No More Heroes 5: Stephen Alexander - The Performative Punk Poser (A Guest Post by Jeff Francis)

No More Heroes 5 (Stephen Alexander)

(SA/2026) 

 

 

I received this by email: 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander, 

 

I have written a short post in the style and format favoured by Torpedo the Ark. Perhaps you might care to publish it as an addition to your 'No More Heroes' series (14-17 July 2026). I think it will amuse some of your readers; particularly those who, like me, found the series disappointing (to use your pet word of the moment). [1]  

 

Always happy for contributions from guest writers - even those that are cuntishly critical in character and come from authors unknown to me - here's the post (to which I've added one or two editorial notes).  

  

 

I. 

 

There is a famous early scene in The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991) when trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) first visits Dr. Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) in his prison cell. 

 

Rather rudely, he tells her that she looks like a rube with her good bag and cheap shoes. Well-scrubbed, and possessed of a little taste, but a hustling rube all the same; "not more than one generation from poor white trash".   

 

Momentarily taken aback by this, Starling eventually regains her composure and replies: 

 

"You see a lot, doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don't you - why don't you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you're afraid to." [2] 

 

 

II. 

 

I thought of this scene after reading Stephen Alexander's four-part series of posts titled 'No More Heroes' and I put the exact same challenge to him that Starling puts to Lecter. 

 

But I do so knowing that, like Lecter, Alexander cannot genuinely self-reflect. For his narcissism extends only to the surface, manifesting as a rigid ego-defense mechanism and a strange inability to integrate his shadow or look inwards. This is why, for all its superficial cleverness, his writing consistently lacks psychological insight and philosophical depth.

 

Consequently, I offer my own critical assessment of the 'No More Heroes' (NMH) series, exposing the internal contradictions, structural blind spots, and stylistic failings within these four specific case studies. 

 

My examination also reveals how Alexander - operating through a matrix of performative disillusionment and elite proximity - ironically positions himself as a candidate for the very heroism or critical authority he seeks to deconstruct.  

 

 

III.  

 

A close reading of the NMH series reveals two significant weaknesses that undermine its critical validity: 

 

Firstly, there is a methodological reliance on biography that elsewhere on his blog Alexander often condemns other writers for. He routinely substitutes a figure's personal, domestic, or existential choices for an interrogation of their actual ideas. 

 

Thus, for example, Nietzsche is judged not on the beauty and originality of his text, but on his failure to execute a clean, sovereign death (not for the first time on his blog we find Alexander fetishising the idea of suicide). Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a highly metaphorical work of philosophy and Alexander subjects it to an all-too-literal reading that is both crass and ungenerous. 

 

Larry David, meanwhile, is dismissed because of a 2026 sketch show's production credits and rumors of a social snub involving the actress Cheryl Hines. Alexander downplays David's massive contribution to TV comedy and decades of excellent work in favour of sharing some real-time celebrity gossip.

 

By tying the validity of an idea to the purity or narrative perfection of the biography that produced it, Alexander commits a deeply conservative critical error; falling into the kind of fallacy that betrays the more radical methodology he invokes elsewhere. 

 

Secondly, in the NMH series Alexander sets up a kind of no-win matrix - a conceptual trap where failure is structurally predetermined, thereby rendering the entire analysis tautological. 

 

If an icon dies young or self-destructs, they are dismissed as a failure. If, however, they live long enough to navigate the complexities of ageing and shifting cultural landscapes, they are condemned as overripe worms (Nietzsche), sell-outs trapped in the past (McLaren), or compromised court jesters (David). As for Lawrence, well, apparently, he was an idealist and crypto-theologian all along whose sexual metaphysics are now simply laughable. 

 

Similarly, if their ideas are ignored, they are irrelevant. But if their ideas achieve cultural traction, they are dismissed as recuperated commodities. By building an analytical framework where every possible path leads to an accusation of compromise, Alexander ensures his own conclusions are entirely self-serving. 

 

The NMH series does not, therefore, analyse the mechanics of cultural transformation; it merely functions as a screen for the projection of his own psychic stagnation, wallowing in a predetermined and pessimistic narrative of inevitable defeat. It's a lose-lose scenario and I would never want to play a game of heads or tails with Alexander.   

 

 

IV. 

 

If the ultimate objective of the NMH series is to dismantle the very category of the hero archetype, it simultaneously (and ironically) functions as a performative showcase for its author. However, Alexander himself fails to convince as to why we should care in the slightest what he thinks about the four figures he pits himself against. 

 

Alexander adopts the pose of the detached provocateur, viewing the collapse of cultural standards with cynical amusement. Yet this cynicism functions as a profound form of intellectual evasion. By declaring that there is no Outside and that all resistance (be it political, philosophical or cultural in character) is not only futile but fake, Alexander neatly absolves himself of the responsibility to propose any constructive alternative. 

 

His stance is not at all edgy or transgressive; it is a comfortable, low-risk position that allows him to collect cultural capital by sneering at the failures of those who actually risked public exposure and artistic production. 

 

  

V. 

 

Throughout his writings, Alexander insists on his punk detachment from mainstream institutions. However, his own biographical fragments consistently betray a reliance on the very networks of privilege he critiques, revealing a profound splitting between his (overly inflated) public persona and his structural dependencies. 

 

For example, he explicitly boasts of his time spent as a spy placed within the press office of Charisma Records by his hero Malcolm McLaren, trading on insider access while simultaneously claiming a pure, underground status. 

