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. 

 

  

Earth Calling the Sophia Space Agency - An Alternative View by Jennifer Davis Taylor

Jennifer Davis Taylor and Melpomeni Kermanidou 

(Project Leader of the Sophia Space Agency)

 

 

Never let it be said that Torpedo the Ark doesn't encourage alternative perspectives ... 

 

Here's a thoughtful response submitted by Jennifer Davis Taylor - an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and creative practitioner who was present at the Sophia Space Agency audio event at Kings Place that I wrote about in a recent post: click here. 

She writes:  

 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander, 

 

Like you, I attended the launch of Melpomeni Kermanidou's debut album released under the name of the Sophia Space Agency, but I noticed entirely different things about both the staging and the spatial audio playback.

      

For me, the theatre space was defined by its intimacy - just right for twenty or thirty people. We weren't overcrowded. I liked the proportions of the room and the ratio of space to people because I didn't feel unnerved by the energy around me. The stage was bathed in blue light. The three empty chairs, with ferns interspersed between them, gave me a sense of anticipation. The eye masks we were handed at the door heightened this feeling for me. It felt as if there might be a party game, with some slight unpredictability that would enhance the fun. 

      

What initially strikes me about your post, Stephen, is that you understood the event as a scene before experiencing it as a playback. That feels right. Meni's white dress and boots were not incidental decoration; they communicated that the event was a kind of carnivalesque space - theatrical and operating slightly outside the normal rules of social interaction. Her appearance gave us permission to expect the unexpected. She appeared to have dressed not only for the event but for the imaginative space the work itself asked us to enter: retro-futuristic, feminine, controlled, luminous, slightly alien. Because she appeared after the playback, her appearance also felt like a validation of our varied internal imaginative responses to the experimental soundscape. 

      

The contrast of her appearance with the two men on stage may well have been a failure of individual sartorial taste. However, accidental as it may have been, I also found it to be an effective foil. Meni was easily able to hold the visual and conceptual field of the event almost by herself. At the same time, the men's presentation demonstrated an asymmetry of cultural permission. Male authority is often allowed to arrive uncomposed, rumpled, ordinary, even careless. Female artistry in dress, because it is more expected, also has a kind of privilege in public. Women are allowed to carry atmosphere, beauty, and coherence, even though they are also often expected to enact that symbolic labour. 

      

That imbalance became part of the performance, whether anyone intended it or not. The stage picture quietly exposed who is permitted to appear as an expert without adornment, who needs to dress up to be received as one, and what that dressing up costs. Meni's costume was beautiful. However, it also leaned into her identity as a performance artist rather than only as a musical innovator. I was reminded of Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, whose technological inventions anticipated later developments in wireless communications. Even today, that far more significant contribution remains overshadowed by her glamorous persona. In this case, had Meni not performed sartorially, she might not have carried the evening so successfully. Could she have appeared in rumpled clothes and smeared makeup? Would that have drawn more attention to her genius? I suspect not. 

 

Further to this, I was also interested in your argument about spatial audio producing a kind of cathedral effect: immersive, beautiful, technically pristine, but finally perhaps too complete. That seems to me the strongest critical idea in the post. The problem is not that the music is beautiful, or even that it is overwhelming. The problem is what happens when a work leaves no remainder - no gap, no exterior, no accidental birdsong, no human roughness through which the listener can breathe. 

      

While I was experiencing it, however, I wasn't disturbed by the rules of the space or by the idealistic premise. Perhaps this was because the experience was finite for me. I didn't worry about its implications as a large collective movement or as a mass vehicle for a set of values. The producers admitted that this style of music does not lend itself easily to mass consumption. The technological setup for enjoying it is prohibitive and inconvenient. Therefore, I could contemplate beauty and accept transcendence as a gift that Ms Kermanidou and Martyn Ware were trying to offer, without feeling that I had to buy into their idealism wholesale. 

      

More troubling, for me, was the clash between the themes of the work - planetary destruction - and the medium itself, which relies on cyberstorage and power centres that may also be environmentally harmful. Even though I was struck by that potential irony, I also saw how the music fulfilled some classic roles of art: to be of its time, to generate new forms, and to make visible the contradictions of the present.       

 

It was a rich and enjoyable experience that gave me a lot to think about. I learned a lot. I took away questions that will help me to be a better thinker and artist.

 

 

Notes

 

Jennifer Davis Taylor appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. 

 

As stated, she is an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and creative practitioner who holds a PhD from The Warburg Institute (University of London) and specializes in seventeenth-century French art and literature, women's studies, and material culture. 

      

Her forthcoming book, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault (Peter Lang), reframes Perrault not merely as a fairy tale author but as a theorist of design whose collaborative studio practice staged radical allegories of female agency.

 

Readers are encouraged to visit the website: jenniferdavistaylor.com for further information. 

 

 

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. 

       

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

Zer0 Books (2025) [a] 

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk 

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IV. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

V. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

  

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

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

Zer0 Books (2025) [a] 

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk 

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

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

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

He writes:

 

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

 

Fisher continues:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II.  

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

   

 

III. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IV.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

V. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Fisher writes:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

   

Fisher concludes:

 

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

 

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

 

VI.

 

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

 

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

 

Anyway, I was not impressed: 

 

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

  

Fisher, however, LOVES the film:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

VII. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

VIII. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IX. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

  

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

   

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

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

       

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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