Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Five

Mark Fisher Haunted by the Spectre of 

Jean-François Lyotard Until the Very Last 

(SA/2026)

 

I.

 

Torpedophiles who have been following this series of posts on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire (2021) [a] will recall my surprise (and disappointment) that in Lecture Four he didn't take the opportunity to dive deep into Anti-Oedipus (1972), even whilst admitting that Deleuze and Guattari were the spectres that continued to haunt his thinking. 

 

Well, it is even more surprising in light of Fisher's decision to concern himself more with socio-historical writings rather than French theoretical texts, to find that Lecture Five is centred on Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1974) - a notoriously difficult and intense work that even the author eventually came to regard as his evil or nasty book [livre méchant] due to its aggressive rejection of the rigid moral, political, and theoretical frameworks of the political left - specifically Marxism - in favour of a chaotic celebration of accelerated desire [b]. 

 

Fisher obliging his students to engage with Lyotard having just lectured them on 1970s American labour history and countercultural idealism the week before, is like being taught to swim by someone who lets you paddle for a bit in the shallows near the shoreline before throwing you in the deep, shark-infested waters.  

 

 

II.  

 

Fisher begins by reading aloud a passage from Libidinal Economy in which Lyotard (ironically) suggests that English industrial workers actually enjoyed their subordination and the destruction of their bodies by the capitalist machine: 

 

"the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they [...] enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion  [...] in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed on them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity [...] enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs [...]" [c]  

 

While this pissed off many of his Marxist contemporaries, it is something that D. H. Lawrence had seriously explored in his fiction many years earlier. In Women in Love (1920), for example, he writes of how Gerald Crich reorganises the mines owned by his ailing father in line with the latest technology and modern work practices:

 

"Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method [...] the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible and heartbreaking in its mechanicalness.

      But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanised. And yet they accepted the new conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out of them. [...] There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted [...] They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system [...] Otherwise Gerald could never have done what he did." [d]  

 

That perfectly anticipates Lyotard and his politics of desire. It also explains why, personally, I didn't find anything terribly provocative in Lyotard's book back in the '90s (although a fair amount of material that simply perplexed or bored).     

    

 

III.  

 

The key takeaway from Lyotard is that there is no revolutionary outside to capitalism; no primitive societies or subversive regions. This, says Fisher, is the "relentless message" (182) of Libidinal Economy - it's a "scathing assault" (182) on those thinkers who believe otherwise and a slap in the face to those Leftists still romanticising May '68. 

 

Furthermore: Marxism itself (certainly in its Old Man guise) "is never done with the prosecution of the case against capital" (191). Consequently, the revolution is always deferred; there is no climax or consummation. Marxism is forever stuck at the level of critical foreplay.     

 

One might ask at this point why Fisher wants his students to consider Lyotard's nasty book - it seems to negate his own political project of acid communism. 

 

The answer is that Fisher uses Lyotard's pessimistic analysis - which is less a critique and more a diagnosis - to map the fatal flaw of the modern Left; i.e., its abandoning of the terrain of desire and its own retreat to a joyless, defensive moralism that is despised by the proletariat. 

 

Lyotard captures this with savage perfection in the following quoted by Fisher:  

 

"'You situate yourselves on [...] the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalised desires be totally ignored, forbidden [...] you are like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that!'" (204)

 

And, of course, the working class does suffer, but so too do they enjoy "'swallowing the shit of capital'" (203) - including its sausage pâtés - until fit to burst. 

 

Fisher sees the task of a postcapitalist politics of desire (acid communism) as countering this by building an alternative future that is ultimately more pleasurable than anything capital can offer; to oblige Marx to become the Little Girl at last ...   

  

 

IV. 

 

Bringing his lecture to a close, Fisher provides a convenient summary:

 

"I think, then, that the libidinal economy [...] is largely to do with [...] a kind of hatred of almost all existing left-wing models of what political transformation entails. [...] These [left-wing projects] are all inadequate and all for the same reason [...] in that they don't take the desire of the capitalised seriously. They reject it and [...] therefore keep re-inscribing moralism." (204)

 

It's not enough to understand Marx - you also need to understand the Marquis de Sade! Capitalism and desire are inseparable; capitalism is desire. Thus, we need to "throw aside a simple utilitarian model of desire" (205) - i.e., one in which we seek out pleasure and wish to avoid pain. To acknowledge that there's an intimate and complex relationship between these two things has a number of implications - not least for political theory. 

 

I have to say, I'm still not entirely sure how Fisher thinks his concept of acid communism shows the fly the way out of Lyotard's libidinal bottle. He accepts that desire is key and he doesn't moralise in the manner of many on the Left. But he rejects the idea that capitalism is totalising and absolute and insists there must be a tasty vegetarian alternative to capitalism's sausage pâtés (so to speak).

 

If only the collective consciousness of the People can be raised and expanded, so that new - psychedelic - desires can be produced and politically channelled ... And so we end up once more falling back on Fisher's favourite phrase - if only [e].      

 

 

V. 

 

 

Lecture V (5 December 2016) was to be the last that Fisher gave in his Postcapitalist Desire seminar series. 

 

Following his suicide on 13 January 2017, the remaining ten weeks of the course could obviously not go ahead as planned. Which is a shame, 'cos it would have been fun to hear what he had to say about technofeminism and cyberfeminism in week ten and interesting to discover also his thoughts on Nick Land's 'Machinic Desire' in week eleven. 

 

But there you go - no more miserable Monday mornings for him - and just a (boring) sixteen track playlist for the rest of us ... [f]  

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references to this work will be given directly in the post.

 

[b] Originally published as Économie Libidinale in 1974, the work was translated into English by Iain Hamilton Grant and published by The Athlone Press (1993). 

      Lyotard wrote the book in an intentionally vulgar, violent, and quasi-pornographic style designed to outrage his Marxist contemporaries. Its most notorious provocation - which I examine in relation to the fiction of D. H. Lawrence in Section II - was the claim that the 19th-century proletariat derived a dark, masochistic pleasure from being physically consumed by the industrial machinery of capital. 

