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

Zer0 Books (2025) [a] 

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk  

Three variations by SA (2026)

 

'When we can no longer pass to the other side of the mirror 

then the age of transcendence will have passed ...'  

 

I.

 

Mark Fisher and his CCRU chums, like Baudrillard, had an amusing penchant for the prefix hyper ... 

 

Originating from the Ancient Greek ὑπέρ - meaning over, above, or excessively beyond - it forms augmentative words indicating states far more intense than normal. Doctors call high blood pressure hypertension; parents of kids who can't sit still say their fidgety brats are hyperactive.

 

Anyway, Fisher titles the final chapter of Flatline Constructs 'Black Mirror: Hypernaturalism, Hyperreality, and Hyperfiction' and these are the concepts we're discussing here in relation to the central question: What happens when fiction propagates, contaminating the Real? 

 

But first, let's take a quick glance into the black mirror itself ...

 

 

II.

 

Hear the term black mirror and you immediately think of Charlie Brooker's Channel 4 TV series [b], where it stood for the dead screens of inactive smartphones and laptops. Indeed, plenty of people mistakenly credit Brooker with coining it.

 

But for Fisher, writing long before Brooker's show, the phrase carried far older, stranger resonances. In occult traditions, a black mirror is a tool for scrying - a dark surface gazed into to communicate with non-human entities or induce visions; a portal to an alternative reality. 

 

As we saw in a previous post, whilst Fisher's foundational texts are mostly drawn from materialist philosophy and cyberpunk fiction, his Gothic Materialist framework is explicitly built to collapse the line between the technological and the magical. 

 

Thus, while modern digital screens might not be made of obsidian, they serve the exact same purpose as a sorcerer's mirror. They induce trances, suspend human agency, and - rather than merely reflecting the world - actively manufacture our understanding of reality and shape our being. 

 

The black mirror isn't simply an object displaying representations: it's a gateway allowing inorganic forces to loop into human reality and hack the future; a threshold where man and machine meet on the same plane. But it is also the definitive interface of communicative capitalism, offering the illusion of connection while locking us into recursive libidinal loops of consumption; an "event horizon beyond which we cannot go" (194).  

  

 

III.  

 

"The cyberneticisation of fiction begins when fiction begins to affect, rather than simply reflect, the Real. This feedback circuit means the end of fiction as mirror, the end of realism in its mimetic mode." (189)

 

What this means is we're heading into the world of hyper this, that, and the other and what Fisher, after William Gibson, calls voodoo; a practice and an explanatory system that has nothing to do with the supernatural and everything to do with hyperreality and the hypernatural.

 

I'm not sure I want to dwell on the relationship between cyberspace and voodoo at any length, but it's important to say that for Fisher voodoo refers to the process of cybernetic systems and technologies taking on a queer undead life of their own - like zombies - thereby eroding the boundaries between living subjects and inanimate objects. 

 

According to this voodoo philosophy, how we relate to the modern world is similar to the way in which archaic societies related to spirits. But crucially, "whilst parallel, voodoo and cybernetics, like the world and cyberspace, are not ultimately reducible to one another, precisely because there is a relation of feedback between the two" (191). 

 

In other words, there is no equivalence of terms; they are not synonymous and neither do they share a metaphorical relationship; the possibility of metaphor disappears, says Baudrillard, when there are no longer distinct objects within differential fields, which, in the age of "'networks and integrated circuits'" (191), there are not [c].   

 

 

IV. 

 

Does anyone still refer to cyberspace? 

 

It feels a bit dated and retro; a stark reminder that Flatline Constructs was written in the 1990s; Fisher uses the word - coined by Gibson - almost obsessively [d].      

 

And yet, perhaps the fact that most of us pretty much stopped using the word cyberspace is not because the concept turned out to be limited, or meaningless, or have built-in obsolescence like many trendy terms do, but because cyberspace is simply what we inhabit today as reality.  

 

We no longer talk about cyberspace, but we do our banking, buy our groceries, and conduct our relationships online. The fiction has fully contaminated and shapes the real world just as predicted; cyberspace, in other words, is now continuous with the world and the relationship between cyberspace and the world must be understood "in terms of the [...] tangled, complicated (and Deleuzian) 'figure' of the implex" (196).   

 

Now, as we all know, the reflex is a lonely child just waiting by the park [e] - but what is the implex?

 

Deriving from the Latin implexus - the past participle of implectere - the English word implex means complicated and entangled. Whilst primarily a literary and/or philosophical term, implex is also used in genealogy to describe pedigree collapse, where the branches of a family tree begin to loop back on themselves due to intermarriage. 

 

Fisher defines the way in which he uses the concept in his work thus:

 

"The implex describes less a relationship between objects than a transformation that happens to a system. The implex designates a process of folding, or unfolding: thus cyberspace is neither 'inside' nor 'outside' the world, it constitutes a fold in the world that is nevertheless a real production - an addition - to the world as such." (196)  

 

If it helps, think of remarks inserted into a text and contained in brackets; they are not quite part of the sentence, but, nevertheless, add something to it - perhaps even transforming its meaning. 

