Mark Fisher photographed in 2011 at
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
'Politics is the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind and it has never achieved anything
except a deepened idiocy ... Quite naturally we are bored of it to the point of acute sickness.'
- Nick Land (1992)
I.
Having read the first fifty-odd pages of Mark Fisher's political writings collected in k-punk (2018) [a] and having commented on them in a previously published post - click here - I must confess I'm increasingly sympathetic to Nick Land's position stated above.
However, once I start reading a book, I'm like the proverbial dog with a bone ... And so, here are some more fragmented remarks on Fisher's political writings, as I once more pick out those things that either inspire or irritate; delight or disappoint ...
II.
For Fisher, Damien Hirst is the artist of capitalist realism par excellence. Thus, whilst he's "not interested in rehearsing [...] discussions of Hirst's merits as an artist" (444), he is interested in Hirst's "symptomatic status as a figure who embodies capital's penetration into all areas of culture" (444).
Personally, I think it a little ridiculous to even mention Hirst in the same sentence as Andy Warhol, but Fisher claims that the former is, in fact, "the Warhol of capitalist realism" (444) albeit one who has "none of Warhol's blank charisma" (444) - or genius.
Fisher writes:
"In place of Warhol's android awkwardness Hirst offers a blokish bonhomie. Warhol's studied banality has become the genuinely ultrabanal. Or, rather, the Hirst phenomenon typifies the way in which, in late-capitalist art and entertainment culture, the ultrabanal and the super-spectacular have become (con)fused." (444-445)
For Fisher, Hirst's work lacks any ambiguity: it is what it is, no more, no less, and in its flat realism it "leaves no space for commentary" (445). His dead animals in formaldehyde "cannot be re-imagined, transfigured or changed" (445) - just like the political system and the culture which produced them.
III.
Torpedo the Ark wasn't a thing back in the summer of 2012, but, if it had been, I'm pretty sure that what Fisher says of the London Olympics is what I would have said: they were designed to be a massive distraction; "the antidote to all discontent" (449).
Sit back, relax, forget all your worries, and enjoy the show - brought to you by McDonalds and Coca-Cola.
Just to be clear: you can hate the greed and cynicism of the corporate sponsors and hate the media who broadcast the event with professional enthusiasm - or hysterical PR delirium as Fisher describes it - and still love the sport (though, in my case, I don't give a shit about sweaty athletes competing for medals and breaking records).
Fisher nails exactly what's going on:
"The point of capital's sponsorship of cultural and sporting events is not only the banal one of accruing brand awareness. Its more important function is to make it seem that capital's involvement is a precondition for culture as such. [...] It is a pervasive reinforcement of capitalist realism." (450)
Amusingly, Mark isn't a fan either of the ArcelorMittal Orbit - that 376-ft sculpture and observation tower designed by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond and intended to be a lasting legacy of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. My mother described it as an eyesore, but Fisher says it's the perfect symbol of the inertia and sterility of capitalist realist culture.
IV.
Capitalist realism is both a belief and an attitude: we believe that it is the only viable option (that there is no alternative); and we therefore resign ourselves to this with a mixture of defeatism and depression - politics is over, history has terminated, and now we're all in it together.
Fisher thinks the only hope is to raise consciousness among the young; get them to see that there can be an alternative modernity (only don't confuse this with postmodernism, which, like Fredric Jameson, he hates and believes to be the cultural logic of late capitalism).
The other thing to do is get the young to engage with mainstream forms and institutions (despite what the anarchists say); "the idea that mainstream culture is inherently coopted, and all we can do is withdraw from it, is deeply flawed" (466) [b]. That is perhaps the most liberal-sounding thing Fisher ever wrote, although, arguably, it is entirely consistent with his radical politics (later named acid communism).
Where I do not agree with Fisher, however, is on the question of success and failure. In a revealing passage, he writes:
"There is too much toleration of failure [...] If I ever have to hear again that Samuel Beckett quote, 'Try again, fail again, fail better', I will go mad. Why do we even think in these terms? There is no honour in failure, though there is no shame in it if you have tried to succeed. Instead of that stupid slogan we should aim to learn from our mistakes in order to succeed next time. The odds might be stacked in such a way that we do keep losing, but the point is to increase our collective intelligence. That requires, if not a party structure of the old type, then at least some kind of system of coordination and some system of memory." (467)
My goodness me! Anyone wishing to know how, where, and why k-punk differs from TTA might be advised to start with this passage ...
First of all, no matter what Fisher seems to think, even if we can learn from our mistakes, we don't learn how to succeed in the future. At most, as Beckett indicates, we learn only how to fail better. For as much as we may wish to believe that endurance, struggle and sacrifice will eventually pay off, success is never an option: we are destined and doomed to fail; such is the tragic character of existence (it takes what Nietzsche calls a pessimism of strength to affirm this and find in it a source of dark comedy) [c].
Secondly, unlike Mr Fisher, I do not think in terms of honour and shame and I would not wish to belong to the kind of collectivist culture which subscribes to this way of thinking (and judging); i.e., the kind of culture where breaches of social or religious norms that threaten to bring shame (or dishonour) upon a family or community often lead to ugly acts of violence.
Linking these notions to a system of coordination, memory, and collective intelligence sounds suspiciously like the imposition of a bureaucratic superego to me and one fears that even the most acidic form of communism would invariably result in increased surveillance, control, and conformity [d]. Prioritising the collective over the individual and thinking in terms of honour and shame obliges us to align with party goals and justifies the State using public humiliation to punish deviants and deter dissent [e].