      Equally controversial was Lyotard's accelerationist insistence that all modern political systems (capitalist, socialist, or fascist) are ultimately fuelled by these exact same chaotic libidinal energies. 

 

[c] Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, quoted by Fisher in Postcapitalist Desire, p. 180.  

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 230-231. 

      Sir Clifford Chatterley reforms his coal mines in a similar fashion to Gerald Crich in Lawrence's final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). I discussed all this in my PhD thesis, Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000), completed in the philosophy department when Fisher and friends were raving about Lyotard and his Libidinal Economy but refused to engage with Lawrence's work, despite the fact that Lawrence had been named by Deleuze as one of the four great heirs to Spinoza and despite the fact that Nick Land was on my Graduate Progress Committee, so knew of what I was up to under the supervision of Keith Ansell-Pearson. I guess I simply wasn't cyberpunk enough for members of the CCRU.   

 

[e] See section VI of the post written on Lecture IV (published 28 June 2026) where I examine Fisher's overreliance on wishful thinking - If only things had gone differently in the '70s ... If only we could make X, Y, or Z happen in the future ... etc. - allowing his desires to heavily influence (if not actually determine) his political philosophy: click here. 

      His supporters will doubtless dispute this and refer to the concept of hyperstition - i.e., they'll insist that Fisher wasn't just engaging in wishful thinking, but attempting to produce real effects via theory-fictions that make themselves true; a speculative idea is introduced into culture, people believe it and change their material behaviour based on that belief, et voila! their actions physically construct a new (alternative) reality. 

       

[f] See Appendix Two: '"No More Miserable Monday Mornings" Tracklist' in Postcapitalist Desire, pp. 217-220.  

      Matt Colquhoun explains that the title refers to a post on k-punk (18 July 2015) and that the sixteen songs listed provide a "mode of consciousness-raising" (218) and have a tonic effect: 

      "Taken as a whole, [the playlist] auto-affects the brain into a state of joyful indignation [...] the freedoms these songs promise remain soulful, and this emboldened soul rattles the subjugated body out of its contemporary complacency" (219). 

        Unfortunately, for me, it's going to take more than a mix of pop, reggae, and disco to buy into Fisher's revolution; let's just say he has much broader taste in music than I do (and I would sooner stuff my ears with beeswax than listen to the sound of the Sleaford Mods).   

 

 

To read the four other posts in this series on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire published on Torpedo the Ark, please click here. 

 

  

Getting Straight to the Point: Reflections on the Sophie Cunningham/DeWanna Bonner Incident

 

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham pointing 

Photo by Grace Hollars / IndyStar (USA Today Network)

 

 

I. 

 

Formed by extending the arm, hand, and index finger, the gesture of pointing plays an important role within human non-verbal communication - as do other hand gestures, of course - although it by no means has a universal meaning. 

 

Thus, pointing - especially at other people - can be considered highly inappropriate in certain contexts and in many cultures; not only disrespectful, but rude and aggressive.

 

This seems to be because the extended finger is an accusatory gesture; one that makes people feel not only objectified and put on the spot, but blamed and shamed in some manner. And no one likes that; even those who are guilty of wrongdoing and deserve to be pointed out and pointed at. 

 

 

II. 

 

Whether that includes the professional basketball player DeWanna Bonner who was finger-pointed at for 22 seconds by opposing player - and now social media sensation - Sophie Cunningham, I don't know. 

 

Bonner certainly issued some choice words at Cunningham after a brief altercation involving Bonner and one of Cunningham's teammates (Caitlin Clark) in the 4th quarter of a game between Indiana Fever and Phoenix Mercury [1], but (as far as I understand) trash talk is an accepted, deeply ingrained part of the game in US basketball.

 

So whether she deserved to have Cunningham pointing at her - after foolishly making it clear how much she objected to being pointed at - for such a ridiculously prolonged period is debatable. However, what is not debatable is that the incident was hilarious (dumb, but hilarious!) [2] - and that Miss Cunningham is a true star of the internet age.

 

For as one might imagine, a countless number of memes have now been generated, including one (shown below) which gives us a glimpse of the celestial nature of a 29-year-old woman who has built a reputation as one of the WNBA's most fearless and competitive players, forever ready to stand up to her opponents on the one hand and stand up for her teammates on the other.   

 

D. H. Lawrence famously suggested in his late verses that aspects of divinity are revealed in the faces and forms of individuals when they are momentarily unaware of themselves in the moment. He calls this purity and it this quality which gives human beings their more-than-human beauty; which makes their flesh gleam with a kind of radiance and the bright flame of being [3].  

 

A lot of people hate (and fear) artificial intelligence, but seeing this AI generated meme arguably enables us to understand what Lawrence means ...  

  

Image of Sophie Cunningham giving us a glimpse

 of the goddess within her
 

 

Notes

 

[1] This game was played on 22 June 2026 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. The Indiana Fever defeated the Phoenix Mercury by 86 points to 77.

      It might also be noted that Bonner and Cunningham have a complicated history as former teammates. Both played for the Fever during the 2025 season before Bonner abruptly left the team after just nine games. Cunningham later criticised Bonner on her podcast for failing to send a professional goodbye text to her teammates, establishing a deep-seated rivalry long before this game.

 

[2] To watch the incident on Instagram, click here. 

 

[3] For more on this idea and for references to the relevant poems by D. H. Lawrence, see the post titled 'I Shall Speak of Geist, of Flame, and of Glimpses' (29 Sept 2021): click here. 

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Four

 

Image via the Acid Horizon 

YouTube channel [a]

 

 

I. 

 

Okay, Lecture Four of Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire [b] - 'Union Power and Soul Power' - a little bit of American labour history (do try and stay awake at the back). 

 

Have y'all done your preliminary reading since I published the post on Lecture Three, the key text being Jefferson Cowie's book Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010), particularly the chapter 'Old Fashioned Heroes of the New Working Class' (pp. 23-75)?

 

Well, don't worry, neither have I; but I'm confident Fisher will bring us all up to speed ... [c]  

 

 

II.  