 

 

V. 

 

Perhaps because he's coming to the end of his thesis, Fisher has started to offer convenient summaries composed of short sentences. For example:

 

"In the age of cybernetic communication, everything connects. Your picture of reality is processed through media, but media are not out of the picture any more than you are. There are no spectators, and no spectacle. You participate whether you like it or not. Nothing is outside the loop." (198)

 

Gothic materialism in a nutshell - I like it! Here's another example:

 

"It is important to remember that the hyperreal is characterised not as the surreal or the unreal, but as the more real than real." (198)

 

That's more Baudrillard in a nutshell than Fisher, but who cares about author rights at this stage of the game?  Everyone agrees that this is true - including Ballard, for whom, like Baudrillard and Borges and Gibson, the mirror is replaced by the screen; something that "does not represent or reflect a primary world" (199), but blurs the distinction between ourselves and it.   

 

And, in a sense, postmodern fiction is a bit like TV: simulating the Real, not reflecting it - literary critics speak of the crisis of representation (everything, of course, was in crisis or at breaking point in the 1990s) [f]. 

 

In the old days, we had to worry about an unreliable narrator; now we have to worry about the status (and reliability) of literature itself - and, indeed, mourn the death of the author (though I'll not be shedding too many tears, I have to admit). 

 

And then there's metafiction - "another case of imploded transcendence in which the book no longer reflects the world, but only because the world has been absorbed into it, meta-textualised" (202) [g].   

   

No wonder so many people have given up reading [h] - or beat a retreat to the so-called classics written in a time when books were windows on the world (and the human condition) and authors towered over the text like living literary giants. 

 

 

VI.

 

One of the things that Fisher does in chapter four is challenge Baudrillard's argument that the triumph of cybernetics puts an end to both fiction and critical theory, on the grounds that we no longer possess a stable, objective reality to contrast them against.

 

For Baudrillard, we are trapped in a carcinogenic state of hyperreality that terminates the Real and causes a "metastatic occupation of the zones which used to double reality (shadow, dream, and myth)" (207). Fisher fiercely rejects such defeatism, putting forward the crucial notion of hyperstition - a theoretical-fictional quantity that actively makes itself real.

 

In other words, Fisher rejects Baudrillard's melancholic nihilism and rather than mourn the murder of the Real, he wishes to accelerate the process and, like Deleuze and Guattari, rescue the radical potential of cybernetics, recognising that non-human, algorithmic networks are transforming what it means to be human.

 

 

VII.

 

Interestingly, Fisher also introduces ideas of animism and demonism to describe how we interact with cybernetic technology and media. Traditionally, the first of these ideas posits the belief that non-human objects possess souls and, as Donna Haraway famously noted, for us moderns our machines - if not exactly soulful - are nevertheless disturbingly animated. 

 

Fisher notes: 

 

"From its very beginnings, the modern(ist) science of cybernetics was haunted by the resurgence of belief structures which, in Freud's terms, would have been considered vestiges from the most archaic parts of the mind: beliefs he characterised as 'animistic'." (217) 

 

As for demonism, Fisher writes:

 

"The cybernetic lexicon has shown a remarkable predilection for invoking the word 'demon'. For obvious reasons; cybernetic systems simulate conscious function without possessing it. The term 'demonic' suggests both this possibility of agency-without-subjectivity and hints at the power of metamorphic becoming proper to entities of simulation." (217) 

 

Drawing as usual on Deleuze and Guattari, Fisher reframes demons not as supernatural entities, but as quasi-autonomous agencies. When we interact with complex, responsive systems - like the AIs in William Gibson's Neuromancer - they behave as if exercising a will of their own. Thus, rather than controlling technology, the machines possess us; altering our behaviour and producing unexpected outcomes.

 

Ultimately, Fisher is saying that in our hyperreal, technological age, the classic human soul or individual psyche is an illusion. We are deeply entangled with inorganic networks. By embracing the language of demonism and animism, Fisher avoids mechanistic science and, instead, formulates his theory of Gothic Materialism, acknowledging that the non-human world is fully alive with strange, unpredictable agencies. 

 

Obviously, as someone who likes objects and object-oriented forms of philosophy in which "the distinction between living and nonliving, between thing and entity" (218) is untenable, Fisher's Gothic Materialism holds great appeal (more so, as a matter of fact, than his later work which gets a bit too hippie-humanist at times - despite what defenders of acid communism say). 

 

 

VIII.

 

The big news story of the day: the UK government has announced a social media ban for under-16s. It will be introduced in early 2027. Keeping children off social media is the best way to keep them safe online, said Prime Minister Keir Starmer, adding that he wants to give children back their childhoods. 

 

Hearing this made me smile, as I had just finished reading Fisher explain how children know more about technology than parents, teachers, or politicians and their early encounter with cybernetic systems immunises them against much of the moral metaphysical bullshit that the adult world seeks to enforce. 