Obviously, Fisher wouldn't want this to happen. But the language he uses in the passage above makes me more than a little uncomfortable ...
V.
For me, Fisher is at his best when at his most outrageous; as he is in the piece entitled 'Suffering with a Smile' (2013), in which he describes how the division between life and work no longer exists and that even CEOs are servants of the Machine.
Now workers are not only stretched to their physical limits, but obliged to smile and show how much they love their jobs:
"Being exploited is no longer enough. The nature of labour now is such that almost anyone, no matter how menial their position, is required to be seen (over)investing in their work. What we are forced into is not merely work, in the old sense of undertaking an activity we don't want to perform; no, now we are forced to act as if we want to work." (473)
And yet ... that's not quite right: "The subjugatory libidinal forces [...] don't want us to entirely conceal our misery. For what enjoyment is there to be had from exploiting a worker who actually delights in their work?" (473)
And so, in order to understand the sadistic game being played now in the world of work, one must consider the pornographic practice of bukkake:
"Here, men ejaculate in women's faces, and the women are required to act as if they enjoy it [...] What's being elicited from the women is an act of simulation. The humiliation is not adequate unless they are seen to be performing an enjoyment they don't actually feel. Paradoxically, however, the subjugation is only complete if there are some traces of resistance. A happy smile, ritualised submission; this is nothing unless signs of misery can also be detected in the eyes." (474)
That's a brilliant insight into the staging of desire and reminds one of how cruelty remains one of the oldest pleasures of mankind ...[f]
VI.
One of the ironies of punk was that although it protested against boredom, it was in fact born of such and derived much of its impetus and inspiration from the fact that everything in the mid-1970s seemed so bloody boring to many teenagers looking for emotional rages as TV Smith would have it [g].
Fisher understands that and regrets the manner in which smartphones have effectively eliminated boredom via constant distraction. Now, young people are anxious and depressed, but never bored.
Amusingly, he writes that he almost feels nostalgic for the "dreary void of Sundays, the night hours after television stopped broadcasting, even the endless dragging minutes waiting in queues or for public transport" (485). The smartphone provides a vast array of features and applications offering instant, on-demand entertainment - who could ask for more?
Fisher, for one - and I'd second him here: "Boredom was ambivalent; it wasn't simply a negative feeling that one simply wanted rid of. For punk, the vacancy of boredom was a challenge, an injunction and an opportunity ..." (485)
In neutralising boredom and dispersing our attention, capitalism has made everything boring!
Notes
[a] Mark Fisher, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018). Please note that all page references to this text will be given directly in the post.
[b] In the article 'How to Kill a Zombie: Strategising the End of Neoliberalism' (2013), Fisher writes: "Neo-anarchist doctrine maintains that we should abandon mainstream media and parliament - but our abandoning it has only allowed for neoliberals to extend their power and influence." (478).
Similarly, Fisher argues that the anarchist emphasis on direct action "conceals a despair about the possibility of indirect action" (478), yet it is only via the latter that "the control of ideological narratives is achieved" (478).
And later, in 'Limbo is Over' - a k-punk post from April 2015 - Fisher even breaks ranks with his then hero Russell Brand and encourages people to get out and vote: "It's hard not to have some sympathy with Brand's disdain for voting [...] But the problem is that popular disengagement from parliamentary politics suits the right more than us." (490) I don't know if that's true, but I tend to share Sartre's position on this question and agree that whilst it might make sense to sometimes vote against, one should never vote for.
[c] See my post on Beckett's phrase from Worstward Ho (1983) dated 11 June 2013: click here.
[d] Fisher would obviously challenge this. Indeed, in 'How to Kill a Zombie' he does precisely that, writing that whilst he doesn't want a return to "old-school Leninism", he would like to see the left get a little more organised and "overcome certain habits of anti-Stalinist thinking" (479), so that it might impose an effective programme of change and take seriously the task of actively dismantling neoliberalism.
In other words - and Fisher is explicit about this - the task for those on the left is not merely to rethink questions of solidarity, but retrain in the art of class war. I'm afraid this is all a bit too militant for my tastes.
[e] Readers will recall how, in the Soviet Union, prorabotka sessions were held in workplaces and universities; or how, in Maoist China, class enemies were forced to publicly confess misdeeds and wear derogatory signs, thereby creating a culture of self-censorship and fear, wherein individuals closely monitored their own actions to avoid being labelled a regime opponent.
[f] In Daybreak (I. 18), Nietzsche argues that cruelty should not be viewed as a perverse aberration, but, rather, as one of the "oldest festive joys of mankind". In his view, the ability to inflict or witness suffering was historically not only a source of deep delight, but also an act via which "the community refreshes itself and for once throws off the gloom of constant fear and caution".
I am using R. J. Hollingdale's translation in the 1982 Cambridge University Press edition of Nietzsche's book originally published in German as Morgenröthe - Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile (1881).
[g] I'm referencing the song 'Bored Teenagers', written by TV Smith of punk group The Adverts (which featured as the b-side of their hit single 'Gary Gilmore's Eyes' (Anchor Records, 1977): click here to watch them play the track live on The Old Grey Whistle Test (BBC2, Feb 1978).
And here's another classic punk track on the theme of boredom - written by Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks and included
on their Spiral Scratch EP (New Hormones, 1977): click here.
This post continues here.