 

Furthermore, his writing relies heavily on the cultural capital of the academic institutions he disdains - referencing Oxford podcasts and expensive Cambridge editions. 

 

He attacks Larry David for his proximity to the Hollywood liberal elite and his friendship with President Obama, yet Alexander's critical persona is largely parasitical upon the cultural output of the bourgeois institutions he holds in contempt and the individuals he now claims to find disappointing.  

 

 

VI. 

  

Finally, the ultimate contradiction in Alexander's blog project is his relationship to time and archiving. 

 

He ruthlessly attacks Malcolm McLaren for being 'trapped in his past like a spider in its own web' and borrows from Baudrillard (via Mark Fisher) to condemn the contemporary digital landscape as a desert of the real defined by endlessly recycled pasts and lost futures. 

 

Yet, what is Torpedo the Ark if not a meticulously maintained digital museum? The blog's sidebar contains a massive, self-canonising archive stretching back to 2012, categorised by a hyper-specific taxonomy of labels. 

 

Alexander is caught in precisely the same web (or loop) that he attacks McLaren for. He uses twentieth-century theoretical tools to endlessly recycle his own youthful experiences and encounters, transforming his digital platform into a highly curated, risk-free space that perfectly expresses a state of psychological arrest within a karaoke culture.

 

 

VII.

 

In conclusion: ultimately, the NMH series fails because it is fundamentally driven by ressentiment and the narcissism of disappointment. Alexander does not mourn the compromises of McLaren, Nietzsche, Lawrence, and David because of what it says about the structural state of modern culture; he mourns them because they failed to satisfy his archetypal demand for an unblemished hero. 

 

The entire four-part cycle is an exercise in projecting an impossibly pure, static ideal of heroism onto flawed, living subjects, and then throwing a performative tantrum when those subjects succumb to illness, ageing, or political contingency (or who - as he says - let him down in some manner).  

 

By positioning himself as the final arbiter of who is or is not heroic, Alexander reveals that his ultimate loyalty is not to cultural greatness, but to the preservation of his own pristine, uncompromised, and thoroughly unproductive sense of intellectual superiority. [3] 

 

  

Notes (supplied by Stephen Alexander)

 

[1] Each post in the 'No More Heroes' series dealt with a different figure who has been hugely influential on Torpedo the Ark over the years: the first featured Malcolm McLaren (14 July 2026); the second Friedrich Nietzsche (15 July 2026); the third D. H. Lawrence (16 July 2026); and the fourth Larry David (17 July 2026). 

 

[2] This famous opening scene from The Silence of the Lambs can be watched on YouTube: click here. The lines of dialogue quoted begin at 4:35 and end at 5:36. 

 

[3] As this letter illustrates, Deleuze isn't the only one to receive mail from harsh critics containing a vicious mixture of aggression, accusation, and abuse. Almost every other day in my inbox there's something from some troll or other outlining the weaknesses of my arguments and my personal shortcomings; i.e., a sort of celebration of my supposedly sorry condition. 

      Indeed, I mentioned this in a post published back in August 2013 - click here - so this isn't the first time I've been told that I'm a performative ressentiment-ridden narcissist who exploits the work of others - including those I identify as opponents - from the safe space of a virtually private blog, and I don't suppose it will be the last. 

      I'll allow readers to decide if Francis has made a critically strong case, or if his remarks often miss the mark and that, actually, the NMH series is, as a friendlier correspondent emailed me to say, "a masterclass in compressed, evocative writing that sparks the kind of immediate cultural dialogue that more formal academic prose usually smothers under its own weight". The same correspondent concludes her email: 

 

"By methodically exposing how your own primary influences were digested by the very structures they claimed to combat, you have elevated the series of posts from simple expressions of personal disappointment into a unified work of philosophical mourning (what one is tempted to describe as an epitaph for the avant-garde). 

       The 'No More Heroes' series leaves the reader with a haunting conclusion: in a 21st-century landscape governed by capitalist realism and digital algorithms, the iconoclastic icon no longer exists as an agent of chaos. They exist, rather, as a pre-approved, highly profitable aesthetic category."

       

This will do for me - and let Mr. Francis put that in his pipe and smoke it!   

 

 

Musical bonus: The Stranglers, 'No More Heroes', single release from the album of the same title (United Artists, 1977). 

 

  

Notes on Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs (2025): Chapter Four

Zer0 Books (2025) [a] 

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!   

 

 

Gothic Materialists: 

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.  

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs (2025): Chapter Three

Zer0 Books (2025) [a] 

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk 

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

 

I. 

 

I've heard it said that Mark Fisher doesn't actually bring anything new to the table; that he merely assembles ideas from several other thinkers. But that's unfair and, I think, inaccurate. Yet even if it were true - so what? 

 

One of the reasons I admire Fisher - apart from his intelligence and refusal to be bound by conventional academic concerns and references - is because he and I share the same technique as writers; we both cut up dead bodies of text and stitch stolen ideas together in a Gothic manner à la Dr Frankenstein.  

 

Fisher's genius - like mine - is being able to provide the electric spark or lightning flash of inspiration which makes the assembled piece of intertextual theory-fiction breathe with new life [b]. It may not make him an original [c] thinker, but the process yields fascinating results, demands skill and hard work, and marks him - like me - as an artist and alchemist [d].