 

Children are natural born animists and "increasingly live in a Gothic Materialist chaosmos" (222). Fisher continues: 

 

"In many ways, children occupy the frontier-zones of capitalism, operating as probe-heads in what, for adults, is the future. Indeed [...] it might be said that the child's universe of animist presences and animal-becomings has far more purchase on capitalist (and schizophrenic) reality than adults' continued belief in subjective interiority." (223) [i]

 

  

IX. 

 

Fisher closes chapter four - and his thesis - with an analysis of a film I've never seen and, to tell the truth, I've never even heard of: John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1994) ... A supernatural horror movie heavily influenced by the work of Lovecraft and which blurs the line between reality and fiction in a way that must have had Fisher terribly excited at the time. 

 

Let's say it received mixed reviews upon release - but it has since gained something of a cult following and Fisher declares it to be "perhaps the only film to merit the description hyper-horror" (228). 

 

It's easy to see why he says this and why he loves it so: the film tracks a horror novelist whose pulp fiction literally rewrites reality, culminating in a scene where the film's protagonist (insurance agent John Trent) sits in a derelict cinema watching the very movie he is trapped inside. It's the ultimate cyber-cinematic loop. 

 

Personally, however, I would still rather rewatch Gerald Thomas's Carry On Screaming (1966), because humorous horror matters more to me than hyper-horror. Both films exploit the conventions of the genre, but whereas In the Mouth of Madness does so in order to amplify "feelings of dread and disquiet" (228), Carry on Screaming does so in order to induce laughter. 

 

Nevertheless, the latter remains a work that can be read in terms of Gothic Materialism ... 

 

For example, central to the film is the idea that human beings can be transformed into inanimate mannequins for sale through a process of dollification. This perfectly illustrates Fisher’s interest in the loss of agency and the blurring of boundaries between organisms and objects. It might also be argued that Oddbod's cloning - called regeneration in the film - provides an example of the biological being subordinated to mechanically-induced propagation.   

 

There's a good deal more I could say (and would like to say) about Carry On Screaming, but this is not really the time or place (perhaps in another post, at another time). 

 

It may not be a "hyperfictionalisation of Lovecraft" (231) and it may not have amused Deleuze and Guattari, but it remains a brilliant work of pulp modernism and I can't help thinking that there was something as hypercamp about Fisher's mentor Nick Land as there was about Kenneth Williams's performance as Dr. Watt. I can even imagine Land frantically pacing around a laboratory-cum-lecture-hall, delivering apocalyptic prophecies about technological singularities before screaming into the abyss: Frying tonight!   

 

 

Gothic Materialists: 

Dr. Nicholas Land & Dr. Orlando Watt [j]

 

   

Notes

 

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

 

[b] Black Mirror (2011 - present) is a speculative Channel 4 television series created by Charlie Brooker set in near-future dystopias containing sci-fi technology. Episodes tend to be weighed down with dreary social commentary. It now exists on Netflix.

 

[c] Fisher goes on to quote the following from Baudrillard: 

      "We once lived in a world where the realm of the imaginary was governed by the mirror, by dividing one into two, by theatre, by otherness and alienation. Today that realm is the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of contiguity and networks." 

      See Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (Verso, 1993), p. 54. 

 

[d] Gibson first used the term cyberspace in his short story 'Burning Chrome' (1982) and most famously in his novel Neuromancer (1984):  

      "Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." 

      Interestingly, Gibson was himself bored of the term by the time he appeared in the documentary No Maps for These Territories (Mark Neale, 2000), saying that for him it was only ever a convenient buzzword; evocative, but essentially meaningless. 

 

[e] I'm referencing the Duran Duran hit single, 'The Reflex', released in April 1984. Taken from their third studio album Seven and the Ragged Tiger (EMI / Capitol Records 1983): click here.  

      Perhaps because I know Fisher, like his pal Simon Reynolds, was obsessed with pop music, I can't help song lyrics coming into my head when reading his work. For example, although I didn't mention it, the moment I began to read his stuff on voodoo I began hearing the Adam and the Ants track on Prince Charming (CBS, 1981) which contains the brilliant chorus: 'That voodoo that you do / the shimmy lights through you / and no one can voodoo the voodoo that you do / do to me, yeah': click here.     

 

[f] I'm not even kidding: the idea of crisis was extremely popular and pervasive in the 1990s, both in academic circles and across wider culture; leading figures were called on to diagnose the crisis of X, Y, and Z. 

      One suspects it had something to do with the fact that not only was the end of the century fast approaching, but we were also about to enter a new millennium; people were obsessed with the year 2000 (or Y2K) - not least with so-called Y2K bug, which like the Millennium Dome, turned out to be rubbish and a massive let down for those hoping for global financial meltdown and infrastructural collapse, including members of the CCRU who, as Adam Jones reminds us in his Foreword to Flatline Constructs, set their watches for midnight on December 31st, 1999 when the time-bomb in Babylon was supposed to explode and erase the twentieth century. 

