A Thing of Beauty in the Abstract: on the Sexiness of the Periodic Table (A Post for Ian Buxton)

Blair Bradshaw: Periodic Table (2013) 

Oil on canvas (30" x 72") [1]

blairbradshawstudio.com 

 

 

I. 

 

In a recent 6/20 paper on paraphilia [2], I claimed that desire needn't be constrained and shaped purely by our own human experience and capacity and that once desire is liberated, then we are free to love anything and everything and not just anyone - including animals, plants, and atypical objects of every description. 

 

This is not, however, to posit a model of pansexualism: I'm not saying all is sex [3]. What I am suggesting, rather, is that an element of libidinal energy is invested in everything we do and that desire is what brings things "which otherwise are incommensurable" [4] into touch. 

 

Desire, in other words - which has no fixed essence and therefore evades definition - can best be thought of in terms of how it functions as a "strange current of interchange" [5] flowing between bodies (including abstract, virtual, or artificial bodies). 

 

As Deleuze and Guattari argue, if you examine the social field closely enough, you'll find that beneath the conscious investments of economic, political, and religious formations, "there are unconscious sexual investments, microinvestments that attest to the way in which desire is present" [6]          

 

Thus, sexuality exists even in the way that a bureaucrat fondles his records [7] - or, we might add, in the strange manner that the periodic table exerts its allure upon a scientist.

 

 

II.

 

The periodic table is an ordered arrangement of chemical elements into rows and columns based on their assigned atomic number [8]. It's both a marvellous product of the scientific imagination and an iconic piece of graphic design [9].  

 

Of course, I'm aware that one must exercise a certain degree of caution here; that the periodic table is first and foremost a visual record of scientific knowledge rather than a work of the artistic imagination. Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev was almost certainly more concerned with physics than aesthetics when he produced the first periodic table in 1869 [10] and, ultimately, it's determined by function rather than form.

      

Nevertheless, it relies heavily on certain design principles to do with layout and colour in order to translate highly complex scientific laws into a pleasing and accessible format and anyone who cannot see the elemental beauty in it must be blind. 

 

And beauty, of course, isn't tied to truth or goodness, so much as to sex appeal. Thus, we can say that not only is its vertical and horizontal cross-referencing lovely to look at, it also communicates a sense of joy and warmth. My critics at the 6/20 may not like to admit the fact, but for certain men a body of knowledge is more seductive, and more arousing, than that of even the most comely young wench.  

 

 

III.

 

To understand this allure, one might look past the design aesthetic and consider the libidinally material behaviour of the elements themselves. For the periodic table is perhaps best thought of as a map of highly eroticised intensities. 

 

Take, for instance, the alkali metals sodium (Na), potassium (K), and caesium (Cs). Hyper-reactive and volatile, these elements are driven by a desperate, unstable promiscuity. They cannot bear to exist in isolation and will explosively couple with almost any partner in a flash of consummating heat.

 

At the opposite end of this behavioural spectrum lie the noble gases helium (He), neon (Ne), and argon (Ar). Embodying a mixture of coldness, cruelty and self-contained celibacy, they refuse to bond or even flirt with the rest of the chemical universe. Theirs is an erotics of absolute refusal and pristine isolation - until that is a sudden, intense electrical current causes them to glow with the ecstasy of one who has been ravished.   

 

Between these extremes lie tactile and toxic temptations such as quicksilver (Hg) - a queer, elusive liquid metal that defies the standard boundaries of its state. 

 

But of course, for me - as a writer and homotextual - the seduction of the periodic table lies more in the wonderfully evocative and allusive names of the elements that roll off the tongue with almost liturgical sensuality: from the dark gothic beauty of cobalt (Co) [11]; to the celestial beauty of selenium (Se) [12]. 

 

If, as Einstein once suggested, the mathematical formulations of science are the poetry of logical ideas, then to read the periodic table aloud is to recite a chant of desire; a poetic incantation where language itself becomes a site of bliss. 

 

So, when 6/20 regular Ian Buxton asks if the periodic table is sexy, the answer is obviously - and resoundingly - Yes! [13]  

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Blair Bradshaw is a contemporary American artist known for his visually striking paintings of the periodic table of the elements. His work blends the scientific data with an aesthetic interpretation of human experience, thereby giving familiar elements whole new meaning (often of a whimsical character). Physically large in size, his pieces are created using diverse mediums, including oil on canvas, oil on paper, and wood. 

      For a discussion of Bradshaw's work, see the adapted extract from Tami I. Spector's article 'The Art of the Periodic Table', posted on The MIT website (4 Feb 2021): click here. The full piece can be found in Leonardo, Vol. 52, Issue 3 (June 2019). 