 

How does group consciousness practically develop in the historical moment? And what might we learn with reference to our own time?

 

These are the questions Fisher wishes to address here. Along with: why did it all fail; why was there no working class revolution in the US in the late 1960s / early '70s? 

 

Or to put it another way, why did Nixon win - and win big - in '72 and why have the neoliberal Right in the shape of the Republican Party continued to win, often with popular working-class support (think Reagan and Trump, for example)?   

 

I think the answer is pretty clear - though not one the Left will ever concede; as a rule, working class people do not like countercultural hippies and radical activists who want to destroy the American way of life - liberty, the pursuit of happiness, apple pie, etc. They don't want "unprecedented ferment" and "diverse leftism" (154). 

 

Some left-wing commentators say this makes certain elements of the working class reactionary and resentful (deplorable as Hillary Clinton would say). Today, young white working class males are invariably demonised as racist and misogynistic. 

 

To be fair to Fisher, however, he never bought into this. Indeed, he frequently pushed back against condescending stereotypes and rejected broad, pejorative characterisations - such as the term chav - arguing that left-leaning intellectuals needed to empathise a little more and moralise less [d]. 

 

Having said that, he does not deny working-class resentment as the "driving force of reaction" (156) in the 1970s and after, defining the term as "a form of anti-solidarity" and "anti-consciousness" (156) that keeps people divided.  

 

 

III.     

 

The idea that there's no class system now - that we're all either middle-class or, in Lawrence's view, one vast proletariat that has become quite literally robotic [e] - is interesting and worth looking at a little more closely. 

 

Technically speaking, Fisher is right that we can't all belong to the middle - "That is an impossible typology" (157). He's amused, however, by the doubleness of the idea: 

 

"It's both disavowing class at the same time as it's assuring the impossibility of completely overcoming it. Because if we're all in the middle class then, really, there is no such thing as class struggle anymore. But hold on! We're still talking about class [...] we still have to use the term class but in the very attempt to eliminate the concept." (157) 

 

That's true, I suppose, but doesn't really say a great deal and I feel as if Fisher has forgotten his Deleuze and Guattari from back in the day when Anti-Oedipus was his main point of reference. If one turns to the section titled 'Capitalist Representation' in chapter 4, one finds a detailed explanation of how a simple idea of class no longer cuts the conceptual mustard:

 

"That the State is entirely in the service of the so-called ruling class is an obvious practical fact, but a fact that does not reveal its theoretical foundation [...] from the viewpoint of the capitalist axiomatic there is only one class, a class with a universal vocation, the bourgeoisie. [...] This proposition contains something other than an ideological blindness or denial. Classes are the negative of castes and statuses; classes are orders, castes, and statuses that have been decoded." [f]

 

What I think that means is that there is no fundamental difference between the banker, the baker, and the candlestick maker; they are subjugated as functionaries into one and the same flow of capital. And ultimately, only the bourgeoisie remains as the decoding and decoded class. Deleuze and Guattari continue (and I'm quoting several paragraphs at some length here as it seems to me important): 

 

"The generalized slavery of the despotic State at least implied the existence of masters [...] But the bourgeois field of immanence [...] institutes an unrivaled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation: there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves [...] The bourgeois sets the example [...] more utterly enslaved than the lowest slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine." [g]  

 

"It will be said that there is nonetheless a class that rules and a class that is ruled [...] the distinction between the flow of financing and the flow of income in wages. But this is only partially true, since capitalism is born of the conjunction of the two [...] and integrates them both in the continually expanded reproduction of its limits. So that the bourgeoisie is justified in saying, not in terms of ideology, but in the very organization of its axiomatic: there is only one machine, that of the great mutant decoded flow [...] and one class of servants, the decoding bourgeoisie, the class that decodes the castes and the statuses [...]" [h]     

"In short, the theoretical opposition is not between two classes, for it is the very notion of class, insofar as it designates the 'negative' of codes, that implies there is only one class. The theoretical opposition lies elsewhere: it is between [...] the class and those who are outside the class [les hors-classe]. Between the servants of the machine, and those who sabotage its cogs and wheels. [...] If you will: between the capitalists and the schizos [...] at the level of decoding [and desire], in their basic antagonism at the level of the axiomatic [...] [i] 

 

 

IV.

 

Now, I've no idea why Fisher - who must know this material intimately - didn't bother to refer to it and discuss it with his students. By his own admission in week one, although not on the official reading list, Deleuze and Guattari remained the spectres behind the course - so why not summon them here?

 

Perhaps he simply felt it was time to move on with his thinking; to find more practical points of reference and prioritise different conceptual frameworks - more socio-historical and a little less theoretically sophisticated. 

 

In his late work, as he formulated his ideas around acid communism, Fisher seems keener to figure out the material reasons why the liberatory potential of the late-60s and early-70s collapsed rather than re-engage with the philosophical abstractions of poststructuralism. 

 

And so, if for strategic (and pragmatic) reasons only, Fisher remains committed to the idea of class: class struggle, class solidarity, and the raising of class consciousness - regardless of what Messrs. Deleuze and Guattari write [j]. 

 

Though Fisher also wants to tie class to other things, such as race and gender, and promote the possibility of "an intersectional class politics" (158). Class structures may no longer really exist thanks to the capitalist axiomatic doing away with all traditional social and cultural codes and forms, but it can be reproduced in order to create a little unity and solidarity. 

 

Ironically then, it's communism - not capitalism - that wants to keep class in place; for class "goes against the actual dominant tendencies" (159) of capitalism: to decodify and deterritorialise and to ensure all that is solid melts into air [k].     

  

 

V. 

The danger, of course, is if you bring class back - particularly in an intersectional form - you reify it and it becomes identitarian - that is to say, "defined not by its consciousness or by its agency but by particular identity characteristics that are prescribed to it" (160). 

