Earth Calling the Sophia Space Agency

Melpomeni Kermanidou

Vocalist and Project Leader of the Sophia Space Agency 

 

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

Kings Place, London N1 

(24 June 2026)  

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

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

 

 

II. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IV. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Martyn Ware, Patrick Clarke, and 

Melpomeni Kermanidou (SSA)

 

 

Notes

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

[9] Ibid. 

 

 

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

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

 

 

   

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Three

 

Front cover of the Italian edition of Mark Fisher's 

Postcapitalist Desire (2021) [a]

 

 

I.

 

When Mark Fisher asks his students if they have heard of György Lukács and his ideas of reification and totality [b] he is met with a proverbial wall of silence.

 

And, to be fair, who in 2016 would reasonably be expected to be au fait with a long-dead Hungarian Marxist whose major work - History and Class Consciousness - had been published almost 100 years earlier in 1923? 

 

Especially when, according to Fisher's own theory, his students - along with the rest of us - have been completely subsumed by capitalist realism, making the work of thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School - which includes Lukács - feel completely alien and not just dated.   

  

Fisher, however, insists that the above book remains extremely valuable (113) - once one gets to grips with its difficult language (although he concedes that it's "infuriating to read" (112) due to its dense, unyielding Hegelianism). 

 

It is also, says Fisher - keen to parade his acid communist credentials by adopting hippie terminology [c] - an "extremely trippy" (113) book, by which I think he means that it's a work that appears to be written by someone who has taken powerful mind-altering drugs and likely to induce strange effects in the reader. 

 

For Fisher, Lukács describes a world that feels like a hallucination, yet is terrifyingly real; he shatters the illusion that forces us to see the manufactured, exploitative reality of capitalism as the natural condition of man. In other words, his work acts like a psychedelic agent, destabilising the common-sense of capitalist realism. 

 

Far out, man! 

 

 

II.  

 

The best way to understand what Lukács is driving at, argues Fisher, is to read his work in relation to a more recent essay by the feminist scholar Nancy Hartsock. 

 

In 'The Feminist Standpoint' [d], Hartsock performs an act of theoretical translation by taking Lukács's concept of class consciousness and applying it to the field of gender studies, developing in the process what we now know as standpoint theory [e].

 

If, for Lukács, the bourgeoisie cannot (and will not) see the true nature of capitalism because their class privilege depends on maintaining the illusion and only the proletariat has a structural interest in perceiving reality, then, for Hartsock men, as a sex, also view the world through an idealised lens that is blind to the shit that women have to accept and deal with. 

 

It is only the latter who, from their marginalised and subordinate position, are able to form not merely a different perspective, but see things as they really are.

 

In sum: Fisher wants to show his students that desire (and reality) look radically different depending on where you stand in the world. The dominant class mistakes its narrow view for universal truth, while the marginalised see both the illusion and the underlying machinery at work.  

 

That's the theory at least - one that would leave Nietzsche laughing his head off! [f]   

 

III. 

 

For Fisher, standpoint theory is a way to break from postmodern relativism and to ground truth back in material practice. A standpoint is so much more than merely a view or perspective, precisely because it is constructed in material practice and what Fisher calls group consciousness. 

 

And unlike the Titanic, group consciousness can actually be raised - and the higher it's raised, the better you'll feel about yourself. Why? Because you'll be freed from self-responsibility born of bourgeois individualism: 

 

"Once workers realise the problem is capital, not them [...] when women realise the problem is patriarchy, not them [...] then their consciousness has immediately shifted. You feel better! [...] You'll feel relief from the guilt and misery of having to take responsibility for your own life, which you shouldn't have to - despite everything neoliberal propaganda tells us." (119)

 

Obviously, I find this pretty objectionable - not as a liberal keen to defend personal agency, but as a Nietzschean for whom nothing is more contemptible than seeking relief from suffering via the construction of a feel-good philosophy founded upon herd morality [g]. 

 

I understand why it's so important for Fisher's critique of capitalist realism to deconstruct bourgeois individualism and the privatisation of misery, etc. But I find this blame-shifting to external systems problematic to say the least. Nietzsche would identify this anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal shift as simply another unfolding of the slave revolt in morals; something that ultimately results not in feeling better about yourself, but in hating others.

 

Acid communism may be Fisher's attempt to heal and empower - to raise consciousness among the proletariat - but, unfortunately, it more often than not traps its adherents in a mindset of reaction and ressentiment and ends with fantasies of punishment: "I don't know if anyone ever has fantasies about this - I know I do - about getting very powerful people sent to jail." (127-128)

 

 

IV.

 

I don't want to give the impression that I don't agree with many of the things Fisher says, because, actually, I do. Or, at any rate, I sympathise with some of his points (ironically enough from a shared class standpoint). 

 

For example, I think he's right to say that capitalism always prevents awareness amongst people that they could "live differently and have more control over their own lives" (132). And I think his concern about the mobile phone is spot on; essentially, it's a device designed to endlessly distract and make you available to the imperatives of capitalism anywhere and at any time (134).

 

People think they need a phone "in order to communicate" (135) with other people; that is to say, they need to buy an expensive product in order to relate to (and function within) the world. Fifty years ago, no one would have believed this. But today, this is the "level of domination" at which capital has encroached "on people's minds" (135).   