      In brief, Spector argues that the intersection of art and science has the potential to build new insights, ideas, and processes beneficial to both disciplines. She also makes the interesting observation that Bradshaw "elevates the iconography of the periodic table, using its form to create visual-linguistic connections and rearranging and isolating the elements into clever wordplay". In other words, for Bradshaw, it's the cultural associations and linguistic connotations that most excite about the periodic table.

 

[2] See the Events page on Torpedo the Ark for details of the paper: click here. 

      The 6/20 Club is a twice-monthly salon graciously hosted by Christian Michel at his west London home. Established for over twenty years, it has seen an impressive assortment of speakers present papers on a huge number of topics.  

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, '...... 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. 339.

 

[4] The politics of desire is far more subtle and further reaching than a naive form of pansexualism. Lawrence was always insistent on this point. Thus, even if an element of sex enters every aspect of human life, this does not mean everything can or should be reduced to sex. Greater even than the sex impulse is the creative impulse; it is the latter - not the will to love - that is the world-forming drive. 

      See chapter IX of his Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (CUP, 2004). And see chapter 11 of my Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid press, 2010), where I discuss this.    

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's Two Years Before the Mast', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 109.

 

[6] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 183. 

 

[7] See Deleuze and Guattari writing in Anti-Oedipus ... p. 293. The passage reads: "The truth is sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a business man causes money to circulate ..." D&G are also keen to emphasise that this is not merely a metaphor. 

 

[8] Elements are organised in horizontal rows - known as periods - by their increasing atomic numbers. The vertical columns - or groups - represent elements with similar electronic structures and properties.  

 

[9] For an interesting short piece discussing the periodic table by graphic designer and visual communications expert Tony Pritchard, see Eye, Vol. 20, Issue 78 (Winter, 2010), please click here.  

 

[10] It might be noted that Mendeleev did not actually know about atomic numbers in 1869; he organised elements by atomic weight. The physical basis for atomic numbers was discovered by English physicist Henry Moseley in 1913. 

      Before Moseley's work, atomic numbers were simply a placeholder for an element's position on the periodic table. Moseley used X-ray spectroscopy to measure the characteristic wavelengths of various elements, revealing that the square root of an X-ray's frequency is directly proportional to its atomic number. This breakthrough - known as Moseley's Law - allowed him to reorganise the periodic table by atomic number rather than atomic weight, correcting long-standing inconsistencies in Mendeleev's original table. 

 

[11] The word cobalt derives from the German word kobold, the name of evil underground goblins and given to the ore by medieval German miners because the rock was considered not only worthless, but emitted toxic fumes when smelted.   

 

[12] The word selenium is from the Greek word selēnē [σελήνη], meaning moon (though this is not related to its silvery colour when existing in its most stable form). 

 

[13] Ian Buxton mistakenly thought I wasn't being serious when I answered in the affirmative to his question 'Is there anything sexy about the periodic table?' Normally, I would let such a misunderstanding pass. But, just for once, I wanted to let it be known that while I might present my work in a relatively light-hearted manner, I do, as a matter of fact, take the ideas fairly seriously. 

      Similarly, if I choose not to discuss things at length or in depth at the 6/20, that's because I think of it not as an academic space, but as a forum in which speakers are invited to please their audiences by playing with ideas, rather than engage in an aggressive form of dialectics or intellectual sparring.          

 

 

This post is for Christian and Jennifer (my co-presenter on the night) - and with special thanks to Maria, Dawn, Fatima, Ruth, Soko, and Rebecca. 

 

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: A Little Bit More Politics (Sections VII - XIII)

Марк Фишер: Кислотный коммунист

(SA/2026)

 

Note: All page references in this post are to Mark Fisher's k-punk: 

The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), 

ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018). 

 

 

VII. 

 

Fisher may have hated D. H. Lawrence, but perhaps he might have appreciated Lawrence's idea of a democracy of touch [a], as one of his criticisms of the smartphone and other forms of touchscreen technology is that they involve touch devoid of any sensuality: 

 

"When the fingers encounter the glassy surface of the iPhone, everything they touch on the screen feels the same. The fingers are effectively acting as extensions of the eye and the brain - an eye and brain that have now been radically re-habituated by cyberspace." (487) 

 

Fisher thinks it astonishing that this line of thought was anticipated by Baudrillard in the 1980s - but even more remarkable is the fact that Lawrence foresaw all this in the 1920s. 

 

And like Tanizaki, Lawrence also wrote in praise of shadows, which, rather surprisingly, Fisher calls for the cultivation of in addition to the carving out of spaces "beyond the hyper-bright instant" (487). I so much prefer this poetic-philosophical Mark Fisher to the one who bangs on about politics and the financial crisis of 2008. 

 

 

VIII. 