 

[g] Metafiction should not be confused with hyperfiction - "a process whereby fiction and reality are radically smeared" (223). Unlike metafiction, says Fisher, "hyperfiction assumes no special role for the author (or indeed for the text). On the contrary, it is only when the author and the text have been immanentised that a hyperfictional circuit is in place [...]" (223-224). 

      In sum: it's not a game of representation, but of feedback and hyperfiction can be defined simply as "fiction which makes itself real" (224). Deleuze and Guattari, of course, as thinkers "dedicated to radical immanence [...] can be placed on the side of the hyper-process" (224); the rhizome being the "exemplary case of what we are calling a hyper-system: a system that is inherently opposed to transcendence and unity" (227) and continually looking for ways to connect to an Outside.     

 

[h] According to survey data from 2024, more than a third of UK adults have given up reading for pleasure in recent years. Young people seem to have particular problems engaging with books (perhaps not surprisingly). I'm not sure it matters, however, when everything has now been placed "under the sign of the fictional" (Flatline Constructs, 202).

      See the article by Ella Creamer dated 24 July 2024 in The Guardian: click here. 

 

[i] I pick up on what Fisher writes here in relation to the question of banning social media for under-16's in a recently published post (16 June 2026): click here. 

 

[j] Orlando Watt was played by Kenneth Williams with hypercamp brilliance in Carry On Screaming! (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1966). To watch the official trailer, click here. Note that the exclamation mark was officially part of the film's title, but was rarely used in posters and publicity.  

 

 

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.  

 

 

Fanged Noumena: Amuse-bouche

 

Urbanomic / Sequence Press (2011) 

 

'Nick Land's writings inhabit a disordered anarchitecture, 

a space traversed by rat and wolf vectors, conjuring a 

schizophrenic metaphysics.' [a]

 

 

I. 

 

What the above quote warns is that Land's work isn't exactly an easy read, nor something one can just dip in and out of on a Sunday afternoon. 

 

In fact, one is tempted to say of his philosophy what Bertrand Russell famously said of Heidegger's: "extremely obscure and highly eccentric in its terminology" - an irresponsible running riot of language [b].  

 

Of course, that's no reason to dismiss or downplay the importance of Land's thinking - and, for some of us, the excitement and allure of the work lie precisely in its libidinal occultism or what Ray Brassier later termed mad black Deleuzianism [c].  

 

 

II.

 

Published in 2011, Fanged Noumena is an anthology of writings from the twenty-year period 1987 - 2007. Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, it covers various philosophical and aesthetic obsessions and, with a cover featuring a coloured etching by Jake and Dinos Chapman [d], it has since acquired cult status. 

 

Although I was one of the first to buy the book [e], it has taken me until now to finally learn how to engage with it. Even so, there remains a good deal of material which I still don't know how to approach. That's not due, I hope, to a lack of intelligence on my part, but rather a lack of patience to think through qwernomics, or try and make sense of a Ziigothic X-Coda [f]. 

 

Life's too short, as Larry David would say. 

 

 

III. 

 

Before discussing Land's writings in the later posts in this series, I'd like to first examine the Editor's Introduction and briefly sketch a portrait of Land, a much mythologised and much demonised - some would say hugely overrated - figure. 

 

By paying particular attention to his time at Warwick and involvement with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), I'm hoping to gain a better understanding of the manner in which the texts gathered in Fanged Noumena went from being complex but fairly standard works to almost impossible to read by the late 1990s. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Mackay and Brassier - both graduate students in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s - rightly emphasise that Land's work "folds genre in on itself, splicing disparate sources" (1) in order to create a "dense, frequently bewildering vortex of hallucinatory conjunctions" (1-2). 

 

They intend for the volume to infect a new generation of readers interested in furthering the collapse of orthodox metaphysics into psychotic cosmogony and accelerating the "obsolescence of humankind" (2). 

 

It's philosophy, Jim - but not of a kind that Bertie Russell would recognise, nor one that many of Land's more orthodox colleagues approved of. Rooted in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bataille - i.e., renegade thinkers who "mocked and disparaged academicism" (2) - Fanged Noumena is a violent assault upon conventional wisdom.

 

In brief, Land was a type of punk philosopher - albeit one closer in spirit to the darkly humorous nihilism of the Sex Pistols than the social worker ethos of The Clash [g]. I suspect that is why, although he and I were never close, I always enjoyed my few brief meetings with him to discuss the progress of my own research project at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s [h].      

 

However, once Land resigned his position at Warwick (in 1998), "academic orthodoxy quickly and quietly sealed the breach inflicted in its side by his ferocious but short-lived assault, so that within the first few years of the new century, he had become an apocryphal character, more or less forgotten in philosophical circles" (4). 

 

And yet, his writings continued to inspire a small number of people; "particularly among artists and writers" (4).  

 

 

V. 