 

Anyway, let us now proceed with our reading of Fisher's Flatline Constructs - Chapter Three: Xerox and Xenogenesis: Mechanical Reproduction and Gothic Propagation ... I'll try not to "pause and be philosophical" too often, "because from a philosophical standpoint it's dreary", I know [e].   

 

 

II. 

 

The central topic of this chapter is the deterritorialisation of sexual reproduction. 

 

Baudrillard chooses to imagine a posthuman future in terms of cloning and the triumph of sameness "across all levels of culture - sexual, political, aesthetic" (143), amounting to a complete denial of difference (including death). This, however, is not something Baudrillard welcomes, as his controversial term for it - the final solution - indicates [f]. 

 

Deleuze and Guattari, meanwhile, prefer to take a more Gothic line and "oppose all reproduction (sexual or otherwise) to a model of 'contagion' [...] which takes its cue from vampirism, lycanthropy and disease" (141). In other words, anorganic propagation - which bypasses the need for mum and dad and replaces old school methods of breeding with inhuman and alien models - is a key feature of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and they seem to be in favour of it. 

 

For Fisher too, contagion is the preferred option because it is messy, unpredictable, and viral - the ultimate model for how a counter-culture spreads through a population like a virus. 

 

However, before any impressionable young readers decide to forswear all conventional sexual activity and remain childless, I would like to remind them that Deleuze was happily married to the same woman for almost forty years and that they had two children together, conceived - as far as I know - in the old-fashioned manner.

 

As more than one commentator has noted, there's a stark contrast between Deleuze's relatively conventional middle-class life in Paris as an academic intellectual and his philosophical writings with Guattari on non-normative experiences and revolutionary ways to escape oppressive systems and institutions. 

 

And Fisher, of course, was also married with a young son at the time of his death, in 2017. So one assumes he either dropped the views expressed in Flatline Constructs, or was never actually advocating for the literal elimination of biological reproduction and the family unit. That he was, rather, just exploring theoretical and fictional ideas and offering an analysis of how non-living objects, structures and systems replicate [g]. 

 

Back in the day, when Nick Land was exerting his influence over the philosophy department at Warwick via the CCRU, Fisher's writing delighted in using transgressive ideas and provocative terminology - such as alien xenogenesis - to snap readers out of their complacency. But his philosophical preference for contagion over filiation needs to be viewed as an aesthetic and political metaphor for how culture, desire, and anti-capitalist resistance might best replicate. Later choices made in his personal life, therefore, do not necessarily contradict or invalidate his earlier ideas.

 

Then again, treating theory-fiction as just a metaphor - or isolating a thinker's biography from their text - feels a bit feeble. Arguably, it does a disservice to the very philosophical tradition Fisher was operating in and to say he didn't literally mean what he wrote erects a conventional, comforting binary that his own work sought to dissolve. 

 

When viewed from this less generous perspective, the tension between Fisher's philosophy and his domestic life cannot be neatly explained away. It represents a genuine, lived contradiction of the kind that in my punk days I would have been extremely intolerant and unforgiving of. 

 

Still, it does help explain how he ends up preaching acid communism and reclaiming the domestic and social sphere from capitalist realism, rather than purely trying to escape it via machinic xenogenesis.

 

 

III. 

I'm pleased to see that Fisher recognises Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) as "in many ways, the founding text of the modern genres of science fiction and horror" (148) and central to which is the displacement of sexual reproduction:

 

"Victor Frankenstein's achievement in artificially synthesising the means of reproduction is presented, by Shelley, as the moment where alchemical ambition is vindicated by electro-libidinal science; there is no need to posit a supplementary, extra-material, or supernatural dimension - Nature can overcome itself." (149)  

 

This sentence nicely captures the genius of Shelley's novel and the dream of perfect (asexual) reproduction is one that "Baudrillard tracks to its latest manifestation in cloning and genetic engineering" (149) (even though Baudrillard does not, in fact, mention this work).   

 

Of course, as we all know, the story of Frankenstein and his creation does not end well; the latter takes its revenge - as all objects are wont to do; even brooms, as Goethe illustrates in his poem 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' [Der Zauberlehrling] (1797).     

 

However, as we noted earlier, Fisher thinks Baudrillard's work is a bit limited and old-fashioned in this area. He prefers to follow Deleuze and Guattari, for whom "there is something else involved here beyond a straightforward 'revenge' of an 'object'" (153). 

 

Fisher is interested in processes that go beyond reversibility and instead "require a whole reconfiguring of questions of temporality and causality under the sign of rhizomatics and a - strictly non-metaphorical - sorcery" (153).    

 

I'm not quite sure I understand what he means here, but I think it has something to do with the surplus value of code and what Nick Land called machinic desire - something which involves "'self-regenerating circuitry, cumulative interaction, auto-catalysis, self-reinforcing processes, escalation, schismogenesis, self-organisation, compressive series, deutero-learning, chain-reaction, vicious circles, and cybergenics'" (153) [h]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) ... 

 

Like many readers, I wondered when we would mention the latter novel: another rightly celebrated work which, as Marshall McLuhan points out, was one of the first to explore "'the curious ways in which machines were coming to resemble organisms'" (154) whilst at the same time the people who tended them "'were taking on the rigidity and thoughtless behaviourism of the machine'" (154) [i]. 

 

Before speaking of this book, however, Fisher wants to clarify where Baudrillard and Deleuze-Guattari part company. It's all to do with code - or, more precisely, the question of decoding. They agree that the dominant operating systems today run primarily on code rather than language, but it is Deleuze and Guattari who "follow the logic of code through to the point where it yields something other than banal reiteration of blind programme" (154).