 

The phrase that best sums up Fisher's utopian phase - his acid communism - is red plenty (a phrase he borrows from Francis Spufford's 2010 book of that title). It refers to the collective capacity of the People to "produce, care and enjoy" (510) and is the thing which, he says, capitalism is set up to block: 

 

"The attack on capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about 'wealth creation', capital necessarily and always blocks our access to this common wealth." (510) 

 

In a post-capitalist future, technological advancements and the communist re-ordering of society will provide abundance for all: "Everything for everyone" (510), including bread and roses. Gone forever will be the days of artificial scarcity. 

 

Further, everyone will feel a sense of red belonging - a sense of belonging that has nothing to do with faith, flag, or family and cannot be "reduced to the chauvinistic pleasures that come from being an insider in any group whatsoever" (510-511). 

 

It is, rather, a "special sense of involvement that promised to transfigure all aspects of everyday life in a way that, previously, only religion had promised to, so that even the dreariest task could be imbued with high significance" (511). 

 

The great promise of red plenty and red belonging is that it doesn't matter "where you come from or who you are" (511), you will be cared for unconditionally. 

 

It's clear how this line of thinking might feed into the open borders movement. What's not quite so clear is how such thinking relates to Fisher's own mental health; frankly, I can't see how anyone can promote such ideas without being in some sort of delirium (similar to the mystical state experienced by those who suddenly find God) [b]. 

 

I know some of his more ardent supporters believe that Fisher's speculative nostalgia and hallucinogenic politics is the best way to confront capitalist realism, but for those looking for a rather more practical strategy for transitioning from neoliberalism to a democracy to come, Fisher's work is essentially worthless. It also seems somewhat at odds with his own more pessimistic views and criticism of the moralising left. 

 

In sum: whilst I'm all for the creation of new narratives and conceptual frameworks - and maybe even a little bit of libidinal engineering - Fisher's acid communism fails to convince and red plenty leaves me hungry for something more. 

 

 

IX. 

 

And back to the topic of consciousness-raising ... A practice (or range of practices) that Fisher believes to be of crucial importance to molecular revolution: 

 

"Consciousness-raising opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective experience. It can give us the resources to behave, think and act differently [...]" (514) 

 

For Fisher: 

 

"The roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings, especially their feelings of misery and desperation, and together attributing the sources of these feelings to impersonal structures [...] mediated by particular figures to which we must attach populist loathing" (514). 

 

These figures would include, for example, landlords and entrepreneurs, whom Fisher brands as parasites. We might, I would suggest, see this as a succinct definition of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment and which is central to slave morality. 

 

Fisher claims that the aim of consciousness-raising is to produce more compassion "for others and for ourselves" (514), but I worry that his proposed method of consciousness-raising will only generate class hate and make people feel pretty rotten about themselves too; has knowing that others feel as desperate as you do ever really helped? [c] 

 

 

X.

 

Fisher is grateful to Francis Spufford for reminding us all that "when communism was defeated, it wasn't just a particular ideology that disappeared" (518). 

 

No, the demise of communism - and he's thinking here of the USSR - was also "the disappearance of modernism's Promethean dream of a total transformation of human society" (518). 

 

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that's a good thing. For this dream became a dystopian nightmare, did it not? Surely Fisher knows the history of the Soviet Union - and, indeed, he might also be expected to know what happened to Prometheus (for those who don't recall their Ancient Greek mythology, it ended even worse for him than for Trotsky).    

 

Is Fisher really falling back into what Nick Land would call a sentimental indulgence - i.e., the hope that a political revolution will lead to "new productive, perceptual, cognitive and libidinal possibilities" (518). 

 

I don't want to be a postmodern killjoy who radically lowers expectations and crushes dreams, etc. But, really, c'mon! Knowing, Mark, that there's no way back to old school communism [d], why pin your hopes on renewing (and resuming) class solidarity and the building of radical machineries of desire? 

 

 

XI. 

 

I mentioned above how, for Fisher, "the roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings" (514). 

 

And yet, in another text from 2015, titled 'Anti-Therapy', Fisher acknowledges that the idea that "talking about our feelings could be a political act seems counterintuitive" (521) and that this new emotionalism seems closely linked to capitalist realism - born of Tony Blair's "manipulation of the extraordinary grief jamboree that ensued in the immediate wake of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales" (521). 

 

Fisher rightly says that the new emo-politics enforced by New Labour "went far beyond mere mood-setting" (522) - now we all had to possess the right feelings and share them in the approved manner. Blair "led the way in normalising the emotional self-exploitation that was necessary for the final phase of neoliberalism in Britain" (522) - a phase that Fisher amusingly calls spincerity (the public performance of an emotion you may or may not genuinely feel). 

 

It's enough to make one wish for the return of traditional British restraint and resolve; of stiff upper-lips and stoical detachment. However, Fisher sees this as reactionary and posits in contrast a third way (if I can use such a phrase); one based on his reading of Spinoza. 