 

This is key: Land's libidinal re-materialisation of critique "reconfigures questioning as exploration, whose orienting vector runs from the known towards the unknown, rather than from the unknown to the known" (15). 

 

What that means is Land looks to venture outside the gate, rather than enclose the outside - which for Land is a fully material realm - within the framework of knowledge. Thus, there's nothing to learn by studying Land's philosophy - and much to lose (including your mental health and professional career).  

  

 

VI. 

  

Some readers will, not unreasonably, already be wondering if Land's assault on "reason, truth, and history" (21) isn't predestined for a "collapse into romantic irrationalism" (20). 

 

Mackay and Brassier think not. Conceding that his work is not entirely free of elements that are both romantic and irrational, they also argue that it resists easy reduction to such, thanks in no small part to his nomadic numbering practices (or schizonumerics) and his appeal to an alien (or machinic) intelligence that plays out within human culture but is "unattributable to human agency" (22).

 

Land may be unreasonable and irrational, but he's not crazy. And certainly not stupid.  

 

 

VII. 

 

As well as everything else, Land is a political philosopher - albeit one who dismisses politics in the traditional sense as "the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind" [i]. 

 

Like Marx, Land is obsessed with capitalism; particularly "the most extreme possibilities of techno-capital" (26) which he wishes to accelerate beyond all internal limits (whatever the consequences for man and planet). It's here that his thinking becomes increasingly fictional and speculative (or hyperstitious) in character and he leaves behind the "established norms of academic discourse" (26).   

 

Things become deterritorialised, delirious, and deathly (or thanatropic). Rejecting Deleuze's vitalism, Land radicalises Freud's death drive and posits death as the zero-degree of an absolute deterritorialisation and the primary productive matrix:   

 

"Thus, remodelling the schizoanalytic programme in line with his own militant and fervidly anti-vitalist objectives, Land violently repudiates A Thousand Plateaus' sage warnings against the dangers of a 'too sudden destratification' [...] To Land's eyes, A Thousand Plateaus' newfound caution [...] is a lamentable step backwards from Anti-Oedipus' most audacious innovations, and fatally lays open the latter's unequivocal declaration of war on the strata to the classic compromise-formations and policing of desire that they had previously so effectively challenged." (30) 

 

Land is the exterminating angel called for by Deleuze and Guattari, but he's not quite as they imagined him and he has no interest in preserving organic existence.   

 

 

VIII.

 

For Land and his disciples, cyberpunk - or, encoded in their own jargon, k-punk - wasn't just a literary subgenre, it was a "textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future" (33). In other words, it provided a model for their own theory-fictions and hyperstitions [j].

 

I remember that one of the books I was persuaded I simply must read after entering the philosophy department at Warwick in 1994, was William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). A seminal and quintessential cyberpunk text, it remains second only to George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) on my list of most boring novels I have ever had to slog through.

 

My negative reaction to this book was only matched by my aversion to the headache-inducing jungle beat of darkcore and a preference for the Schwarzenegger movie Twins (1988) over The Terminator (1984). Together, these aesthetico-intellectual shortcomings were probably enough to ensure I would never be considered a suitable candidate for Nick's inner circle or invited to participate in the CCRU ...     

 

  

IX. 

   

"The inception of the amorphous and short-lived Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) - established at Warwick University in 1995, shortly before Land's departure from academia, but immediately disowned as an undesirable parasite by the institution to which it was precariously affixed [...] - marks yet another important phase-transition in Land's work." (39)

 

And the key term of this phase-transition: geotraumatics - a concept via which Land makes an "audacious attempt [...] to characterise all terrestrial existence, including human culture, as a relay of primal cosmic trauma" (39).   

 

Pop-reggae specialists UB40 were worried that the earth might die screaming, but Land is here to tell us that, actually, it was born 4.5 billion years ago in absolute fucking agony. 

 

The retraction of its molten outer surface and its "subsequent segregation into a burning iron core" (39-40) is described by Land as "the aboriginal trauma whose scars are inscribed, encrypted, throughout terrestrial matter, instituting a register of unconscious pain coextensive with the domain of stratified materiality" (40) beyond anything that Freud - or even Deleuze and Guattari - ever imagined.     

 

For Land, all structure is repressive and everything - from the smallest cell to the largest terrestrial body - is seeking a release from its organisation: "Nothing short of the complete liquidation of biological order and the dissolution of physical structure can suffice to discharge the aboriginal trauma that mars terrestrial existence." (41)

 

Some will see this as a radical furthering of pessimism; others - like Brassier - will speak of nihilism unbound. Either way, it's a pretty challenging and uncompromising way of thinking - and entirely logical. It's also one of the reasons that I still find myself attracted to Land, despite our many differences. 

 

Like Sid Vicious, he just never saw a red light, only green, and no one can accuse Land of not having taken his mad, bad and dangerous project "as far as he possibly could" (53).     

 

 

X. 

