Zer0 Books (2025) [a]
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.