 

For Spinoza's philosophy "makes the management of emotions central to its project" (524) and aims not to repress feelings, but engineer joy via the use of reason. This, for Fisher, makes Spinoza "a thinker whose work is an indispensable resource for any progressive project" (524) - a view that is not uncommon amongst neo-Marxist thinkers (particularly those influenced by Deleuze and Badiou) [e].  

 

Get Spinoza on board, says Fisher, and talking about our feelings can become a radical political act; "part of a practice of consciousness-raising that makes visible the impersonal and intersubjective structures that ideology normally obscures from us" (530).  

 

  

XII.  

 

This seems at first a rather disingenuous thing to write: 

 

"It's somewhat ironic that theories of the 'Event' have come to the fore [...] at just the moment in history when it has become clear that events in and of themselves don't change anything." (531)

 

For Fisher surely knows that the Event (as conceptualised by philosophers) is extremely rare and has little to do with the events covered by the news media, such as Live Aid, for example, or the G20 protests. The Event - at least as I understand it (inspired by Lawrence) - is a rent in the Great Umbrella; something that allows a glimpse of chaos and the discovery of a new world via the destruction of fixed forms [f].  

 

But perhaps Fisher was thinking of something said by Zarathustra to the effect that what matters more than noisy, violent events are those changes that take place in us in our stillest hours: "'The world revolves, not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values: it revolves inaudibly.'" [g] 

 

Heidegger picked up on this idea after the War, when he attempted to purge his notion of Transzendenz - Dasein's ability to start over and transform the world - not only from its conventional ties to metaphysics but to the idea of action. What was required, Heidegger argued, was not some great event, but a form of silent waiting. 

 

What seems most to worry Fisher is that events often result in euphoric outbursts of feeling "followed by depressive collapse" (531) - but the same could be said of love, no? 

 

Still, if events are the be-all and end-all - if change doesn't happen through them alone - "there are nevertheless moments which function as thresholds, opening up a new terrain of struggle, and allowing different collective emotions to propagate" (532). 

 

Which is basically saying things can still happen out of the blue ...   

 

 

XIII.  

 

Finally, we come to the two short texts, both from 2016, with which part four of k-punk closes; firstly, 'Cybergothic vs Steampunk' and, secondly, 'Mannequin Challenge' ...

 

In the former, Fisher argues that the global terrorist network ISIS "holds up a mirror to twenty-first century capitalist nihilism" (544). A form of nihilism that is essentially a type of existential poverty. We might not like to admit it, but ISIS offer a solution to this (albeit a horrifically false solution). For like criminal gangs and religious cults, ISIS offer those who join fellowship and meaning.    

 

Perhaps more interestingly, Fisher describes ISIS in relation to his concept of the cybergothic:

 

"There are no 'pure' archaisms, nothing ever repeats without difference, and ISIS is properly understood as a cybergothic phenomenon which combines the ancient with the contemporary (beheadings on the web)." (546)

 

And whilst he is obviously not a supporter of ISIS, Fisher - a bit like Foucault, who greeted the Iranian Revolution in 1979 with warm enthusiasm [h] - is excited by "the rising tide of experimental political forms in so many areas of the world at the moment" (546). 

 

And that's because, for him, this shows that "people are rediscovering group consciousness and the potency of the collective" (546).     

 

I can't help wondering whether, if he were alive today, Fisher (like Foucault in his late work) would find it necessary to rethink questions central to the Enlightenment and to liberalism. To concede, for example, that whilst the individual is a political fiction, it's nevertheless a useful one which needs vigorously defending; as does secular society when threatened by militant religious fascism. 

 

In the latter piece, Fisher comments on Donald Trump and his successful campaign in 2016 to become President of the United States. 

 

In contrast to Clinton and her team of "political robots playing out an exhausted programme" (547), Trump's campaign "was possessed of a sense of effervescing excitement, of anarchic unpredictability, the feeling of belonging to a building-movement" (547). 

 

Fisher understands how Trump caught the mood of popular dissatisfaction with capitalist realism and performed with a certain libidinal freedom that was attractive not only to his supporters, but to many who wouldn't vote for him in a million years and were appalled by his rhetoric and immoderation. His campaign may have been ugly, but at least it wasn't boring. 

 

In brief, like many other commentators of a certain generation, Fisher recognised that Trump was the punk candidate (what this tells us about the latter is an interesting question we might discuss one day).   

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written several posts referencing this Lawrentian idea; see, for example, the post dated 14 May 2014 - 'Towards a Democracy of Touch' - click here. 

      Note that the word 'hated' is used deliberately here; Matt Colquhoun confirmed to me in a recent email (7 May 2026) Fisher's visceral hostility toward Lawrence.

