning or cosmic intent.

 

To put all that in a nutshell: while all three concepts involve intersecting timelines, serendipity requires you to be on the ball; synchronicity requires you to be prone to mysticism; and to understand the nature of coincidence requires an ability to do the math.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] J. G. Ballard, 'What I Believe', a prose poem originally published in the French magazine Science Fiction, Issue 1 (Jan 1984): click here to read on BJA Samuel's website.    

 

[2] Mark Fisher, 'let me be your fantasy', posted on his k-punk blog on 27/08/2006, and included in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 44-48. The line quoted from is on p. 47. 

 

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: An Opening Salvo

 Mark Fisher: k-punk 

(Repeater Books, 2018) [a]

 

I started the blog because it seemed like a space in which to maintain 

a kind of discourse that had all but died out, with what I think are 

appalling cultural and political consequences. - k-punk (2005)  

 

 

I. 

 

According to Simon Reynolds, 'Mark Fisher's k-punk blogs were required reading for a generation' [b].  

 

I pretty much belong to that generation: born in the '60s; raised in the '70s; graduating in the 1980s [c]. However, I must confess to having never read a word written by Fisher until relatively recently. This despite the fact that he and I were both in the philosophy department at Warwick as doctoral students in the 1990s, and shared many of the same obsessions and points of reference.      

 

I suppose, post-Warwick, I had my own projects to keep me occupied. I certainly had nothing to do with the blogosphere until November 2012, when the Little Greek set up Torpedo the Ark and suggested I might enjoy publishing posts more than merely scribbling private notes in writing pads. She was right, of course; as the 2,700 or so posts published since that date testify.    

 

Still, better late than never ... And having just bought a copy of k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016) - a big, fat book containing many of the posts from his seminal blog - I now hope to discover for myself the "elegance and reach of Fisher's writing, the evangelical urgency and caustic critique that seared through his rapid-fire communiques" [d].

 

I suspect the philosophically-informed posts will interest me more than the ones on pop music and film. I'm particularly keen to investigate how Fisher moves from being a Ccru-inspired accelerationist who exalted "the border-dissolving flows of capital and scorned socialism as a decrepit early 20th-century relic" [e] to becoming such an absolute opponent of neoliberalism and a pioneer of acid communism.  

 

This post, however, is merely setting the stage for such an investigation and future posts will engage more fully with Fisher in his k-punk alias. For when I say the k-punk book is a big, fat book, I mean exactly that; if you include the index, it's 750 pages long and so, obviously, I can't be expected to perform the kind of close reading that I recently subjected Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) to.  

 

It took me four days to read through the less than ninety pages of that book and write a five-thousand-word, three-part post. At that rate, it would take me over a month to work line-by-line through K-punk and, frankly, as much as Fisher is a fascinating writer, I don't have that level of interest, stamina, or dedication (certainly not when the sun is shining). 

 

What's more, it would be disrespectful to Fisher to pretend that I could provide a definitive overview or, worse, place his thinking in a nutshell. So, all I'll do - for now at least - is simply share some thoughts on the foreword by Simon Reynolds and the introduction by the book's editor, Darren Ambrose. 

 

 

II.

 

I can only hope that, when I'm dead, I have a friend like Simon Reynolds to say something kind and insightful about me and my work. Clearly, the latter misses his friend and the chance to converse with him on a wide range of subjects: 

 

"There are many days when I wonder what Mark would say about this or that [...] the clarity he could bring to almost anything [...] I miss Mark's mind. It's a lonely feeling." (7)    

 

I was pleased to be reminded that Fisher's worldview - certainly in the days when he belonged to the band D-Generation - was shaped by punk and a love-hate relationship with Englishness. That makes it easier for me to feel affection for Fisher. As does the fact that he so effectively dissolved the distinction between popular culture and high art, as well as that between philosophy, politics and literature: 

 

"Often, and most crucially, Mark wrote about many - sometimes all - of these things at the same time. Making connections across far-flung fields, zooming in for vivid attention to aesthetic particulars and zooming out again to the widest possible scope [...]" (2) 

    

However, I'm not quite so comfortable with the idea that he had a total vision and that his ideas were heading somewhere; that a "gigantic edifice of thought was in the process of construction" (3). But we can let Fisher's modernist ambitions pass for the moment, even if it's a crucial point of difference between the two of us: Fisher the grand architect and systematiser; me a believer in the ruins and advocate of chaos.  

 

He and I may share a certain writing style - "rigorous and deeply informed" (3), but non-academic. But whereas the "urgency in Mark's prose came from his faith that words really could change things" (3), I have no such faith (as a nihilist, I have little time for progressive optimism). 

 

And whilst Fisher wants to make "everything feel more meaningful, supercharged with significance" (3), I want to void everything of meaning and hollow out all substance and significance.  

