Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk
Three variations by SA (2026)
'When we can no longer pass to the other side of the mirror
then the age of transcendence will have passed ...'
I.
Mark Fisher and his CCRU chums, like Baudrillard, had an amusing penchant for the prefix hyper ...
Originating from the Ancient Greek ὑπέρ - meaning over, above, or excessively beyond - it forms augmentative words indicating states far more intense than normal. Doctors call high blood pressure hypertension; parents of kids who can't sit still say their fidgety brats are hyperactive.
Anyway, Fisher titles the final chapter of Flatline Constructs 'Black Mirror: Hypernaturalism, Hyperreality, and Hyperfiction' and these are the concepts we're discussing here in relation to the central question: What happens when fiction propagates, contaminating the Real?
But first, let's take a quick glance into the black mirror itself ...
II.
Hear the term black mirror and you immediately think of Charlie Brooker's Channel 4 TV series [b], where it stood for the dead screens of inactive smartphones and laptops. Indeed, plenty of people mistakenly credit Brooker with coining it.
But for Fisher, writing long before Brooker's show, the phrase carried far older, stranger resonances. In occult traditions, a black mirror is a tool for scrying - a dark surface gazed into to communicate with non-human entities or induce visions; a portal to an alternative reality.
As we saw in a previous post, whilst Fisher's foundational texts are mostly drawn from materialist philosophy and cyberpunk fiction, his Gothic Materialist framework is explicitly built to collapse the line between the technological and the magical.
Thus, while modern digital screens might not be made of obsidian, they serve the exact same purpose as a sorcerer's mirror. They induce trances, suspend human agency, and - rather than merely reflecting the world - actively manufacture our understanding of reality and shape our being.
The black mirror isn't simply an object displaying representations: it's a gateway allowing inorganic forces to loop into human reality and hack the future; a threshold where man and machine meet on the same plane. But it is also the definitive interface of communicative capitalism, offering the illusion of connection while locking us into recursive libidinal loops of consumption; an "event horizon beyond which we cannot go" (194).
III.
"The cyberneticisation of fiction begins when fiction begins to affect, rather than simply reflect, the Real. This feedback circuit means the end of fiction as mirror, the end of realism in its mimetic mode." (189)
What this means is we're heading into the world of hyper this, that, and the other and what Fisher, after William Gibson, calls voodoo; a practice and an explanatory system that has nothing to do with the supernatural and everything to do with hyperreality and the hypernatural.
I'm not sure I want to dwell on the relationship between cyberspace and voodoo at any length, but it's important to say that for Fisher voodoo refers to the process of cybernetic systems and technologies taking on a queer undead life of their own - like zombies - thereby eroding the boundaries between living subjects and inanimate objects.
According to this voodoo philosophy, how we relate to the modern world is similar to the way in which archaic societies related to spirits. But crucially, "whilst parallel, voodoo and cybernetics, like the world and cyberspace, are not ultimately reducible to one another, precisely because there is a relation of feedback between the two" (191).
In other words, there is no equivalence of terms; they are not synonymous and neither do they share a metaphorical relationship; the possibility of metaphor disappears, says Baudrillard, when there are no longer distinct objects within differential fields, which, in the age of "'networks and integrated circuits'" (191), there are not [c].
IV.
Does anyone still refer to cyberspace?
It feels a bit dated and retro; a stark reminder that Flatline Constructs was written in the 1990s; Fisher uses the word - coined by Gibson - almost obsessively [d].
And yet, perhaps the fact that most of us pretty much stopped using the word cyberspace is not because the concept turned out to be limited, or meaningless, or have built-in obsolescence like many trendy terms do, but because cyberspace is simply what we inhabit today as reality.
We no longer talk about cyberspace, but we do our banking, buy our groceries, and conduct our relationships online. The fiction has fully contaminated and shapes the real world just as predicted; cyberspace, in other words, is now continuous with the world and the relationship between cyberspace and the world must be understood "in terms of the [...] tangled, complicated (and Deleuzian) 'figure' of the implex" (196).