 

[b] Normally, I would not comment on someone's mental health. However, since Fisher and his followers make such a point of politicising depression - arguing that it is a social phenomenon heavily influenced by capitalism rather than a purely chemical or biological issue - I feel justified in doing so.

      Note, however, that my use of the term delirium is not simply intended in the narrow clinical sense, but more in the philo-political sense deployed by Deleuze and Guattari, for whom delirium is a way the unconscious invests in the social field, sometimes opening up revolutionary lines of flight. I suggest that Fisher's vision of acid communism operates as this precise kind of political delirium; an elaborate, idealised alternative reality constructed to escape the immense psychological claustrophobia of capitalist realism. Such a vision of utopia functions as a temporary, internal flight mechanism from profound depression. Suddenly, the world feels meaningful and loving once more. 

      However, as a political strategy, this hallucinogenic clarity borders on a mystical state rather than practical materialist organising. And, unfortunately, such states seldom last; when the speculative fantasy dissolves, the individual comes back down to earth with a bump, resulting in renewed depression. Fisher, as most readers will know, tragically committed suicide less than two years after writing the text discussed here.

 

[c] Historically, of course, it has. In the second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups of the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, sharing personal experiences of isolation, shame, and subjugation was precisely what allowed women to see that their private misery was structural and political. This collective realisation was a vital catalyst for solidarity and agency. 

      However, my contention with Fisher is that his specific formula for consciousness-raising risks short-circuiting this therapeutic transformation. Rather than moving from shared misery to structural agency, Fisher's explicit demand for populist loathing targeted at parasites paves a direct line toward Nietzschean ressentiment. It risks trapping the participants in a permanent state of reactive anger and class hate, which ultimately toxicifies the self and breeds a new form of psychological misery. 

      Of course, Fisher himself is aware of this danger, which is why he later refers readers to Wendy Brown's essay 'Wounded Attachments' (1993) - an essay in which she diagnoses the psycho-libidinal origins of an identity politics and what those on the right call wokism. 

      Fisher writes: "Drawing on Nietzsche's account of resentment [...] Brown wrote of a political subjectivity which 'becomes deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuge the pain of its powerlessness through its vengeful moralizing, through its wide distribution of suffering, through its reproach of power as such'" (526-527). And Fisher concludes that today "the mixture of moralizing aggression and investment in impotence has proliferated in a political atmosphere now substantially shaped by the online environment" (527).

      Brown's essay can be found in Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (August 1993), pp. 390-410. It can be accessed via JSTOR by clicking here.  

 

[d] Fisher says as much: "I don't believe that the old signifier 'communism' can be revived [...] It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the twentieth century" (520). Funnily enough, however, a few months later he names his new politics of desire emerging from the future ... acid communism.  

 

[e] As a Lawrentian, I have my reservations about Spinoza and his rationalism. Nevertheless, his work is useful in exposing the myth of the autonomous individual at the heart of the liberal tradition which drags with it notions of free will and responsibility.   

 

[f] See the post titled 'on Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella' (10 June 2013): click here.  

 

[g] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 153-154.  

 

[h] Writing in an Italian daily newspaper (Corriere della Sera), Foucault praised the Iranian Revolution as an authentic anti-imperialist movement and a spiritual revolt against Western-imposed modernity, rather than just a religious coup. See my post dated 14 August 2014, in which I discuss this: click here. 

 

 

This post is a continuation of my previous post on Fisher's political writings in the book k-punk (2018): click here. 

 

And for earlier thoughts on Fisher's political writings in the above work, please click here.

 

  

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

Ay up, me duck! Three famous East Midlanders: 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

  

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

    

Notes

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

  

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

II.  

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: An Opening Salvo

 Mark Fisher: k-punk 

(Repeater Books, 2018) [a]

 

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

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

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

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

    

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

  

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

 

 

III. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

   

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

 

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

 

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

  

  

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

[e] Ibid. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

    

Notes on Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) 3: Chapters 7-9

Warwick alumni: Messrs. Alexander and Fisher

 

This is a continuation of a post: part 1 can be accessed by clicking here 

and part 2 by clicking here. 

 

 

I.

 

In a sense, this isn't so much a book review as an attempt to occupy the textual space that Fisher has succinctly mapped out in his book Capitalist Realism and meet him there in and on his own terms. 

 

But it is also a staged confrontation; perhaps even an attempt to exorcise his ghost (it's difficult not to feel a little haunted by Fisher at times). But it's a confrontation that is hopefully carried out in an amiable manner and a generous spirit. One that whilst opening up a pathos of distance between us as cultural commentators, also indicates that we clearly share certain interests, ideas, and points of reference. 

 

Anyway, let us return to the book, Capitalist Realism (2009) [a] - picking up where we left off in part two, at the beginning of chapter 7 ...