 

In other words, despite a certain degree of affection, I wouldn't say Fisher and I were comrades-in-arms. And, despite some uncanny similarities, I wouldn't say we were brothers under the skin. I think he and I would have been, at best, respectful frenemies had we ever known one another [g]. 

  

That said, I very much look forward to reading his k-punk posts to see if they're as provocatively brilliant and as fizzing with fervour as Reynolds insists. And I'll endeavour to read them in a good spirit, although, as Reynolds points out, there's always an undercurrent of competition between writers and "severity towards 'the opposition' is the mark of seriousness, a sign that something is at stake and that differences are worth fighting over" (5) [h].

 

 

III. 

 

I think my ambivalence toward Fisher is, then, already pretty clear ... 

 

On the one hand, I admire the fact that he was not - and never wanted to be - "a conventional academic writer, theorist or critic" (9); that his writing was, as Darren Ambrose says, "too abrasive, polemical, lucid, unsentimental, personal, insightful and compelling for that" (9). 

 

But, on the other hand, I am far more sympathetic to the postmodernism that a great deal of his writing was "undertaken in vehement opposition to" (9) [i]. I prefer irony to sincerity and would wish to curb Fisher's enthusiasm and grand ambition to invent the future and reshape human experience. I mean, c'mon, Mark: wtf d'you think you are? (You're not the Messiah, you're just a very clever boy.)       

 

I may say I wish to torpedo the ark, but I'm aware that I'm never going to be able to sink the bloody thing with just a few smart lines written in a short post; mostly, one blogs so as to be able to explore one's own obsessions and refine one's own writing style - as is recognised by Ambrose, with reference to Fisher:

 

"k-punk posts encapsulated an intellectual moment of reflection on the world: they are responsive, immediate, and provide an affectively charged perspective." (10)

 

But they're not going to bring about the Revolution or provide a path to Utopia. Ambrose may find in Fisher's work "reasons for continuing, against the odds, to hope for an alternative to the dystopian present" (11), but I'll be happy if the k-punk posts occasionally provide an amusing idea or clever turn of phrase. 

 

A bit like Nietzsche's Will to Power, surely Fisher's blog remains first and foremost a space for thinking the thought from outside - nothing else. That is to say, thinking a type of thought that stands in contrast to the interiority of most philosophical reflection and the positivity of our scientific knowledge; a type of thought that we find not in mysticism, but in that hybrid genre known as theory-fiction.

 

As Ambrose writes, Fisher had a strong commitment to "fugitive discourses which have been legitimated by neither the official channels of the establishment [...] or traditional forms of publishing" (11). That, again, is something on which he and I are in accord and whilst Fisher's loyalty is to Spinoza and Kafka - mine more to Nietzsche and Lawrence - we agree that "it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split" [i].   

 

If anyone wants to find an alternative to capitalist realism, then let them read the above four authors; or let them read k-punk and/or Torpedo the Ark. You may not find any traces of acid communism in the latter [j], but there's a delicious poison (or pharmakon) seepig throughout (i.e., the playful production of différance).    

   

I said earlier that, after I'm dead, I hope I have as loyal a friend as Reynolds to say something kind and insightful about me and my work. But I hope also that TTA finds a posthumous editor as skilled and sensitive as Darren Ambrose, who does an excellent job in assembling Fisher's writings. 

 

If his aim was to "provide as comprehensive a picture as possible of the blog [...] by selecting pieces that reflect both its eclectic content, its theoretical pluralism and most of all its remarkable consistency" (15), then, from what I've read so far whilst flicking through the hundreds of pages, I think he's achieved that. 

 

Hopefully, Ambrose also manages to retain a sense of the posts immediacy and informality, despite the fact that the work has been abstracted from its original format and the very specific context of the blog. I guess I'm about to find out ...

  

  

Notes

 

[a] This work was edited by Darren Ambrose and has a Foreword by Simon Reynolds. All page references given in the post refer to this 2018 edition published by Repeater Books.    

 

[b] This was the title of a piece written shortly after Fisher's suicide and published in The Guardian (18 Jan 2017): click here to read online; or here to listen to an audio version on YouTube. 

 

[c] Whilst Fisher, born in July '68, was pure Gen X, I belong more to the tail end of the Boomers (or what some sociologists now call Generation Jones), having been born in 1963 (the same year as Simon Reynolds). This gives Fisher and myself slightly different perspectives and means, for example, whilst I experienced punk in real-time as a 14-year-old adolescent, Fisher came to it retrospectively via the hybrid forms of post-punk. 

 

[d] Simon Reynolds, 'Mark Fisher's k-punk blogs were required reading for a generation', see link above. 

[e] Ibid. 

 

[f] As mentioned, Fisher and I remained complete strangers to one another at Warwick and whilst he was a core member of the Ccru, I couldn't make head-or-tail of the wilfully hermetic publication ***collapse, even though I once contributed some artwork to it and was on amiable terms with Nick Land, who oversaw my progress as a doctoral student in the philosophy department, under Keith Ansell-Pearson's supervision.