Now, as we all know, the reflex is a lonely child just waiting by the park [e] - but what is the implex?
Deriving from the Latin implexus - the past participle of implectere - the English word implex means complicated and entangled. Whilst primarily a literary and/or philosophical term, implex is also used in genealogy to describe pedigree collapse, where the branches of a family tree begin to loop back on themselves due to intermarriage.
Fisher defines the way in which he uses the concept in his work thus:
"The implex describes less a relationship between objects than a transformation that happens to a system. The implex designates a process of folding, or unfolding: thus cyberspace is neither 'inside' nor 'outside' the world, it constitutes a fold in the world that is nevertheless a real production - an addition - to the world as such." (196)
If it helps, think of remarks inserted into a text and contained in brackets; they are not quite part of the sentence, but, nevertheless, add something to it - perhaps even transforming its meaning.
V.
Perhaps because he's coming to the end of his thesis, Fisher has started to offer convenient summaries composed of short sentences. For example:
"In the age of cybernetic communication, everything connects. Your picture of reality is processed through media, but media are not out of the picture any more than you are. There are no spectators, and no spectacle. You participate whether you like it or not. Nothing is outside the loop." (198)
Gothic materialism in a nutshell - I like it! Here's another example:
"It is important to remember that the hyperreal is characterised not as the surreal or the unreal, but as the more real than real." (198)
That's more Baudrillard in a nutshell than Fisher, but who cares about author rights at this stage of the game? Everyone agrees that this is true - including Ballard, for whom, like Baudrillard and Borges and Gibson, the mirror is replaced by the screen; something that "does not represent or reflect a primary world" (199), but blurs the distinction between ourselves and it.
And, in a sense, postmodern fiction is a bit like TV: simulating the Real, not reflecting it - literary critics speak of the crisis of representation (everything, of course, was in crisis or at breaking point in the 1990s) [f].
In the old days, we had to worry about an unreliable narrator; now we have to worry about the status (and reliability) of literature itself - and, indeed, mourn the death of the author (though I'll not be shedding too many tears, I have to admit).
And then there's metafiction - "another case of imploded transcendence in which the book no longer reflects the world, but only because the world has been absorbed into it, meta-textualised" (202) [g].
No wonder so many people have given up reading [h] - or beat a retreat to the so-called classics written in a time when books were windows on the world (and the human condition) and authors towered over the text like living literary giants.
VI.
One of the things that Fisher does in chapter four is challenge Baudrillard's argument that the triumph of cybernetics puts an end to both fiction and critical theory, on the grounds that we no longer possess a stable, objective reality to contrast them against.
For Baudrillard, we are trapped in a carcinogenic state of hyperreality that terminates the Real and causes a "metastatic occupation of the zones which used to double reality (shadow, dream, and myth)" (207). Fisher fiercely rejects such defeatism, putting forward the crucial notion of hyperstition - a theoretical-fictional quantity that actively makes itself real.
In other words, Fisher rejects Baudrillard's melancholic nihilism and rather than mourn the murder of the Real, he wishes to accelerate the process and, like Deleuze and Guattari, rescue the radical potential of cybernetics, recognising that non-human, algorithmic networks are transforming what it means to be human.
VII.
Interestingly, Fisher also introduces ideas of animism and demonism to describe how we interact with cybernetic technology and media. Traditionally, the first of these ideas posits the belief that non-human objects possess souls and, as Donna Haraway famously noted, for us moderns our machines - if not exactly soulful - are nevertheless disturbingly animated.