 

Fisher wants class back in the picture. And he wants intersectionality. But he doesn't want identitarianism. The question is: can he have the first two things without the third today, when everyone is obsessed by identity politics? I doubt it. And he seems a little naive in hoping that people will see that class consciousness is all about working people recognising they share a common position and have common interests "in spite of whatever cultural, personal, subjective qualities"(161) they possess. 

 

For Fisher, it isn't that class is "more important than those other forms of identification or forms of struggle" (160), it's just that "when class is no longer there [...] the given picture is necessarily incomplete" (160) and everything is fatally distorted. 

 

But, for my next door neighbour, being a Muslim matters more - way more - than anything else; including acid communism. Fisher might say that this shows a concern only with his present and his past [l] - that my neighbour lacks a form of consciousness that is "different from identity" (165) and which is about the subject's future becoming as it has a transformative dimension and has hyperstitional effects. 

 

Unfortunately, my neighbour - newly arrived from Pakistan with his wife, parents, children, and brother - probably wouldn't understand wtf Fisher was talking about and would care even less. He just wants to extend his kitchen and perform his obligatory daily prayers (Salah - the second pillar of Islam). 

 

What is more, I suspect that if you were to ask him what needs to be done to resolve the crucial antagonisms that divide society he would doubtless argue for the imposition of Sharia - again, I'm pretty sure he'd not call for acid communism. 

  

 

VI. 

   

Fisher closes Lecture Four with a series of what ifs ... 

 

"What if "countervailing forces hadn't managed to assert themselves in the Seventies?" (170) What if a "new alliance of workers, the counterculture, etc., had come together in a sustained way?" (170) What if neoliberalism hadn't triumphed and everyone had demanded the abolition of work?    

  

To me, this is pretty desperate stuff - but Fisher feels these are some of the key questions of our age and which open up a vision of the future and a "potential route into postcapitalism" (170). 

 

Does anybody remember the scene in an episode of The Inbetweeners [S2/E3] when Will, exasperated by the views and behaviour of French exchange student Patrice, launches into an anti-French rant? Challenged by Simon on its racist content, Will exclaims: "He's made me racist!"

 

Well, that's kind of how I feel when reading Fisher at times: I don't want to be cynical - but he's made me cynical! 

 

"What if there was no 1973? What if there was no recession?" (170) What if we could turn back time and reverse the conditions of the late 1960s and early '70s into the current moment? Arrgh! So many hypotheticals on one page! 

 

Posing such questions is not a sign of resistance - more a sign of political hopelessness and philosophical exhaustion. Fisher has nothing else to say other than what if and nowhere else to go other than yesterday; no wonder he suddenly starts listening to The Beatles when all his troubles seemed so far away.   

 

 

VII. 

      

Actually, Fisher does have one additional point to make in Lecture Four - and it concerns aesthetics ... 

 

Fisher thinks that what carried the revolutionary forces along and sustained the necessary conditions for change was the counterculture; "and the counterculture the was primarily driven through music" (171). It was pop music - as much as politics - that offered the "vision of a liberated world" (171) [m]. 

 

As Dewey Finn taught his students at Horace Green: One great rock show can change the world! [n] 

 

Or as Fisher puts it, music feeds into the revolutionary struggle, man; and the revolutionary struggle feeds into the music, creating a "positive feedback loop" (171) and a "vector for the dynamics of transformation of the social world" (171) - which is nice, but nowhere as catchy and explains why his career as a Hollywood script writer never really took off. 

 

For Fisher, culture leads the way; "in lots of ways" (172) and the counterculture is "not just a counter-politics; it's a range of forms of cultural expression" (172) that allowed us "to imagine a completely transformed world" (173) in an act of performative anticipation. 

 

As Miss Brodie would say, in her best Edinburgh voice: For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. [o]   

 

But for those like me, made cynical - and yes, even a little irritated by Fisher's utopianism - this is just tiresome. Particularly as he knows as well as I do what happened: 

 

"It failed. It went wrong. There were moments of rupture. There were glimmers. There was a sense of something that could have been different. But it didn't work out that way." (172)

 

And rock 'n' roll rebellion - whether led by hippies wearing Afghan coats or punks in their leather jackets - was just as commodifiable as anything else.  

 

Nevertheless, we are, I suppose, encouraged to try again (for if at first you don't succeed ...) - to desire anew and find our mojo once more (or transformational libido as Fisher calls it). And that means turning to Jean-François Lyotard and falling back into French theory ... 

 

See you for Lecture Five ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This podcast from the Acid Archives - Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher (Full Episode) - was uploaded to the Acid Horizon YouTube channel in December 2022, but first put out in September 2020. Matt Colquhoun guest stars. Those who would like to listen can click here.  

 

[b] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references to this book will be given directly in the post.   

 

[c] Amusingly, when Fisher asked his class to share their responses to Cowie's book he was met with silence, which tells us either they were naturally reticent, or that quite a few of them hadn't read it either.   

 

[d] See, for example, his important essay 'Exiting the Vampire Castle' (2013), which can be found in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 659-667. 

      I believe that Fisher got a lot of shit from some readers for this text, in which, amongst other things, he champions Russell Brand and sticks up for Owen Jones. It can be read online here. See also my post on Torpedo the Ark (30 Sept 2023) in which I discuss this essay. And readers who are interested might like to also check out Em Colquhoun's xenogothic website where they have mounted a spirited defence of the piece on several occasions. 

 

[e] In the second version of his final novel, Lawrence writes: 

      "There was no longer any such thing as class. The world was one vast proletariat. Everything else had gone. The true working class was gone, as much as the honourable bourgeoisie, or the proud aristocracy [...] a vast homogeneous proletariat made up the whole of humanity." 

      See The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 492.   

 

[f] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press Ltd., 1984), pp. 253-254.  

 

[g] Ibid., p. 254.  

 

[h] Ibid.

 

[i] Ibid., p. 255.

 

[j] Actually, Deleuze and Guattari would support him in this as a matter of praxis. The task, they write, of any revolutionary socialist movement is to organise a "bipolarity of the social field, a bipolarity of classes" and to both embody the idea of class interest in consciousness and actualise it in an organised political party "suited to the task of conquering the State apparatus" (Anti-Oedipus, 255). 