 

Critics - and he has many (particularly on the miserabilist left) - will say that Land's philosophy was always going to terminate in neoreaction and/or a "puerile capitulation to neo-liberal 'realism' shrouded in mysticism" (51). 

 

Everything in his writings that "falls outside the parameters of disciplinary knowledge can and will be effectively dismissed by those who police the latter" (54) 

 

But as Mackay and Brassier conclude:

 

"The challenge of Land's work cannot be circumvented by construing the moral dismay it (often deliberately) provokes as proof of its erroneous nature, or by exploiting the inadequacies in Land's positive construction as an excuse to evade the corrosive critical implications of his thought." (53)

 

Land's thought-experiments have made crucial contributions to "the diagnosis of the cosmic, biological, evolutionary, and cultural genealogy and nature of the human" (53). And, more than this, he has given us the tools - and weapons - with which to launch future assaults "against the Human Security System" (54), should we choose (or dare) to do so.  

  

  

Notes

 

[a] Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, 'Editor's Introduction' to Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007 (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), p. 1. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post between round brackets.   

 

[b] Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West: A Historical Survey of Western Philosophy in its Social and Political Setting, ed. Paul Foulkes (Macdonald, 1959), p. 303. 

 

[c] Mackay and Brassier explain what's meant by this in their 'Editor's Introduction' to Fanged Noumena: "Land seized upon Deleuze-Guattari's transcendental materialism [...] and subjected it to ruthless cybernetic streamlining, excising all vestiges of Bergsonian vitalism to reveal a deviant and explicitly thanatropic mechanism." (5)

      Despite this, it's important to remember that at the core of Land's thought "are the works of Immanuel Kant" (6) - something which is, I think, often overlooked or not understood by those readers who think everything starts with Nietzsche or only come for the Lovecraft.   

 

[d] The cover image by Jake and Dinos Chapman is from Disasters of War IV (2001); a hand-coloured etching with watercolour (24.5 x 34.5 cm).

 

[e] The book was originally published in a 1000 numbered copies; mine is 278. 

 

[f] Critics suggest that even Land didn't really know what he was trying to say - or, if he did, didn't mean it - but that seems unfair and mistaken. Nevertheless, it's amusing to note Land's initial response to Mackay's request to republish his old writings: 

      "'It's another life; I have nothing to say about it - I don’t even remember writing half of those things … I don't want to get into retrospectively condemning my ancient work - I think it's best to gently back off. It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead amphetamine god.'"

      See Robin Mackay, 'Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism', (2013): click here.  

 

[g] For readers who want a more detailed explanation of the difference between the Sex Pistols and The Clash (and why my allegiance is to the former rather than the latter), see the post dated 2 August 2018: click here.   

 

[h] I was doing my PhD in the philosophy department at Warwick between 1994 and 2000, and Land was assigned as my Graduate Progress Committee member during my first year. 

      I have to confess, however, that I had no real interest in what the CCRU were up to. My thinking on Nietzsche was far more influenced by Keith Ansell-Pearson's work than Nick's (Keith being my supervisor). That said, I did appreciate Nick's career advice, which encouraged me in the view that it was better to flip burgers from the back of a van than pursue a position in academia.    

 

[i] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 197. 

 

[j] See my post of 18 May 2026 in which I discuss the term (and concept) of hyperstition: click here. 

 

 

For the first post following this taster - on 'Nick Land and the New Amazons' (1 June 2026) - click here.

 

 

On Nick Land and Albert Camus: From Hyperstition to Absurdism

Accelerating the Absurd 

(Portrait of Nick Land and Albert Camus) 

(SA/2026)

 

 

 

I. 

 

We closed a recent post on hyperstition by suggesting that Nick Land's theory might be understood as a form of post-irony - a conceptual space in which the virtue of sincerity returns, albeit in a compromised (impure, less naive) form. 

 

This yields an amusingly paradoxical result. It becomes possible to speak of the absurd in all seriousness: "Not because you forgot it was absurd, but because you no longer believe that absurdity disqualifies meaning." [1] 

 

By invoking fictions to manufacture reality, hyperstition ultimately abandons us in a world shaped by indifferent, chaotic forces. And by treating reality as an artificial construct, Landian philosophy builds the ultimate Absurd landscape. 

 

Could it be, then, that Nick Land (inadvertently) returns us to Albert Camus, albeit with a dark, cyberpunk twist? 

 

This is the question we will (briefly) address here ... 

 

II. 

 

This is not a question we would have been permitted to ask during the mid-1990s, when the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was aggressively exerting its quasi-occult influence over the philosophy department at Warwick University. 

 

As a PhD student there at the time, I always found Land extremely polite and personable, despite his Mephistophelian reputation. Yet, to the CCRU's zealous inner circle, Camus was a philosophical enemy and I recall being condemned by one of Land's followers for daring to quote from L'Homme révolté (1951) in my doctoral thesis [2]. 

 

The CCRU wanted to dissolve human agency into the techno-capital matrix. Camus, by contrast, insisted on human defiance in the face of a meaningless void. For the Warwick avant-garde, this made Camus an old-fashioned moral humanist clinging to the dignity of Man.  