Fisher notes:
"From its very beginnings, the modern(ist) science of cybernetics was haunted by the resurgence of belief structures which, in Freud's terms, would have been considered vestiges from the most archaic parts of the mind: beliefs he characterised as 'animistic'." (217)
As for demonism, Fisher writes:
"The cybernetic lexicon has shown a remarkable predilection for invoking the word 'demon'. For obvious reasons; cybernetic systems simulate conscious function without possessing it. The term 'demonic' suggests both this possibility of agency-without-subjectivity and hints at the power of metamorphic becoming proper to entities of simulation." (217)
Drawing as usual on Deleuze and Guattari, Fisher reframes demons not as supernatural entities, but as quasi-autonomous agencies. When we interact with complex, responsive systems - like the AIs in William Gibson's Neuromancer - they behave as if exercising a will of their own. Thus, rather than controlling technology, the machines possess us; altering our behaviour and producing unexpected outcomes.
Ultimately, Fisher is saying that in our hyperreal, technological age, the classic human soul or individual psyche is an illusion. We are deeply entangled with inorganic networks. By embracing the language of demonism and animism, Fisher avoids mechanistic science and, instead, formulates his theory of Gothic Materialism, acknowledging that the non-human world is fully alive with strange, unpredictable agencies.
Obviously, as someone who likes objects and object-oriented forms of philosophy in which "the distinction between living and nonliving, between thing and entity" (218) is untenable, Fisher's Gothic Materialism holds great appeal (more so, as a matter of fact, than his later work which gets a bit too hippie-humanist at times - despite what defenders of acid communism say).
VIII.
The big news story of the day: the UK government has announced a social media ban for under-16s. It will be introduced in early 2027. Keeping children off social media is the best way to keep them safe online, said Prime Minister Keir Starmer, adding that he wants to give children back their childhoods.
Hearing this made me smile, as I had just finished reading Fisher explain how children know more about technology than parents, teachers, or politicians and their early encounter with cybernetic systems immunises them against much of the moral metaphysical bullshit that the adult world seeks to enforce.
Children are natural born animists and "increasingly live in a Gothic Materialist chaosmos" (222). Fisher continues:
"In many ways, children occupy the frontier-zones of capitalism, operating as probe-heads in what, for adults, is the future. Indeed [...] it might be said that the child's universe of animist presences and animal-becomings has far more purchase on capitalist (and schizophrenic) reality than adults' continued belief in subjective interiority." (223) [i]
IX.
Fisher closes chapter four - and his thesis - with an analysis of a film I've never seen and, to tell the truth, I've never even heard of: John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1994) ... A supernatural horror movie heavily influenced by the work of Lovecraft and which blurs the line between reality and fiction in a way that must have had Fisher terribly excited at the time.
Let's say it received mixed reviews upon release - but it has since gained something of a cult following and Fisher declares it to be "perhaps the only film to merit the description hyper-horror" (228).
It's easy to see why he says this and why he loves it so: the film tracks a horror novelist whose pulp fiction literally rewrites reality, culminating in a scene where the film's protagonist (insurance agent John Trent) sits in a derelict cinema watching the very movie he is trapped inside. It's the ultimate cyber-cinematic loop.
Personally, however, I would still rather rewatch Gerald Thomas's Carry On Screaming (1966), because humorous horror matters more to me than hyper-horror. Both films exploit the conventions of the genre, but whereas In the Mouth of Madness does so in order to amplify "feelings of dread and disquiet" (228), Carry on Screaming does so in order to induce laughter.
Nevertheless, the latter remains a work that can be read in terms of Gothic Materialism ...
For example, central to the film is the idea that human beings can be transformed into inanimate mannequins for sale through a process of dollification. This perfectly illustrates Fisher’s interest in the loss of agency and the blurring of boundaries between organisms and objects. It might also be argued that Oddbod's cloning - called regeneration in the film - provides an example of the biological being subordinated to mechanically-induced propagation.
There's a good deal more I could say (and would like to say) about Carry On Screaming, but this is not really the time or place (perhaps in another post, at another time).
It may not be a "hyperfictionalisation of Lovecraft" (231) and it may not have amused Deleuze and Guattari, but it remains a brilliant work of pulp modernism and I can't help thinking that there was something as hypercamp about Fisher's mentor Nick Land as there was about Kenneth Williams's performance as Dr. Watt. I can even imagine Land frantically pacing around a laboratory-cum-lecture-hall, delivering apocalyptic prophecies about technological singularities before screaming into the abyss: Frying tonight!