 

[g] I agree with Reynolds that "it is this negative capacity - the strength of will to discredit and discard" (5) that keeps culture and criticism alive; "not wishy-washy tolerance and anything goes positivity" (5). As a philosopher, nothing is more important than to access nihilation. 

 

[h] Ambrose praises Fisher for his "exemplary antipathy and negativity towards PoMo hyper-ironic posturing" - see his introduction, k-punk (2018), p. 12.   

 

[i] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 154.    

 

[j] Acid Communism was the proposed title for a book Fisher was working on at the time of his death (by suicide) in 2017. According to the unfinished introduction, the promise of such a post-capitalist ideology was "a new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving" (p. 687) - that's not quite what's on offer on Torpedo the Ark ...  

 

 

This is essentially just an introductory post to a new series of posts inspired by Fisher's writings during the period 2004 - 2016, to be published intermittently over the coming months (that's the plan at least). For a second round of fire, click here.  

 

Regular readers will be aware that I have previously discussed Fisher's three published works - Capitalist Realism (2009), Ghosts of My Life (2014), and The Weird and the Eerie (2016) - on Torpedo the Ark in multi-part posts.

 

    

Why I Still Don't Much Care for the London Marathon

Male runners in the London Marathon

Photo by Alessia Pierdomenico 

 

There are tens of thousands of them and each one runs alone, 

without even a thought for victory, but simply in order to feel alive ... 

before collapsing exhausted at the roadside.  

 

 

I. 

 

Despite what some people say - and despite its non-linear, fragmentary character - Torpedo the Ark maintains a rather strong level of critical continuity, frequently revisiting the same themes and referencing the same authors. 

 

Thus it was that when half-way through writing a post this morning on why Baudrillard was right to describe jogging - along with dieting, bodybuilding, and so many other aspects of contemporary keep-fit culture - as a new form of voluntary servitude [1], I suddenly remembered a post published exactly ten years ago in which I had already expressed my dislike for running and the London Marathon as an ersatz sporting event: click here.

 

What I said then, I would still say now: for I still find its mix of fun-running, charity, narcissistic athleticism, media hype, and commercial sponsorship all wrapped up in Lycra and covered in sweat, deeply offensive; a form of socially approved masturbation on an obscene scale, the pleasure of which has nothing to do ultimately with either sport or sex; a corporate-media event that would have poor, exhausted Pheidippides spinning in his grave. 

 

 

II.  

Having said that, there was at least one anonymous reader of the 2016 post who found it anything other than amusing and sent me this irate email:

 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander,

      Your post titled 'Why I Don't Much Care for the London Marathon' (26 April 2016) has left me fuming. For it is nothing more than a highly cynical and elitist critique of a fantastic mass-participation sporting event of which all true Londoners are rightly proud. 

      Using pseudo-intellectual frameworks and sneering cultural snobbery, not only do you wrongly suggest that it is a performative, commercialised display of vanity rather than true athletic ability, but you also reject and ridicule a friend's inclusive and joyous view of the race.

      Who are you to look down upon and ridicule others? You may think you're intellectually superior because you have a Ph.D., but you're not - you are, rather, just a hateful individual whose palpable disdain for participants in the Marathon - you describe them as 'idiots endlessly pounding the pavements' - is both shocking and shameful. High-brow allusions and references do not validate what is essentially a peculiar personal grievance you seem to have against not just runners, but all humanity!   

      And so, despite nihilists like you who would sneer at everything and everyone, I shall continue to enjoy this wonderful community event, which each year raises tens of millions of pounds for good causes.   

 

 

III. 

 

I didn't reply at the time and, to be honest, don't really feel inclined to do so now - ten years on. 

 

However, I would just point out that the 2016 post might possibly be read as a piece of Juvenalian satire and is thus in a long unapologetic but highly-entertaining tradition of writing. Adopting the role of a highly-articulate, somewhat cynical and misanthropic narrator is also not unknown in English letters ...

 

As a rather more intelligent (and sympathetic) reader of the post said to me: It works perfectly as a stylish (slightly absurd) piece of counter-cultural contrarianism.    

 

Still, I hope my anonymous critic manages to channel all their righteous energy into crossing the finish line should they be running in this year's end-of-the-world show (i.e., the London Marathon). 

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Baudrillard was a fiercely humorous critic of what people in the sixties, seventies and eighties called jogging, but which is now usually referred to as running (the former term having become a bit passé and not seen as serious and aspirational enough; as lacking in intensity for an age that must go further, faster). 

      See America, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 1988), pp. 37-39 in which Baudrillard writes of those modern ascetics who, via the muscular exhaustion of their bodies, seek a higher plane of consciousness and are unable ever to come to rest. And see pp. 19-20 where he discusses the New York Marathon; an event that moves him to tears (of despair and laughter). Note that I paraphrase Baudrillard for the epigraph at the head of this post.