 

That might be true. But, whilst I may not have shared all of Camus's politico-philosophical prejudices, the fact is that L'Étranger (1942) remains a far more enjoyable read than William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). 

 

And, well, as Elaine Benes would say, Camus was just so good-looking [3] ...

 

 

III. 

 

In Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942), Camus defines the Absurd as the gulf between the human desire for meaning and the sheer indifference of the universe. 

 

Nick Land's cybergothic philosophy has a similar pessimistic starting point and, like Camus, he strips away the comforting illusion of any logic or purpose. For Land, human intentions, morals, and desires are entirely irrelevant; history is driven by the alien and artificial forces of techno-capital. 

 

There is, therefore, a degree of structural affinity between their respective philosophies. One might even compare the Landian subject - trapped in hyperstitious feedback loops and techno-myths determining reality - with Camus's figure of Sisyphus, forever pushing his rock up the mountain. 

 

Both are obliged to accept their fate over which they have no control (which, in fact, controls and engineers them). 

 

Indeed, both are encouraged to affirm their fate and, in the case of the Landian subject, accelerate the inhuman processes unfolding not in order to be happy, but so that they might be erased, as Michel Foucault famously wrote, "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" [4].        

  

Notes

 

[1] Victor Stones, 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection', medium.com (18 Nov 2024): click here. 

 

[2] My thesis - Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000) - dealt with the political character of Nietzsche's philosophical project and I quoted Camus on several occasions on the question of revolutionary violence, state tyranny, etc. 

 

[3] Seinfeld, season 6, episode 5: 'The Couch' (dir. Andy Ackerman, written by Larry David, 1994). 

      The point is, it doesn't always matter what someone's views are. You can forgive a good deal when someone is attractive and Camus is widely considered one of the most handsome of all philosophers, celebrated for his physical features, his sharp sense of style, and his air of iconic coolness. No wonder Sartre was envious of him and their friendship eventually ended in tears.   

 

[4] Foucault was writing in Les mots et les choses (1966), translated into English as The Order of Things (1971), p. 387. 

      That's the crucial difference between Camus and Land: the former leaves his readers with the thought that Sisyphus ultimately finds a way to be happy (that his task is itself enough to fill his heart with joy); the latter offers no such comfort and doesn't give a damn about the happiness (or survival) of humanity. Land knows that civilisation is ultimately designing the technology that will replace us. 

      A friend of mine once put it this way: Camus recognises life is an absurd comedy but he still hopes man can provide the punchline; Land thinks of things more as a Lovecraftian horror story and chooses to side with Cthulhu.   

 

What's In a Word: Hyperstition

Image of Nick Land by Victor Stones

The Brazilian Mutt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Despite Michael Scott's belief to the contrary, the seven-letter assemblage s-t-i-t-i-o-n is neither an actual word in itself, nor even a suffix as such [2]. 

 

And apart from superstition and interstition, I think even Susie Dent - Countdown's resident lexicographer and etymologist - would struggle to come up with any other terms ending this way. 

 

Unless, that is, she happens to be familiar with the writings of rogue philosopher Nick Land who developed (and weaponised) the term hyperstition in the mid-1990s, when guiding spirit and chief theorist of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, at the University of Warwick.  

 

 

II. 

 

Hyperstition is a rather lovely neologism and a crucial concept within Land's work and the thinking of those who were in some manner influenced by him - such as Mark Fisher and Simon O'Sullivan, for example [3]. It can, surprisingly perhaps, be defined quite simply and clearly: 

 

Hyperstition is the idea that theory, fiction, or memetic ideas can manifest and bring about their own reality via feedback loops and cultural momentum. [4]

 

It is, if you like, a more dynamic and active form of superstition that can materially change things. For example, cyberspace originated as a purely fictional concept in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984). But it inspired engineers, investors, and cultures to build the actual Internet [5].

 

Another example is provided by Bitcoin, which started as a highly technical (if somewhat speculative) proposal posted on an obscure forum. As traders bought into the narrative of a decentralised cryptocurrency, however, their collective belief created the multi-billion-dollar market we see today [6]. 

 

But hyperstition isn't just the science of self-fulfilling prophecy - it's also a way of playing with time; of telling stories about the future in order to retroactively affect the present. In other words, by articulating tomorrow, you change how people act today to make that future happen. This is what gives science fiction its potency. 

 

It all sounds a bit like magical thinking and I'm sure that's how friends at Treadwell's would interpret the theory. But it's not quite that - even if Land himself often discussed hyperstition in occult language borrowed from Lovecraft; he would, for example, call it a coincidence intensifier or speak of invoking the Old Ones [7].  

 

Such framing, of course, serves to highlight the idea that when collective narratives take hold of a society they seem to possess an autonomous life of their own, becoming forces independent of human agency. 