Dr. Nicholas Land & Dr. Orlando Watt [j]
Notes
[a] All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition of Flatline Constructs.
[b] Black Mirror (2011 - present) is a speculative Channel 4 television series created by Charlie Brooker set in near-future dystopias containing sci-fi technology. Episodes tend to be weighed down with dreary social commentary. It now exists on Netflix.
[c] Fisher goes on to quote the following from Baudrillard:
"We once lived in a world where the realm of the imaginary was governed by the mirror, by dividing one into two, by theatre, by otherness and alienation. Today that realm is the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of contiguity and networks."
See Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (Verso, 1993), p. 54.
[d] Gibson first used the term cyberspace in his short story 'Burning Chrome' (1982) and most famously in his novel Neuromancer (1984):
"Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data."
Interestingly, Gibson was himself bored of the term by the time he appeared in the documentary No Maps for These Territories (Mark Neale, 2000), saying that for him it was only ever a convenient buzzword; evocative, but essentially meaningless.
[e] I'm referencing the Duran Duran hit single, 'The Reflex', released in April 1984. Taken from their third studio album Seven and the Ragged Tiger (EMI / Capitol Records 1983): click here. Perhaps because I know Fisher, like his pal Simon Reynolds, was obsessed with pop music, I can't help song lyrics coming into my head when reading his work. For example, although I didn't mention it, the moment I began to read his stuff on voodoo I began hearing the Adam and the Ants track on Prince Charming (CBS, 1981) which contains the brilliant chorus: 'That voodoo that you do / the shimmy lights through you / and no one can voodoo the voodoo that you do / do to me, yeah': click here.
[f] I'm not even kidding: the idea of crisis was extremely popular and pervasive in the 1990s, both in academic circles and across wider culture; leading figures were called on to diagnose the crisis of X, Y, and Z.
One suspects it had something to do with the fact that not only was the end of the century fast approaching, but we were also about to enter a new millennium; people were obsessed with the year 2000 (or Y2K) - not least with so-called Y2K bug, which like the Millennium Dome, turned out to be rubbish and a massive let down for those hoping for global financial meltdown and infrastructural collapse, including members of the CCRU who, as Adam Jones reminds us in his Foreword to Flatline Constructs, set their watches for midnight on December 31st, 1999 when the time-bomb in Babylon was supposed to explode and erase the twentieth century.
[g] Metafiction should not be confused with hyperfiction - "a process whereby fiction and reality are radically smeared" (223). Unlike metafiction, says Fisher, "hyperfiction assumes no special role for the author (or indeed for the text). On the contrary, it is only when the author and the text have been immanentised that a hyperfictional circuit is in place [...]" (223-224).
In sum: it's not a game of representation, but of feedback and hyperfiction can be defined simply as "fiction which makes itself real" (224). Deleuze and Guattari, of course, as thinkers "dedicated to radical immanence [...] can be placed on the side of the hyper-process" (224); the rhizome being the "exemplary case of what we are calling a hyper-system: a system that is inherently opposed to transcendence and unity" (227) and continually looking for ways to connect to an Outside.
[h] According to survey data from 2024, more than a third of UK adults have given up reading for pleasure in recent years. Young people seem to have particular problems engaging with books (perhaps not surprisingly). I'm not sure it matters, however, when everything has now been placed "under the sign of the fictional" (Flatline Constructs, 202).
See the article by Ella Creamer dated 24 July 2024 in The Guardian: click here.
[i] I pick up on what Fisher writes here in relation to the question of banning social media for under-16's in a recently published post (16 June 2026): click here.
[j] Orlando Watt was played by Kenneth Williams with hypercamp brilliance in Carry On Screaming! (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1966). To watch the official trailer, click here. Note that the exclamation mark was officially part of the film's title, but was rarely used in posters and publicity.