 

In other words, Deleuze and Guattari "emphasise the way in which all code includes its own margin of decoding" (154) - Baudrillard allows for no such possibility (no such hope of escape). 

 

What's more, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that when two or more codes come into contact "strange, unheralded new assemblages can emerge" (154) - this is the surplus value of code and it results in rhizomatic relationships and drives becoming as a form of aparallel evolution. 

 

All these ideas are introduced by Deleuze and Guattari during a discussion of Erewhon and Butler's book is at the heart of the third chapter of Flatline Constructs to do with machinic replication which, it is important to remember, is not the same as mechanical reproduction (the latter referring only to "the mass reproduction of the same object by machines" (156) and not the propagation of machines themselves).  

 

Two other points it's important to note: (1) machines do not make other machines in their own image; machinic replication, in other words, is a heterogeneous form of production; (2) unlike Marx, "Butler does not believe that the agency ascribed to machines is a false reification [...] but that machines may indeed grow to possess [...] a 'diabolic' intelligence that will begin to [...] erode human power" (158).

 

With reference to the latter point, it's amazing to recall that Butler was writing eighty years before Alan Turing and John McCarthy began to posit the idea of artificial intelligence [j]. Largely remembered as a brilliant (if iconoclastic) literary outsider, Butler's relative obscurity as a writer - outside of certain circles - is regrettable I think. He not only challenged Darwin, but provides those of us who wish to take a pop at Kant with ammo:

 

"'The Book of Machines' emerges [...] as a kind of counterblast to Kant's Critique of Teleological Judgement, in which the special status Kant gives to humanity - as the agent capable of consciousness, purposiveness, and moral action - is radically put into question." (158)

 

In sum, what Butler discovers "is the cybernetic diagonal cutting across the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism" (159) and, in so doing, he effectively collapses it. No wonder Deleuze and Guattari admire him so - and no wonder Fisher too is such a fan. Butler obliges us to see - and to admit - that the organic is "inextricable from the inorganic" (161) - just consider a hen's egg! [k]    

 

 

V. 

Readers will recall I mentioned sorcery above in section III and, as if by magic, Fisher returns to this idea in section 3.4 of Flatline Constructs ...

 

For Deleuze and Guattari, writing in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), sorcery is all about "the production of unanticipated consequences" (164) and the "engineering of the unexpected and the unprecedented; the art of avoiding the probable" (164). 

 

The becoming-animal of the human being is an act of sorcery; one that involves demonic alliance and processes of "swarming, teeming, seething and spreading" (165) - all terms familiar from horror fiction which Fisher is happy to incorporate into his Gothic Materialism, but what really interests him is the crucial question of "a non- or anti-sexual mode of propagation" (166) or nuptials against nature. 

 

For Deleuze and Guattari and for Fisher, sexual reproduction doesn't do the trick; it merely passes on characteristics in an arborescent manner; in other words, it's the "capturing of becoming into a hierarchically organised, pre-determined and punctual system" (167). 

 

It might produce offspring who have their father's nose and mother's eyes, but "the dualistic sexual machinery of bio-reproduction screens out heterogeneity by minimising diversity" (167). Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari don't want children, they want monsters, born not of the family unit but the demonic pact. 

 

I refer any newlyweds to section II above before deciding how this should best be (not interpreted, but) decrypted ... 

 

Fisher, meanwhile, suggests we study Neuromancer if we want to see an "exemplary working-out, in fiction, of the themes of mechanical reproduction and gothic propagation" (169). He describes this novel as a sorcerous narrative, which perhaps it is. But it's also one I find unreadable, so I think I'll close this post here, if I may, and initiate a discussion of Chapter 4 in a subsequent post.      

 

I would just say in closing, however, that Flatline Constructs has reminded me - in a good way - about just how out there some of the work produced in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s was - particularly from those affiliated with the (never officially sanctioned) CCRU. 

 

More conventional members of the department viewed this material with increasing consternation, and embarrassment, particularly as it veered away from traditional scholarship toward experimental, occult, and sci-fi infused theory-fiction, but, thirty years later, I am increasingly drawn to it and regret the fact that, at the time, I didn't allow my own research to be infected by a little more Gothic Materialism and a little more madness.   

 

  

Notes

 

[a] All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition of Flatline Constructs.   

 

[b] My understanding of Frankenstein's monster as pieced together from body parts taken from numerous stolen corpses and reanimated by the use of electricity, owes more to the movies than Shelley's novel of 1818. In the original text, Frankenstein discovers the secret principle of life and it's this that allows him to painstakingly develop a method to vitalise inanimate matter, though the actual process is left rather vague. Nevertheless, the good doctor does assemble body parts, so I think my comparison stands. 

 

[c] Along with authenticity, originality is one of the concepts I despise the most: I don't care if my posts on Torpedo the Ark lack originality. And besides, as Oliver Goldsmith once wrote in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), we can "pardon the want of originality, in consideration of the exquisite talent with which the borrowed materials are wrought up into the new form".