 

And so we arrive at Land's other big idea - accelerationism, or the virulent logic of techno-capitalism. The key point is this: don't fool yourself that mankind is master of events or will determine its own destiny (and don't think all knowledge is empowering). 

  

 

III.

 

In sum: whilst there are many criticisms one might make of Land's theory - it depends, for example, "on a concept he never properly defines: non-human intelligence" [8] - the idea of hyperstition is always going to appeal to those who are searching for a form of post-irony; "a cultural condition in which sincerity returns [...] but returns transformed, self-aware, no longer naive" [9]. 

 

For this has the amusingly paradoxical result that it becomes possible to say something absurd but in all seriousness: "Not because you forgot it was absurd, but because you no longer believe that absurdity disqualifies meaning." [10] 

 

Could it be that Nick Land takes us back to Albert Camus (albeit with a dark twist)? That suggests an interesting post for another day ... [11]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Victor Stones (aka Victor Alfons Steuck) is a Brazilian writer, artist, and musician with a deep interest in philosophy, language, and the evolving role of technology in society. He explores many thought-provoking topics on his website, blending critical thinking with creativity.

      His excellent essay 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection', in which he introduces the concept of metastition as a diffractive counterpoint, can be found on his website linked to above or on medium.com (18 Nov 2024): click here. I will refer to this essay in the main text and quote from it in the notes below. I have also borrowed and adapted (a detail from) the amusing image created by Stones featuring Nick Land (and, originally, Michael Scott).    

 

[2] The sitcom character Michael Scott - played brilliantly by Steve Carell in The Office (US version) utters the immortal line 'I'm not superstitious, but I'm a little stitious', in the season 4 two-part episode titled 'Fun Run' (written and dir. by Greg Daniels): click here to watch on YouTube.

      Interestingly, Victor Stones argues that stition is effectively a real word - even if it has been extracted as a grammatical phantom from superstition - as it refers to the "underlying scaffolding of beliefs that helps us navigate reality" and would include ethical principles and cultural norms. But he also insists that Land's 'stition' is not truer than Michael Scott's; "it is simply dressed in theory" and coined knowingly.   

 

[3] I'm assuming most readers will be familiar with the name Mark Fisher, if only because I have written many posts about his work on TTA: click here. As for Simon O'Sullivan, he's a philosopher and artist working at the intersection of these two practices who regularly writes about hyperstition as an experimental methodology.

      Other thinkers influenced by Land who have developed his theory of hyperstition in their own work include Austrian philosopher Armen Avanessian, who co-directed the documentary Hyperstition in 2016; Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, who, in his seminal theory-fiction book Cyclonopedia, utilised the concept to describe petroleum-based mythologies that alter geopolitical realities; and the Australian xenofeminist Amy Ireland, whose work frequently explores the hyperstitional properties of language, logic, and poetry.   

 

[4] Nick Land helpfully described hyperstition himself as 'an element of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional qualities functional as a time-travelling device'.   

 

[5] As Victor Stones reminds us, in a similar manner "many technologies initially imagined in science fiction, such as Artificial Intelligence or Virtual Reality, have transitioned from speculative fiction into practical innovation because of their hyperstitional power". See his essay linked to in note 1 above. 

      This is why we should not only be careful what we wish for, but cautious about what we dream, fantasise, or imagine.   

 

[6] It is important to remember, however, that for every Bitcoin, "a thousand crypto-narratives collapsed" and one of the criticisms of Land's theory is that it doesn't account for this: "It notices winners and retroactively calls them inevitable; survivorship bias dressed in cybernetics." Empirical claims about how narratives become real should always be treated with caution for as long as they remain untested or are in fact untestable. Again, see Victor Stones, from whose essay I quote here.

 

[7] As Stones says, the CCRU deliberately wrote about "time-warps and Lovecraftian magic" for a good reason; it induced readers of their philosophy to act as if these things were real: "And acting-as-if, for Land, is indistinguishable from reality." 

 

[8] "Land writes as if capitalism or the market 'thinks', processing information, selecting trajectories, and 'manufacturing intelligence' without human direction. Yet he provides no operational criteria to distinguish such intelligence from stochastic noise, homeostatic feedback, or simple anthropomorphic projection."

      Quoted from Victor Stones, 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection' ... See link provided in note 1 above. 

      Stones goes on to accuse Land of being a crypto-theologian when it comes to this question of non-human intelligence; one who has fooled himself (and his loyal followers) into thinking he's making strictly analytical assertions, when he is actually making faith claims or expressing his own ideological preferences. 

      Ultimately, the practice of metastition proposed by Stones is a conscious, reflective intervention into the blind feedback loops of hyperstition and rooted in old school sincerity; strong, but not naive and with nothing post-ironic about it. Politically, it allows for (and encourages) accountability and responsibility, whereas the politics of hyperstition and accelerationism promoted by Land ushers in a radically inhuman future via a post-democratic period he terms the Dark Enlightenment (which I have written about on TTA here).          

 

[9] Ibid.

 

[10] Ibid.

 

[11] That day is now here.