       

[k] This phrase - 'all that is solid melts into air' - is famously found in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848). 

      Funnily enough, this was Nietzsche's main gripe against capitalism too; that it made society and culture impossible. From his earliest writings, such as 'The Greek State' (1871/72), Nietzsche argued that capitalism undermined the 'internally sturdy and sensitive bonds' that existed between rulers and ruled in noble society. This essay can be found in On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 176-186.

          Readers might like to note that I examined Nietzsche's critique of capitalism in my doctoral thesis, Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000), written during the same late-90s period in the philosophy department from which Fisher himself emerged.

 

[l] Fisher says that if minority race and religious groups understand themselves only by the features which they already possess, this is a form of reification: "You are already what you identify with." (167)

      Unfortunately, it's not these features - as positive as they may be - that define a people as a revolutionary class: "It's their structural and antagonistic position and the potential for transformation that occurs once consciousness develops that makes them potentially revolutionary agents." (167) 

      This, I think, explains why it is the radical Left likes to flirt with Islamists and secure the Muslim vote; it sincerely believes that one day the Muslims will see that their best interests are not served by Muhammad but by Marx. It's a fantasy, of course, and - ironically, one might even say a form of false consciousness.   

 

[m] So you see, my remark about The Beatles with which I closed section VI wasn't just inserted to be humorous or to take a pop at Fisher for the sake of it.    

 

[n] As I'm sure most readers will know, this line is from the film School of Rock (dir. Richard Linklater, 2003), starring Jack Black as Dewey Finn.  

 

[o] As I'm sure most readers will know, this is a line from Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Macmillan, 1961).  

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One can be read here.

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Two can be read here.

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Three can be read here. 

 

 

Musical bonus: The Beatles, 'Revolution', B-side of 'Hey Jude', a single release from 1968: click here.

 

  

Earth Calling the Sophia Space Agency

Melpomeni Kermanidou

Vocalist and Project Leader of the Sophia Space Agency 

 

Photo taken at The Turning Blue spatial audio playback + Q&A

Kings Place, London N1 

(24 June 2026)  

 

 

I. 

 

The other night, at Kings Place - the cultural pulse of King's Cross - I was pleased to offer my support to Melpomeni Kermanidou. A London-based, Greek-Australian composer, songwriter, music producer, and performer, Meni works across ambient, electronic synthesis, and cinematic genres [1].

 

Wearing a sleeveless white dress with a round neck, zipped front and slightly flared skirt cut above the knee - a retro space-age aesthetic from the 1960s that magically retains its clean, futuristic appeal - matched with a fabulous pair of white leather lace-up ankle boots, featuring a stacked heel and fluorescent neoprene pink details (Prada), she looked - as she always looks - extraordinarily beautiful (see the image above). 

 

 

II. 

 

Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the two gentlemen who shared the stage with her ...

 

Seventy-year-old musician, composer, arranger, record producer, and programmer Martyn Ware (yes - that Martyn Ware, founding member of the Human League and Heaven 17) sat opposite her, wearing what looked like a tie-dyed shirt and a pair of blue DC trainers. 

 

Beside him was Patrick Clarke, who interviewed Meni and Martyn in his role as journalist and Deputy Editor of online popular culture magazine The Quietus, wearing knee-length shorts that displayed the kind of pale legs forever associated with Ernie Wise (short, fat and hairy), along with a shirt that looked as if it had been slept in (and for more than one night).

 

I know it was very hot outside, but, really, they could have made a bit more of an effort. They were on a stage, after all, and in the presence of a serious artiste who has worked so hard for so long to bring this current project to fruition. To me, their complete lack of sartorial concern created a revealing tension with Meni's carefully curated aesthetic and it felt disrespectful to her professionalism, the audience, and the event (see the image below). 

 

 

III. 

 

Moving on - and remembering this was intended to be a music event and not a fashion show, I suppose I should say something about the album unveiled via spatial audio playback [2] as mixed by Martyn Ware (there was, sadly, to be no live performance on the night). 

 

Titled The Turning Blue [3], the album is a dark and experimental work of what is known as ambient music - a genre pioneered in the 1970s by the likes of Brian Eno, who coined the name and established the conceptual foundations for the genre [4]. It essentially prioritises tone, texture, and atmosphere over traditional musical structures like rhythm and melody and often incorporates elements of drone [5], minimalist classical and electronic music.   

 

Not entirely sure what to expect, I smiled when presented at the entrance to the hall with an eye mask, which we were asked to wear for the duration of the album's playing. Obviously, I wasn't going to do that. I wouldn't wear a blindfold to face a firing squad and I'm not going to do it in order to listen to some music, no matter how it's meant to enhance the immersive experience [6].

 

Actually, the album was pretty good and Melpomeni can be proud of her work. If, towards the end I got a bit bored and began to wish for ear plugs rather than an eye mask, this was not because the music lacked merit - there were intriguing elements and surprises throughout - but because I simply required a breather from its sheer intensity.  

 

Funnily enough, considering Melpomeni's Antipodean origins, rather than techno-alien I thought the album sounded a bit Aboriginal at certain points and it occurred to me that, although not inherently ambient in a modern sense, the hypnotic and sustained quality of Indigenous music could easily be adapted to the genre. At other times, I thought Meni's astonishing vocalisations came close to a form of whale song and I was reminded of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (dir. Leonard Nimoy, 1986). 

 

My primary concern, however, lies not with Meni's powerful compositions themselves, but with the pristine production and the spatial audio mix. Together, they constructed walls of sound which, as Martyn Ware said afterwards, had a cathedral-like quality. Such hyper-polished perfection and Wholeness becomes overwhelming and oppressive at last - every acoustic space is filled - and it is in stark opposition to the gargoyle aesthetic affirmed by Lawrence in The Rainbow (1915) [7] and championed here on Torpedo the Ark. 