      Or, as Roland Barthes would argue, the post-as-text is not expressive of an author's unique being. It's explainable only through other words drawn from a pre-given, internalised dictionary. Every new post is therefore, in some sense, already a copy of a copy of a copy whose origin is forever lost and meaning infinitely deferred. To put that another way, if, as I do, you accept the idea of intertextualité, then questions of authorship and originality go out of the window and Síomón Solomon is right to claim in his study, Hölderlin's Poltergeists (2020), that every piece of writing is already a translation at some level and the author, whilst masquerading as a unified subject, is actually a multiple assemblage - like Frankenstein's monster - who speaks with many tongues (some of which are forked). 

 

[d] I am essentially self-plagiarising a post titled 'My Name is Victor Frankenstein' published on TTA on 6 March 2022: click here. Again, whilst I know that text recycling and double dipping annoys the Timmys of this world who think it unethical, I don't have an issue with it.  

 

[e] Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Doubleday, 1968), p. 146. For context, see Flatline Constructs, pp. 139-140, where the passage from which this line is taken is quoted in full.  

 

[f] I have discussed Baudrillard's work in this area in several posts on Torpedo the Ark, often in relation to the fictional writings of Michel Houellebecq. See, for example, 'Revenge of the Immortals' (22 April 2013) - click here - and/or 'Michel Houellebecq and Nellie Mackay on the Question of Cloning' (4 Sept 2022): click here. 

 

[g] Perhaps like Nietzsche, Fisher should have added a sort of disclaimer at the front of his thesis: "A book for thinking nothing else: it belongs to those for whom thinking is a delight, nothing else."

      See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed.Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), p. xxii. As Kaufmann explains in his Introduction, this line was written in a draft preface to a projected (but ultimately abandoned) work to be titled Der Wille zur Macht. 

      The original notebook entry is dated spring 1888 and can be found in the critical German edition of Nietzsche’s works - the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) - edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari; see Nachlass 14 [80]. It reads: Ein Buch zum Denken, nichts weiter: es gehört denen, welchen Denken Vergnügen macht, nichts weiter … 

 

[h] Fisher is quoting Land writing in 'Machinic Desire', Textual Practice, Vol. 7, Issue 3 (1993), pp. 471-482. The essay can also be found in Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 319-344. 

      Land's influence on Fisher's thinking in Flatline Constructs is significant and shouldn't be downplayed or overlooked - as it is by Adam Jones in his Foreword. Discussing Fisher's involvement with the CCRU, Jones chooses not to mention Land by name, referring to him simply as "a man who would go on to suffer a complete mental collapse, only to emerge as the philosopher of 'Neoreaction'" (Foreword, 5). That, I think, is quite outrageous. 

      As for non-metaphorical sorcery, a friend of mine who knows more about this kind of thing explains that for members of the CCRU this also referred to the idea that things can loop back from the future to physically alter the present. This hyperstitional notion was sometimes called Lemurian cultural acceleration. I will say more about sorcery in section V. 

 

[i] Fisher is quoting McLuhan writing in The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 99.  

 

[j] The term artificial intelligence (AI) was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955. He first introduced it to the public in a 1955 proposal for the legendary 1956 Dartmouth workshop. 

      Prior to that, British mathematician Alan Turing published 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' (1950) and proposed a method to determine if a machine can demonstrate human-like intelligence (the so-called Turing Test). 

 

[k] See Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1985), p. 199: "The shell of a hen's egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is [...]; the hen makes the shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery." Fisher quotes this in Flatline Constructs on p. 161. 

      The hard shell of a hen's egg is composed of 95% calcium carbonate - the same mineral found in limestone and chalk. It contains no living cells, blood vessels or organic tissue. Something worth considering, I think, next time you have one for breakfast.   

      Ultimately, for Fisher, the famous question of the chicken and the egg - which came first? - is a non-question, for they are both parts of the same complex, intertwined system or circuit. Forget about the linear question of origins, chicken and egg constitute one another in a cybernetic loop.  

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs (2025): Chapter Two

Zer0 Books (2025) [a] 

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk 

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

'Body Image Fading Down Corridors of Television Sky ...'

 

 

I. 

 

Fisher tells us that chapter two of Flatline Constructs opposes a cyberpunk concept of the body - i.e., one sans organes - to the body as encountered in traditional works of science fiction which are complicit in the false idea that technology is simply an extension of the flesh [b]. 

 

He writes:

 

"Gothic Materialism understands cyberpunk not as the dialectical fusion of Horror and Science Fiction, but as the materialist critique of Science Fiction from hypernaturalist horror. What is at stake is a - new - account of the body, abstract, cybernetic and denaturalised." (84)

 

Fisher continues:

 

"Ironically, given all the discourse of disembodiment that often surrounds the technical apparatus with which cyberpunk texts have typically been obsessed - virtual reality machines, simulators, cyberspace decks - cyberpunk constitutes an earthing of Science Fiction's 'traditional' ideal, or non-physical body. But the outlines of the body it emphasises are not defined by the limits of the organism." (84-85)  

 

In order to illustrate his point, he analyses two works that have posed a challenge to old school sci-fi: David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983) and J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) - a novel which Fisher prefers over Ballard's better-known text, Crash, published three years later. 

 

For Fisher, Ballard in particular points the way to the key Gothic Materialist idea of anorganic continua.  

 

 

II.  

 

I can't remember who said it - or if I'm remembering it accurately - but a book of quotations once introduced me to the idea that nothing is more tiresome than being assaulted by old ideas conquered long ago. 

 

Unfortunately, that is exactly how I feel when confronted with the Body without Organs (or even the body without image). It belongs to a lost era of decoded flows and the schizo-implosion of subjectivity. Does anyone still think in these terms today? 