 

 

II.   

 

Back in the old days, being realistic was a relatively straightforward affair; because the real was fixed and everyone agreed what it was. 

 

But now, being realistic in the age of capitalist realism, "entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment" (54). Now nobody knows quite what's real and what's not, or where they are (readers will recall Fisher spoke earlier of perpetual instability). 

 

That's fine for a small number of people (including Nietzscheans), but can cause issues for the majority who like to know what's what and rely upon what is called common sense. The only way to stay sane is to comply with the madness of the world: 

 

"This strategy - of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question - has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism [...]" (56)

   

It probably helps if one can actively forget most things too; again, for those of a Nietzschean disposition, that fortunately comes easily. 

 

But for those people more like elephants than goldfish - particularly those individuals burdened with hyperthymesia [b] - it isn't easy to forget and, amongst such people it wouldn't be surprising "if profound social and economic instability resulted in a craving for familiar cultural forms" (59) to which they could return to again and again. 

 

This in part explains why postmodernity is retromaniacal in character; "excessively nostalgic, given over to retrospection, incapable of generating any authentic novelty" (59). 

 

 

III. 

 

According to Fisher, although "excoriated by both neoliberalism and neoconservativism, the concept of the Nanny State continues to haunt capitalist realism" (62) - playing as it does an essential libidinal function; "there to be blamed precisely for its failure to act as a centralizing power" (62) when things go wrong. 

 

Why look for systemic causes for the 2008 financial crisis, for example, when you can blame the government? 

 

The fact is, global capitalism's radical lack of a centre is simply unthinkable for most people; they simply can't help believing that there has to be someone somewhere pulling the strings and in control (this returns us once more to the need for God's shadow to be shown in caves long after God himself has departed the scene).   

 

It's at this point Fisher refers us to the call centre that terrifying non-space and "world without memory, where cause and effect come together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens" (63).  

 

Fisher hates the call centre which, in his view, distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism in a distinctly Kafkaesque [c] manner: 

 

"The boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since - as is very quickly clear to the caller - there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could." (64)   

 

He continues:

 

"Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centreless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself." (64)

 

Capital - and capitalism - that's the issue; that's the problem - not individuals nor even the corporations. For not even the corporations "are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by / expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-a-subject: Capital" (70). 

 

All of which puts one in mind of the Lawrence verse 'Kill Money', which opens with the following lines: 

 

 

Kill money, put money out of existence. 

It is a perverted instinct, a hidden thought 

which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones, the soul. [d]  

 

 

IV. 

 

The final chapter of Capitalist Realism opens with a discussion of the Channel 4 reality show Supernanny, starring Jo Frost. It's a show about parents struggling with their children's behaviour; or, as Fisher argues, a relentless (if implicit) attack on "postmodernity's permissive hedonism"(71) and the failure of the paternal superego (or father function) in late capitalism. 

 

Having never watched the show, I'm going to have to take his word on that. 

 

The question is: what might a paternalism without a father look like (assuming a return of the paternal superego is neither possible nor desirable in an age in which Mum knows best) and "the 'paternal' concept of duty has been subsumed into the 'maternal' imperative to enjoy" (71)?  

 

"A question as massive as this cannot of course be answered in a short book such as this [...] In brief, though, I believe that it is Spinoza who offers the best resources for thinking through what a 'paternalism without the father' might look like." (72)

 

I have to admit, I wasn't expecting that and I'm not sure I entirely understand what this means or implies (is it okay to admit that my knowledge of Spinoza is limited?).

 

What he seems to mean is something like this: what we need to do today is make the move from a sad and depressive individualism to collective action; i.e., something more communal and joyous. 

 

Neoliberalism treats people not only as individuals but as infants whose behaviour needs to be modified not with reference to a moral system of right and wrong, but with reference to their own health and safety. They also need to be told not what to think - because nobody has to think anymore in an age of artificial intelligence - but what to feel.  

 

Unfortunately, having always to be constantly concerned about one's health and safety and sign one's emails with virtual hugs 'n' kisses, results in increased anxiety which leads to mental health issues. The Spinozist alternative, which breaks us out of such upbeat narcissism, encourages us to actually connect with others - whatever the risks and whatever the drawbacks (other people can be irritating and boring; they can be unpleasant and make miserable). 

 

But it's still better to fall in love and become an active member of society than fall into solipsistic isolation; the Covid pandemic illustrated that, one might have imagined. Ultimately, it's all about constructing collective agency rather than just an individual identity. Freedom - or perhaps it would be better to say fulfilment - comes when you are no longer trapped within your self. 

 

And from this line of thought, Fisher comes to the following conclusion: "The Marxist Supernanny would not only be the one who laid down limitations" (76), but also the one who encouraged us to take risks and seek out the strange (or that which is not-self). 