 

One yearned for error and imperfection (and a little fresh air) rather than non-stop transcendent beauty and recurrent ecstasy; one listened out for sounds which existed externally to the album and I looked forward to hearing the little birds chirping in my garden in the morning; to hear a note that The Turning Blue did not include; "something free and careless and joyous" [8].

 

In space, it seems, not only can no one hear you scream, no one can hear you laugh either ...  

 

 

IV. 

 

As for the subsequent Q&A session, I enjoyed that as it gave me the opportunity to listen and learn and admire Miss Kermanidou's fabulous footwear. The stage discussion served to reinforce the deliberate nature of Melpomeni's artistic vision; the airless, clinical perfection of the mix wasn't an accident - it was exactly what she set out to achieve. 

 

And while I might personally believe in the ruins and think that a cathedral - including a cathedral of sound - is never perfectly a place of gathering until the roof has caved in and it is "mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs" [9] - there is no denying that Meni has executed her vision with absolute authority. 

 

The Turning Blue may not be a space I would choose to inhabit - and I was slightly relieved to step out into the chaotic streets of London once more - but it is undeniably a monument to Meni's extraordinary talent and dedication and I wish her all the success in the world. 

 

 

Martyn Ware, Patrick Clarke, and 

Melpomeni Kermanidou (SSA)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Whilst I'm unable to provide a full biography on a post such as this, here's a bit more about Miss Kermanidou for those who are interested: Melpomeni studied modern music composition at university in Melbourne, Australia before heading over to the UK. A long-serving member of the Mediæval Bæbes, she released her own solo album in 2010: 8 Tragedies, 2 Love Songs & A Breakdown (Lighthouse Records).  

      Meni then moved into the underground sound art scene; The Turning Blue (see note 3 below) marks her return to the surface. Miss Kermanidou serves as Chair of the Ivors Academy Future Sound Experience Council, which is dedicated to spatial sound, AI, ambient music, electronic music, and the latest in music creation. She is also a full member of the Music Producers Guild and registered with Fusion Management, one of the UK's leading talent and model agencies. 

      She can be contacted via all the usual social media websites.  

 

[2] For those who don't know - and before last night that included me - spatial audio involves the use of technology to create a 3D, immersive listening experience by simulating sounds as if they are coming from all around you. 

      Unlike traditional stereo sound - which only plays through left and right channels - spatial audio adds height and depth, making it feel like you are sitting in the middle of a soundscape. 

 

[3] The Turning Blue is the seven-track debut album from the experimental dark ambient sound project conceived by Melpomeni Kermanidou and known as the Sophia Space Agency. Mixed in spatial audio by Martyn Ware, it uses extensive vocal processing to create synthesised alien soundscapes.

      The Turning Blue is released independently on 17 July 2026 on digital platforms; a limited edition vinyl version, mastered in stereo by Rafael Anton Irisarri will be released later in the year.

 

[4] In 1978, Brian Eno - a one-time member of Roxy Music (1971-73) - released the album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (E.G. Records /Polydor). Punk rock it ain't! 

 

[5] Again, for those who might not be au fait with this genre - and again, before last night that included me - this is a minimalist type of music using sustained sounds, notes, or tone clusters (called drones). It is typically characterised by lengthy compositions featuring relatively slight harmonic variations. 

 

[6] I could tell the ageing hippie sitting next to me wasn't too impressed with my refusal to give myself over to the experience and play ball by wearing the eye mask. 

      But I don't like the enforcement of aesthetic compliance under strictly curated conditions; it's bad enough having to sit still and be quiet for the duration of a performance or playback, but being told to wear a blindfold in an already darkened hall and instructed on how to listen to pre-recorded audio seemed a bit much to me. Having said that, watching as audience members willingly blindfold themselves on command highlighted the immense control an artist can exert not only over her own work, but its reception.

      Ultimately, I'm just not a very good audience member for the same reason I'd make a lousy worshipper in church - I like distractions and the odd disruption to the performance, playback, or ceremony; anything to break the magic spell. 

 

[7] See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Chapter VII, 'The Cathedral', pp. 183-195. I have referred to the gargoyle aesthetic many times on TTA.

      For me, it includes cracks, gaps, fragments, ruins, ruptures, breakdowns, and not just the "wicked, odd little faces carved in stone" that peep out of the "grand tide of the cathedral" and expose the illusion of Wholeness (The Rainbow, 189). 

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 191.  

 

[9] Ibid. 

 

 

Musical bonus: visit the Sophia Space Agency YouTube channel and play the tracks: 'Star Cycle', written by Melopemi Kermanidou and produced by Melpomeni Kermanidou and Jasper Dent; and 'What a Mess', composed and produced by Melpomeni Kermanidou and Arjun Bhamra. 

      Both tracks can be found on the album The Turning Blue (Sophia Space Agency, 2026) - which may or may not come with an official SSA eye mask:

 

 

  

For a thoughtful sister post to this one by Jennifer Davis Taylor, please click here. 

 

  

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One

Repeater Books (2021) [a]

Design by JohnnyBull.uk

 

 

I.

 

Arguing that modern nihilism is essentially the collapse of all values into exchange value and that the revolutionary struggle has become a war waged by lovers, my doctoral thesis Outside the Gate [b] might have been subtitled: towards a postcapitalist politics of desire.

 

And so, I was naturally interested to see what Mark Fisher's approach to this subject would be in a lecture series he began (but didn't finish) at Goldsmiths in 2016 [c].  

 

 

II. 

 

Desire is one of those words that remains a key concept in critical thinking and is used widely across several disciplines (though not always in quite the same way). More than a simple biological urge, it tends to be viewed as a complex socio-linguistic construct that shapes human subjectivity, drives consumer culture, and interacts with power structures.

 

Like Fisher, I took my understanding of the term from Deleuze and Guattari, who critiqued traditional psychoanalytic views by arguing that desire is not caused by lack, but is a productive revolutionary force that shapes reality and builds new connections - an interpretation also found in the work of D. H. Lawrence, who writes that desire is a "strange current of interchange" [d] flowing between all things and bringing them into touch.