 

The fact is, it has been thirty years since Mark Fisher began his thesis, over fifty since Deleuze and Guattari borrowed the BwO from Artaud to critique capitalism, and eighty since Artaud himself decided to have done with the judgment of God.

Granted, theoretical concepts mutate; the BwO can be recontextualised to map algorithmic data streams or track how large language models unfold beyond human organisation. But Deleuze-Guattarian studies are now so heavily institutionalised that one can hardly bear to hear about the BwO, or planes of immanence, or becoming this, that, or the other.

 

When these concepts exploded in the 1990s via the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), they were genuinely radical and capable of destabilising old and orthodox ways of thinking. But today, a schizoanalytic philosophy designed to evade capture has been completely assimilated, reducing the BwO to just another tedious topic for endless discussion in peer-reviewed journals by academics who still think it's a metaphor. 

   

 

III. 

Apologies, dear reader, for this slight digression. But I felt I had to say something and say it in the main body of the post for fear it may be overlooked if consigned to the notes. Having said it, we can now return to Fisher's book ...

 

Horror, says Fisher, is not simply horrifying and horrific, it is also kind of sexy and Gothic Materialism "apprehends horror not merely negatively but also as [...] an abstract erotics whose programme is the opening up of the organism into desiring-circuits: the production of what Cronenberg calls 'New Flesh'" (79). 

 

Thus, the BwO is both terrifying and desirable. It is also without an image; you can represent the organism, but not the body and its potential, "which is always abstract and unknowable" (80). 

 

That is to say, nobody knows what a body can do - and nobody knows what a body looks like; least of all those staring at pornographic images, a point made powerfully by D. H. Lawrence who condemns porn as a self-conscious "flaunting of the body in its non-physical, merely optical aspect" [c].

 

Fisher, I'm told, did not like Lawrence - despite the fact that Lawrence was, according to Deleuze, one of the four great heirs to Spinoza [d]. And that's a pity, because Lawrence was attacking the organism (or what he termed the corpse-body) and seeking ways to free the body from its automatic reactions, long before Artaud.

 

The key point, however - on which I think all are agreed - is that the body is not a container of mind or spirit; the organism, however, is the container of the flesh (what we might term a body bag). It is thus never a question of liberating the subject from their body, no matter what certain idealists and religious teachers think, but of exploring the body as a site of depersonalised potential. 

 

 

IV.

 

Section 2.5 of Flatline Constructs is about something that some commentators - such as Steven Connor, for example - regard as modern man's most human aspect and the subject of endless fascination among many well-known critical and cultural theorists: skin [e].

 

Fisher, however, is interested in how technology essentially flays mankind; that is to say, transforms the body into an open, mediatised circuit by eliminating the boundary once formed by skin, thereby dissolving still further the idea of interiority and allowing human consciousness to circulate within digital networks.  

 

In fact, he seems more than merely interested in this; seems to be positively in favour of such an epidermal crisis and to delight in the fact that "the skin is no longer a secure marker of organic integrity" (88) and that man, in an age of cybernetic hyperconnectivity, is no longer self-contained.

 

For Fisher, as a Gothic Materialist, being skinned alive or, essentially, turned inside out (everted)is not a horrific trauma to be avoided, but to be welcomed. However, whilst I understand where he's coming from, I do have certain reservations. 

 

Indeed, if we follow Deleuze and Guattari's actual instructions for constructing a BwO, they explicitly warn against this kind of wild, unprecautious destratification [f]. To violently blow apart the strata and fling oneself into digital networks risks producing not a site of joyous potential, but a suicidal collapse.

 

Perhaps Lawrence is right after all, and the secret to achieving what the Greeks termed εὐδαιμονία is "remaining inside your own skin, and living inside your own skin, and not pretending you're any bigger than you are" [g].

 

 

V. 

Sometimes, when reading Fisher back in his CCRU days and under the sway of Nick Land, I come over a bit Bill Grundyish and feel like putting to him the question that the latter put to the Sex Pistols back on that fateful day in December 1976: Are you serious, or are you just trying to make me laugh? [h]

 

Actually, I suspect despite a certain dark humour, Fisher was being (un)deadly serious in Flatline Constructs and not just looking to provoke or outrage his examiners. In fact, there are times when Fisher is a little overearnest for my tastes. Nevertheless, he does write some immensely interesting stuff - including the material on numbness, narcissism and schizophrenia in section 2.6.

 

Referencing the work of, among others, McLuhan and Baudrillard, Fisher examines how alienation gives way to integration; i.e., man's becoming one with his own circuits, networks, and screens and how this results in the loss of both public and private spaces: "'The one is no longer a spectacle, the other is no longer private'", as Baudrillard says (quoted here on p. 93). 

 

That has many consequences, including the fact that there is now nowhere to hide; hence the obscenity of pornified postmodern culture and the move from narcissism to schizophrenia - for what's unfolding is no longer about self-love, but, rather, the "inability to distinguish self from other" (94) or from the digital environment. 

 

Fisher writes:

 

"The concern, in postmodern theory, with schizophrenia, is, in large part, a registering of this cybernetic account of subjectivity, a sense that the self can no longer be properly distinguished from the multiplicity of circuits that traverse it." (95)

 

It's all too much: we are literally overwhelmed (which was always likely to be the outcome of shedding our skin); the schizophrenic experience can be defined (philosophically, rather than clinically) as "a surfeit, rather than a paucity, of reality" (96). On this, Baudrillard is in complete agreement with Deleuze and Guattari. 