 

It would, if you like, be a slightly less stuffy version of Auntie Beeb - and acid communism doesn't just call for wild and colourful countercultural experimentation, but a revival of "the supposedly stodgy, centralized culture of the postwar consensus" (76). 

 

Fisher thus moves from Gothic materialism and cyber-punk [e] to public-service broadcasting - which is certainly quite a leap and not one I'm sure I wish to make. Unlike Fisher, I have always hated the BBC - even as a young child. But he insists that the effect of "permanent structural instability [...] is invariably stagnation and conservatism, not innovation", whilst, on the other hand, it's the BBC and Channel 4 that will perplex and delight with "popular avant gardism" (76). 

 

This might seem like a paradox, but Fisher is insistent: "This is not a paradox." (76) The fear and cynicism that come to define late capitalism - including the creative sector - always produce conformist and conventional shit in the end; whereas a certain amount of stability is "necessary for cultural vibrancy" (77). 

 

Whatever else he may or may not be, Fisher is not an anarchist who wishes to smash the state; nor is he an old school socialist who dreams of taking over the state and ever-expanding its size and reach. What he wants - and what he calls on his comrades on the more acidic wing of politics to do - is subordinate the state to the general will: 

 

"This involves, naturally, resuscitating the very concept of the general will, reviving - and modernizing - the idea of a public space that is not reducible to an aggregation of individuals and their interests." (77) 

 

And so, just like that, Fisher again reveals his Rousseauist roots [f]. One half-expects him to begin speaking about enforced freedom and the need for grand narratives. And sure enough ...

 

"Against the postmodernist suspicion of grand narratives, we need to reassert that, far from being isolated, contingent problems [violent teen crime; hospital superbugs, etc.], these are all the effects of a single systemic cause: Capital." (77) 

 

Thus, as well as subordinating the state to the general will, Fisher's neocommunists need to develop strategies against Capital; I refer you to the Lawrence poem quoted above in section III and, if you want, click here for a musical bonus: Killing Joke, 'Money Is Not Our God' [g].     

 

 

V. 

 

Despite Killing Joke releasing their thirteenth studio album - Absolute Dissent - in 2010 and despite the financial crisis two years prior to that, the world kept turning and capitalist realism didn't collapse. In fact: 

 

"It quickly became clear that, far from constituting the end of capitalism, the bank bail-outs were a massive reassertion of the capitalist realist insistence that there is no alternative. Allowing the banking system to disintegrate was held to be unthinkable, and what ensued was a vast haemorrhaging of public money into private hands." (78)  

 

No wonder those who, like Fisher, hoped capitalism might not simply be exposed and discredited but deposed and demolished, were quickly disappointed. 

 

They seemed willing to suffer a second 1920s style Great Depression, but, in the end, had to make do with their own personal forms of depression and concede that without a "credible and coherent alternative [...] capitalist realism will continue to rule the political-economic unconscious" (78).       

 

Still, not wanting to end on a defeatist note, Fisher tries to rally his troops with the hope that "it is year zero again, and a space has been cleared for a new anti-capitalism to emerge which is not necessarily tied to the old language or traditions" (78) of the left. 

 

That just seems naively optimistic (and in political bad taste) to me - there is no year zero - it's a mythical point that Buddhists and Khmer Rouge militants might base their calendars on, but Fisher should know better than to flirt with such rhetoric.   

 

I also wish he would refrain from calling for authentic universality - a phrase that he has possibly picked up from that old fraud Slavoj Žižek and by which he appears to return us to humanism - although I'm sure his defenders would insist appearances can be deceptive and that, actually, Fisher is proposing a new, post-humanist (as well as post-capitalist) form of solidarity (i.e., a model that differs entirely from old school metaphysical humanism).  

 

Nevertheless, it's a problematic phrase to say the least ... [h]

 

 

VI. 

 

I think I noted earlier in this post that I didn't know - and never even met - Mark Fisher. So I rely for insights into his character upon his friends, colleagues, students, etc. 

 

Individuals such as Tariq Goddard, for example, who provides the 2022 edition of Capitalist Realism with an Afterword, in which he tells us that Fisher was a somewhat manic individual who alternated between "the certainty that the finished work would be a portent of good things to come and an intermittent panic [...] based largely on the fear that he had written too little, too late" (82).

 

Goddard also informs us that Fisher was unburdened by false modesty and full of messianic zeal and something of this comes across, I think, in the final pages when Fisher boldly tells those on the left what their vices and failings are - "endless rehearsal of historical debates" (78) - and what they must do to be more successful; plan and organise for a future they really believe in.