 

By the time I'd submitted the above thesis in March 2000, however, I was already a bit tired of the term and sympathetic to Foucault's argument that - despite everything - it always carried with it the assumption that human desires are not only innate but innately positive and healthy and that society only ever represses, exploits, or distorts them. 

 

Foucault famously told Deleuze he couldn't bear the word desire and preferred to speak only of bodies and their pleasures, arguing that localised pleasures acted as sites of transgression that could resist the normalising power structures that create categories of desire and identities [e].  

 

However, as I've mentioned, I'm intrigued to see what Fisher makes of this concept in his final lectures; how he excavates forgotten forms of desire from out of the past and invokes new and futuristic forms of desire beyond capitalism. 

 

And so, let us then turn to Lecture One: What is Postcapitalism (7 November 2016) ...

 

 

III. 

 

Fisher boldly puts to his class of students the following idea (much promoted by neoliberalism): Protestors against capitalism don't really want what they say they want ...

 

"What they want is all the fruits of capitalism - and ultimately that's why capitalism will win. They may claim, ethically, that they want to live in a different world but libidinally, at the level of desire, they are committed to living within the current capitalist world." (39)

 

They want global equity and justice, but they want their iPhones more.

 

Obviously, Fisher as a left-wing accelerationist and acid communist - i.e., one who believes in the existence of postcapitalist desire - rejects this. He thinks it's possible to "retain some of the libidinal, technological infrastructure of capital" (41) while at the same time move beyond it.      

 

Unfortunately, I don't share his political optimism rooted in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1970s. 

 

My thinking remains rooted (some would say trapped) much more in the cynical and destructive nihilism of the Sex Pistols and I'm a little disappointed as well as surprised to see Fisher, who had "previously been scathing about the legacy of the counterculture" [f], beginning to trust the hippies after all and daydream about what might have been if only the fusion of the counterculture and radical politics had "been more successful" (42) and lasted longer than it did.  

 

I agree with Fisher that Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) prefigures the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, but it's only incredible in that it's not to be taken seriously. I referred to it several times in Outside the Gate, but even at the time I recognised its utopianism was, like all forms of utopianism - even those presenting themselves as framed within Marxist materialism - too good to be true.  

 

Fisher tells his students that Marcuse is "a kind of precursor of Deleuze and Guattari" (42), but I think that's a little misleading - even if qualified by the use of the words kind of. 

 

For whilst it's true that Deleuze and Guattari admired Marcuse's intentions, they fiercely criticised his work in L'Anti-Œdipe (1972), arguing that Eros and Civilization does not go anywhere near far enough - in fact, even Wilhelm Reich went much further when it came to radically thinking the question of desire and society. 

 

Marcuse - and Fisher must know all this - continues to frame desire through Freud's lens of repression (and lack); fails to break out the Oedipal triangle; and, finally, maintains a dualistic division between work and play, which Deleuze and Guattari wish to dissolve.  

 

IV.

 

And then there's the question of consciousness ... Something Fisher is looking to raise in order to challenge the "ambient political assumption" (43) of capitalist realism that there's no alternative to the free market [g]. 

 

When it comes to consciousness raising, Fisher says we can all learn from feminist activists and members of various civil rights movements; i.e., people who like to share experiences in support groups, insist that the personal is political, and examine how different forms of inequality and subordination intersect.  

 

Obviously, while raising awareness does not automatically fix things or bring about meaningful change, it is, arguably, the crucial first step toward challenging the status quo. 

 

However, as someone who has sat in on a number of seminars and meetings designed to politically enlighten, let me tell you, they can also be boring as fuck and waste huge amounts of time; they can also quickly become echo chambers in which pre-existing views and prejudices are reinforced.    

 

Fisher seems to be particularly concerned with class consciousness, which is understandable given his background. Born in 1968 in the East Midlands to working-class parents - his father was an engineering technician and his mother a cleaner - Fisher's perspective was fundamentally shaped by his childhood experiences and he would later argue that being working class involved a deeply internalised feeling of ontological inferiority [h].  

 

As an Essex boy also born in the 1960s to working-class parents - my father was a printer at the Bank of England and my mother a housewife who had part-time jobs cleaning - I absolutely understand what he means. My own political consciousness was raised when I was about six years old and my mother told me a story about how my father was once knocked off his bike as he cycled to work by one of the bosses in a big car who didn't even bother to stop; that told me all I needed to know about class.    

 

 

V.

 

The final lecture that Fisher gave - in week five (5 December 2016) - was a reading of Jean-François Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1974) and I'm looking forward to hearing what he says about a work that, in Fisher's own words, makes the particularly strong case that "there's no possible retreat from capitalism - there's no space of primitive outside to which we can return, we have to go all the way through capitalism" (45) now, like it or not.  

 

It's a shame that we never got to hear his thoughts on the subjects due for discussion in weeks six through fifteen - including accelerationism, cyberfeminism, and the work of Baudrillard - but there you go; the course was, as Matt Colquhoun puts it, "tragically interrupted" [i]. 

 

And it's kind of touching that, apparently, for the first few weeks after his suicide "students continued to use the seminar room during the module's scheduled Monday morning time slots to sit together and remember their lecturer" [j]. This mournful vigil eventually transformed into a self-organised reading group - a collective act that tells us something not insignificant about Fisher's impact. 

 

 

VI. 

 

Opening things up to his students, Fisher encourages them to share their thoughts on the course structure and content. He hopes that they will supply what is missing - namely, ideas drawn from the world of art and culture, suggesting that the role of aesthetics in political theory is often "underestimated by elements of the so-called Old Left" (50).    

 

He also hopes they'll interrogate the term postcapitalism, which he uses in preference to communism or socialism, words "tainted by association with past failed and oppressive projects" (50). Fisher argues that postcapitalism also implies victory:

 

"If you're talking about postcapitalism, it implies that there's something beyond capitalism. It also implies [...] a victory that will come through capitalism. It's not just opposed to capitalism - it's what will happen when capitalism has ended. It's not some entirely separate space [...] we're not required to imagine a sheer alterity, a pure outside." (50-51)

 

I have to say, I'm not sure about this: the prefix post doesn't always mean beyond or after when used in a cultural and/or philosophical context, does it? Take, for example, postmodernism - a term that implies neither a simple temporal progression nor a clear victory over modernism. It signifies a critical engagement with and a transformation of the root word rather than what comes after.