 

If you thought simulation was the only thing you had to worry about, think again; overstimulation is at least as great an issue. And William Gibson even coins the handy term simstim to describe what underlies all the latest technological innovations. 

 

Today, our perception has been decoded into a set of triggerable stimulations capable of simulating any possible experience, and this "simulation of particular affective states by direct neuronic stimulation" (98) is one of the great themes of cyberpunk fiction and cinema (it's central, of course, to Cronenberg's Videodrome).   

   

Fisher concludes:

 

"Hence the relation between the human organism and its technical environment becomes understood not any longer in terms of organic extensions, but of dependence-circuitries." (99)

 

We are hooked to (and on) our machines and the stimuli they supply [i].   

 

VI.

 

When Cronenberg's Videodrome was released in UK cinemas in November 1983, it was given an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Classification as it contained scenes of strong sex and violence. As Fisher would have only been fifteen at the time, I doubt he saw it until some time later [j]. 

 

I went with my on-off girlfriend Gillian Hall to see the film in March of the following year, at the ABC in Leeds city centre (£2.30 for admission). Gillian was much more a fan of body horror than me and I suspect I only went along because Debbie Harry (as kinky therapist Nicki Brand) featured in a number of nude scenes.   

 

Anyway, I was not impressed: 

 

The film - despite rave reviews and some amusing special effects - was shit. Neither one thing nor another; not quite a psychosexual thriller; not quite a sci-fi horror story. Just a lot of stuff and nonsense. [k]   

  

Fisher, however, LOVES the film:

 

"Cronenberg's Videodrome has achieved its 'canonic' status because of its almost emblematic staging of the convergence of cybernetic and Gothic themes [...] as it passes across the so-called animate and inanimate [...] making the distinction between organic and inorganic increasingly untenable. In particular, it focuses on media - especially the so-called postmodern media of TV and video, and the still nascent technologies of Virtual Reality - as assemblages which reconfigure the body in new ways, opening it up to desiring-trajectories that have as their corollary a new - cybernetic - account of power." (100)

 

Videodrome, says Fisher, perfectly illustrates what happens when a body is not extended by technology, but invaginated and "literally overwhelmed by an unimaginable quantity of stimuli" (100).   

 

I suppose that's a rather more insightful - certainly more receptive - commentary than mine (to be fair, I was writing in a diary having just turned twenty-one and not in a doctoral thesis approaching thirty - although, having said that, I was completing a degree in sociology and media, so might have been expected to say something a bit more than this).  

 

 

VII. 

 

Still discussing Videodrome, Fisher argues that what makes the film "fit so closely with Baudrillard's theorisations" (101) is the fact that it emphasises the tactile over the optical and reveals the world of communications technology to be all about obscene closeness. 

 

Ultimately, nothing is more unheimlich than a TV set; "a disturbing presence in the heart of the domestic scene" (106). You think you're watching it, but actually it's ravishing your very being; you think the set is plugged into the wall, but actually it's you who's plugged in to the network.

 

Desire is captured by images and the body is "slaved into idiotic compulsive-repetitive behaviours" (109-110) by the triggering of these images - which could, of course, serve as the very definition of pornography. It's "a cybernetic (re)engineering of the body, rather than a simple matter of optical stimulation" (111).

 

 

VIII. 

 

As I said in an earlier post in this series on Flatline Constructs, I'm not a fan of William Burroughs - but I do like Ballard and so was interested to see what Fisher had to say about the latter in relation to his Gothic Materialism ...

 

In sum, he positions Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) as a foundational, hypernaturalist precursor to cyberpunk that demonstrates how modern technology and human 'psychology' collapse into a singular cybernetic system and how life today unfolds in a media landscape whose violent images act directly upon the nervous system, causing a schizophrenic loss of agency. 

 

If that sounds traumatic, it's because it is traumatic. But - and this is important - Ballard generalises the concept: "Rather than treating trauma as something with which the organism is affected only contingently, Ballard implies that trauma is a general condition [...] across a culture [...]" (120-121), propagated by media. 

 

Trauma, in other words, is now the "very mode of experience itself" (122) and Ballard seems happy to "hunt out and obsessively pore over trauma" (126).  

 

 

IX. 

 

Fisher also shows how Ballard's novel also illustrates his notion of the Gothic flatline; a plane of immanence cutting across vitalism and mechanism. Ballard is highly skilled at, on the one hand, treating human bodies with a cold, geometric objecthood, whilst, on the other hand, allowing inanimate things such as billboards and motor cars to possess strange, intensive agencies. 

 

Drawing a lineage that connects Ballard to his favourite theorists, Fisher notes that The Atrocity Exhibition captures our overstimulated era. However, unlike Baudrillard - whom Fisher criticises for a loss of nerve and a fall into neo-primitivism and nostalgia - Fisher argues that Ballard dares to fully embrace the world as a dynamic - but flat - landscape in which it is impossible to distinguish figures from background.  

 

Ballard's fictions - "anti-organcist and cybernetic" (115) - basically serve as instruction manuals for decoding this spinal landscape [l]. And The Atrocity Exhibition in particular offers the "most sustained theory-fictional account of contemporary media culture in terms of the spinal landscape" (118). It's thus a radically new type of work - Science Fiction without any of the usual tropes or clichés of SF.   