 

He continues:

 

"The failure of previous forms of anti-capitalist political organisation should not be a cause for despair, but what needs to be left behind is a certain romantic attachment to the politics of failure, to the comfortable position of a defeated marginality." (78-79)

 

Fisher, in other words, does not like the embracing of victimhood or those who are defeatist by nature. Nor does he have much time for those who might reject his thinking:

 

"It is crucial that a genuine revitalised left confidently occupy the new political terrain I have (very provisionally) sketched here." (79) 

 

And crucial also that they do two things: firstly, "convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized conditions into effective antagonisms" (80); and, secondly, impose a new austerity in order to avoid environmental catastrophe and because limitations placed on desire are a good thing per se (as shown by Oliver James and Supernanny). 

 

To which we can only reply: Tak tochno, tovarishch Fisher!

 

  

Notes

 

[a] I'm using the 2022 edition of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, published by Zer0 Books, and all page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.  

 

[b] Hyperthymesia - also known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) - is an extremely rare condition causing individuals to vividly recall nearly every event of their lives in minute detail (not only what they felt, but what they were wearing and had for lunch on any specific date). Such individuals - and there are believed to be only a hundred in the entire world - often find it hard to forget unpleasant memories or trauma, which can make it difficult to move past negative experiences.   

      Interestingly, Fisher is more concerned with another memory disorder - anterograde amnesia, i.e., the impaired ability to form new long-term memories, whilst past memories remain intact; "the new therefore looms up as hostile, fleeting, unnavigable, and the sufferer is drawn back to the security of the old" (60). For Fisher, this is the postmodern condition defined. 

 

[c] Fisher refers readers to Kafka's novel The Castle (1926), in which K's encounter with the telephone system is "uncannily prophetic of the call centre experience" (64). 

      He then explains what it is that makes Kafka so important as a writer: "The supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there - it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility." (65) 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'Kill Money', in Pansies (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1929), p. 93. 

      Lawrence maintained a vehement hatred of money throughout his writing; see for example his essay 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine' (1925) in which he writes: 

      "Our last wall is the golden wall of money. This is a fatal wall. It cuts us off from life, from vitality, from the alive sun and the alive earth, as nothing can. Nothing, not even the most fanatical dogmas of an iron-bound religion, can insulate us from the inrush of life and inspiration, as money can."

      I'm not entirely sure I agree with this; I would certainly rather live in California, or Switzerland - or even Felixstowe - than Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban, or Iran under the rule of the Supreme Leader. 

      Lawrence's essay can be found in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lines quoted are on p. 363. 

 

[e] Mark Fisher's Ph.D thesis was titled Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (University of Warwick, 1999). It argued that cyberpunk fiction and cybernetic technologies are collapsing the distinctions between life/non-life and human/machine into a flat ontology; what he thought of as a form of Gothic materialism, in which traditional ideas of agency dissolve. 

      As for cyberpunk, Fisher analysed this genre of writing not merely as a type of fiction commenting on reality, but as hyperrealist theory-fiction that acted as an extension of the real world and as a guide to 'the increasingly strange terrain of capitalism'. The name of his long-running blog, k-punk (2004-2016), is CCRU shorthand for cyber-punk; the k stands for the Greek spelling of the term cyber (κυβερ). 

      Flatline Constructs was published in book form by Exmilitary in 2018 and K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, ed., Darren Ambrose, was also published in 2018 (Repeater Books). It brings together some of the best posts from his seminal blog along with a selection of reviews and other writings, including his (unfinished) introduction to a planned work to be called 'Acid Communism'. 

 

[f] Readers may recall that Rousseau is the philosopher most famously associated with the concept of la volonté générale, which he examined in The Social Contract (1762). It represents the collective, common interest of the citizens aimed at the public good, rather than the sum of individual selfish interests. Anyone who refused to obey the general will would be forced to do so.         

 

[g] Killing Joke, 'Money Is Not Our God', was a single released (Jan 1991) from the album Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions (Noise Records, 1990). Written by Jaz Coleman, Geordie Walker, and Martin Atkins. 

      It failed to chart, but it's a track which all those who hate Mammon will appreciate. I'm not sure they were one of Fisher's favourite bands, but he acknowledges Killing Joke as significant post-punk pioneers who not only challenged the musical and cultural norms of the period, but fostered counter-consensual collectivity, providing an exit from the present and a will to retake the present.

     If interested, see what he writes about them on his k-punk blog and in the book Post-Punk Then and Now, ed. Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher (Repeater Books, 2016).   

[h] Fisher obviously isn't a traditional humanist; he doesn't subscribe to ideas of a fixed human nature (or some kind of metaphysical essence) existing outside of culture and history. 

      And so, I suppose authentic universality has to be thought of as a collective (or mass) political project designed to counter forms of suffering that global capitalism produces. Nevertheless, I still dislike the term and still think it lends itself to idealism.