 

To be fair, Fisher recognises the somewhat complicated (even ambivalent) relationship between capitalism and postcapitalism; the fact that we might enjoy the pleasures and products it provides but still want something else, something more, something different. The fact is, capitalism and postcapitalism have overlapping timelines and the latter relies on the former in order to make its critique. 

 

Rather than think in terms of victory or progress, it would be better to view postcapitalism as capitalism coming to terms with its own ambiguities, limitations, and, indeed, radical possibilities - or does that make me capitalocentrist?    

 

 

VII.

 

In response to a question from a student, Fisher mentions his concept of acid communism and Matt Colquhoun is surely right to say that he uses his new lecture-seminar series "to workshop his next book" [k], which he defines here as psychedelic consciousness plus class consciousness; i.e. the becoming-hippie of Arthur Seaton.  

 

Again, as I think I've indicated, acid communism is not an idea I'm convinced by, though it's an interesting turn of phrase in which each term modifies the other and breaks them out of existing associations.   

   

I am more onside with Fisher when he says that one of the things most needed is a politics free from ressentiment. 

 

He suggests that solidarity might be crucial to the building of such. However, because solidarity is "tainted by association with Leninism" (61), he prefers the term fellowship - a more Lawrentian-sounding term, although - ironically - the word originally referred to a type of business consortium [l].  

 

 

VIII. 

 

At the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Mellors sends Connie a letter in which, amongst other things, he sets out his vision of a postcapitalist world, arguing that communal regeneration was possible once men and women realised that life and the pursuit of money are not one and the same thing:

 

"'If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend [...] if they could dance and hop and skip, and sing and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash [...] They ought to learn to be naked and handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on [...] Then they wouldn't need money. And that's the only way to solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness, without needing to spend.'" [m]

 

I thought of this when Fisher introduced the idea of folk politics to his class - a concept developed (but not shared) by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, which argues that radical politics should consist of "'localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism'" carried out by people "'content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations'" (62) [n].

 

Fisher also rejects folk politics - and I can see the problems. On the other hand, however, I worry about the revival of grand political narratives and those who think in terms of great events and the total transformation of society.  

 

It would seem to me that acid communism can only succeed if it learns how to be "content and constant in invisible activities" [o] and change is administered in what Nietzsche calls small doses over long periods of time. Rome wasn't toppled in a day. And: "The chicken does not break the shell out of animosity." [p]    

 

 

IX.

 

I had to smile at Fisher's confession that he doesn't know anything about economics - particularly as a friend of mine bought the book hoping to learn something new and insightful on this subject (which he teaches). 

 

I did try to pre-warn him that Fisher was basically a cultural theorist more interested in the impact of capitalism on mental health, the arts, and desire rather than the risk of inflation or what to do about the trade deficit. 

 

More interested in suggesting, for example, that The Beatles provide a great example of what a post-work society might look like:

  

"They didn't have to work. They'd made enough money, surely, by the early Sixties to just not work [q]. Then their most interesting, experimental stuff emerged [...] partly because they were freed from the pressure of having to worry about a salary [...]" (76). 

 

Fisher then asks his class: "Is that a silly example or not?" (76), which, perhaps from politeness, is a question left hanging (though I think we all know the answer).    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references given in the post (in round brackets) refer to this edition. 

 

[b] Stephen A. Hall, Outside the Gate: Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation Mediated via the Work of D. H. Lawrence (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. This thesis was supervised by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Michael Bell. A revised version was published in 2010 by Blind Cupid Press.  

 

[c] The course was supposed to last for fifteen weeks, but Fisher killed himself on Friday the 13th of January 2017, so the remaining ten weeks of the seminar did not go ahead as planned. The course syllabus (along with suggested reading) is included as Appendix One in Postcapitalist Desire (211-216).  

 

[d] 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. 

 

[e] Deleuze, in turn, expressed his hatred of the term pleasure, which for him marked an interruption of the immanent process of desire. See 'Désir et plaisir', in Magazine littéraire, Issue 325 (October 1994), pp. 59-65. Note that this text was actually written in 1977 as a private letter from Deleuze to Foucault (via their mutual friend François Ewald).   

      An English translation of this text by Melissa McMahon can be accessed via the Monash University website: click here. It can also be found in Deleuze's Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975 - 1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 122-134.        

[f] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 1. 

 

[g] See Colquhoun's Introduction for an interesting discussion of Fisher and the idea of consciousness raising, pp. 15-17. 

 

[h] See the article 'Good For Nothing' in The Occupied Times (19 March 2014): click here. The piece can also be found in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 668-670 (the phrase 'ontological inferiority' is found on p. 669).

 

[i] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 29. 

 

[j] Matt Colquhoun, Appendix One, Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 211.   

 

[k] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 9.

 

[l] Fellow derives from the Old English fēolaga, which translates literally to 'one who puts down money in a joint undertaking'. So a fellowship was originally a group of partners in property or business. It was only later that it took on the broader modern meaning of a community of people sharing common interests.  

 

[m] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 299-300. I discuss the contents of Mellors's letter in Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 258-261. 

 

[n] Fisher is quoting Srnicek and Williams writing in '#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics', in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Urbanomic, 2014), p. 354. 

      Just to be clear, the authors reject folk politics in favour of a model that is 'at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology' and which 'seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow'.   

 

[o] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Book V, § 534, p. 211.  

 

[p] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 305. 

 

[q] I don't think it's being overly pedantic to point out that, as a matter of fact, although by 1964 The Beatles were generating astronomical revenues, their personal wealth was limited and cash flow was restricted by poor early recording contracts, high British taxes, and manager Brian Epstein's initial handling of their business and publishing rights. 

      It was not until the following year that the four members of the band finally had millions of pounds in their personal bank accounts.