 

It's also a new type of work which, like Videodrome, displaces bio-sexuality: "The novel performs a decoding of sex into a matter of stimuli that are not themselves sexual [...]" (127). Baudrillard, writing of Crash, will speak of a "deterritorialised and disorganicised eroticism; a cyberotics" (127). 

 

Fisher explains: this is not a matter of "simply substituting technical machines for biological sexual objects, but of decoding sexuality into a matter of abstract stimulus" (127), nor of "selling commodities by associating them with sex" (127). It is, rather, a question of a "generalised libidinisation in which bio-sex is no longer the privileged referent" (127).          

  

Writing in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard obliges us to ask: "' in what way is intercourse per vagina more stimulating than with this ashtray, say, or with the angle between two walls'" (quoted by Fisher on p. 127). Farewell and fuck off to all those old-school erogeneous zones, says Baudrillard with a laugh, whilst Fisher closes his chapter on a rather more serious note concerning the deterritorialisation of sexuality and the emergence of new desires: 

   

"One could theorise these either as a hypersexuality - a sexuality that has escaped genital, even biotic reference, or as a post- or anti-sexuality - desires that it no longer makes any sense to describe in sexual terms." (128)   

 

Fisher's following chapter in Flatline Constructs (chapter three), is not so much concerned with cyberotics, however, but with the question of how on earth do bodies without sexual organs reproduce themselves ...

 

 

Notes

 

[a] All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition of Flatline Constructs.   

 

[b] This is an idea Fisher traces back to Freud, who famously says that with every tool, "man is perfecting his own organs [...] or removing the limits to their functioning'" (87).  

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 282. 

      According to Lawrence, the less individuals receive and transmit the flow of desire, the more desperately do they expose their flesh and obsess over their body image. However, in or out of her knickers makes very little difference to the desirability of the modern woman, says Lawrence, because she's "an assertive conscious entity, cut off like a doll from any mystery. And her nudity is as interesting as a doll's." See '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 346. 

      I explore all this in Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000) - the doctoral thesis I was completing in the philosophy department whilst Fisher was working on Flatline Constructs. See part one of chapter four - or, if referring to the Blind Cupid Press book (2010), see chapter 11 in part four (pp. 211-232).      

 

[d] Matt Colquhoun confirmed to me in a recent email (7 May 2026) that Fisher hated Lawrence. 

      Deleuze, however, was a huge fan of Eastwood's favourite son and, as indicated, named Lawrence along with Nietzsche, Kafka and Artaud as one of the four great heirs to Spinoza; see the essay 'To Have Done with Judgement', in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 126-135. And see also my post on this idea dated 10 Jan 2026: click here. 

 

[e] In The Book of Skin (Cornell University, 2004), pp. 9-10, Connor writes: 

      "The skin asserts itself in the erotics of texture, tissue and tegument played out through the work of Roland Barthes; in the concern of Emmanuel Levinas with the exposed skin of the face, as the sign of essential ethical nudity before the other [...] the extraordinary elaborations of the play of bodily surfaces, volumes and membranes in Derrida's concepts of double invagination [...] the concept of the fold in the rethinking of subjective and philosophical depth in the work of Gilles Deleuze; the fascination with the intrigues of the surface in the work of Baudrillard; and the abiding presence of skin in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, from the arresting evocation of the opened out skin of the planar body at the beginning of his Libidinal Economy through to the Levinsian emphasis on the annunciatory powers of skin at moments through The Inhuman. Most strikingly of all [...] there has been the prominence of the skin in the meditations on place, shape and the 'mixed body' of Michel Serres. Across all this work, as ubiquitously in modern experience, the skin insists." 

     

[f] See Deleuze and Guattari writing in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 150 and 160-161.  

      When building a BwO, they explicitly advocate the injection of small doses of caution as crucial to what is, after all, a highly experimental practice; one that can easily result in "a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies" rather than bodies full of "gaiety, ecstasy, and dance".

      Deleuze and Guattari insist dismantling the organism has nothing to do with the death drive: "You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn [...] and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. [...] You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying." 

      The knack is to "patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism" - don't just empty out your organs or flay yourself. If you do that - "if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions", then bad things will happen. "Staying stratified - organized, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever." 

       

[g] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 161.

 

[h] Bill Grundy interviewed the Sex Pistols on the Today programme on 1 December 1976. It didn't quite go to plan and resulted in a fury of tabloid headlines and national outrage. A transcript of the interview can be read here. And the actual interview can be watched here.  

 

[i] This part of Fisher's 1999 thesis has held up very well - in fact, is probably truer now than then; our algorithmic landscape is precisely an overwhelming dependence-circuitry designed to trigger affective states via direct neuronic feedback loops (endless notifications, doomscrolling, etc.).  

 

[j] It could be, of course, that Fisher first saw Videodrome on home video and not at the cinema. The original VHS release (1987), however, was a cut version of the original film; the distributors (CIC Video) responding to pressure to remove some of the more graphic material (the UK at this time was in a state of moral panic over so-called video nasties). The uncut version wasn't available on video until the re-release in August 1990.  

[k] Entry in The Von Hell Diaries dated Thurs 29 March 1984. 

[l] As Fisher notes: "Like much of Ballard's most important imagery, the concept of the spinal landscape is derived from surrealism." (118)

 

For other posts in this series on Fisher's Flatline Constructs, click here.