 

As Fisher concludes: "Nobody makes you own a phone. And if you do own it, nobody makes you go on social media. And, of course, if you're on social media, then you are producing for capitalism." (135-136)  

 

Today, we produce ourselves and we curate our own subjectivity [h]. 

  

 

V.

 

Fisher ends the third of his lectures on postcapitalist desire by reading out a series of passages from Lukács, all of which he seems to agree with; all of which seem rather dated to me. 

 

His hope in reading them aloud is that it makes them clearer: "It's not that I think, having read those out quickly, we can go home happy." (145). 

 

And next week (next post) ... more on consciousness raising and the last days of the working class in a lecture titled 'Union Power and Soul Power'. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we're a long way from Flatline Constructs ... [i] 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This Italian edition of Fisher's text was trans. by Vincenzo Perna (Minimum Fax, 2022). I will, of course, be reading the original English work, ed. and with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books 2021). Page references will be given directly in the post. 

 

[b] György Lukács (1885 - 1971) was an influential political philosopher and literary critic whose concepts of reification and class consciousness shaped Western Marxism and inspired members of the Frankfurt School, including Marcuse. 

      By reification Lukács referred to the process in which social relations and institutions are transformed into abstract independent things that take on a life of their own, dominating individuals and preventing them from seeing the underlying realities of capitalism. By totality he refers to the methodological principle that frames society as a dynamic, historically evolving whole in which individual phenomena can only be understood through their relationship to the overarching social system. Interestingly, Lukács uses the latter to critique the former. Fisher thinks both concepts are crucial. 

 

[c] In his attempt to salvage the lost emancipatory desires of the 1960s and '70s counterculture, Fisher - rather embarrassingly - adopts the slang of the time. This strikes me as performative and, as indicated, a bit cringe and he deserves to be gently teased about it. 

      Further, by relying on words like trippy to discuss History and Class Consciousness, Fisher risks trivialising a deeply disciplined, militant text. Lukács was not advocating for a passive, drug-induced distortion of perception, but for a rigorous, collective, organisational awakening. I understand that Fisher views consciousness-raising as a fundamentally psychedelic act and that theory acts like a mind-altering drug, but, on occasions, his acid communism treats critical thinking as if it were all about the vibe.    

 

[d] See Nancy Hartsock, 'The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism', in The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (Westview Press, 1998), pp. 105-132.   

 

[e] Standpoint theory (also known as standpoint epistemology) is a philosophical and sociological framework arguing that an individual's social position shapes their understanding of the world. It posits that marginalised groups possess unique, valuable insights into societal power dynamics that dominant groups often miss. 

      Rather surprisingly for someone who has read Nietzsche, Fisher claims that he found standpoint theory mind-blowing when he first encountered it (again, note his irritating use of hippie terminology). This reaction feels somewhat naive. I would suggest that the idea that all knowledge is shaped by a specific viewpoint is what the German philosopher famously called perspectivism. 

      However, if pushed, one might concede that Nietzsche's concept is shaped by his aesthetics, whereas standpoint theory is more political in character. And also, of course, for Nietzsche there is no truth as such - only competing interpretations; standpoint theory, rooted in Marxism, maintains a stubborn commitment to objective truth. It doesn't simply say everyone has their own truth, but that the oppressed have a truer view of reality than their oppressors - which is all very flattering and all very comforting, but false.  

 

[f] See note [e] above for why Nietzsche would find this amusing (philosophically naive and absurd). 

 

[g] Nietzsche being Nietzsche, he can't help taking things to the extreme in the opposite direction and actively affirming the necessity of misery and pain for the achievement of greatness. In an amusing note found in The Will to Power which provides sharp contrast with what Fisher desires, Nietzsche writes: 

      "To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures."

      See The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), Book IV, § 910, p. 481.   

 

[h] This is essentially Byung-Chul Han's argument in The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2015). This English translation by Erik Butler is based on the original German text titled Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 2010). I have written a two-part post on this work; part one of which (published 7 November 2021) can be accessed by clicking here.   

      As far as I'm aware, Fisher never directly cites Han's work. However, there is significant overlap between his analysis of neoliberal society and contemporary culture and that given us by the South Korean-German philosopher and because of this commentators frequently group their books together (although I'm not sure that's entirely appropriate or advantageous to either thinker). 

 

[i] Flatline Constructs was Fisher's PhD thesis submitted at the University of Warwick in 1999. It was published by Repeater Books in 2025, with a Foreword by Adam Jones. I think it's my favourite work by Fisher and I have written a series of posts on it: click here. 

      For me, there's a real pathos of distance between that work and the lectures in Postcapitalist Desire, although some of his followers insist that there is a strong, underlying level of intellectual (and structural) continuity. I'll let readers decide on that question.  

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Two

Repeater Books (2021) [a] 

Design by JohnnyBull.uk 

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I like about Fisher's work in the 1990s - I'm thinking here of his PhD thesis Flatline Constructs (1999) [b] - is that it offers a new conceptual terminology and synthesises ideas from philosophy, cybernetics, and science fiction into a theoretical framework designed to analyse contemporary culture. 

 

It feels so urgent and exciting because it has its finger on the digital pulse and rather than just speculate on the future, it attempts to actively generate it. 

 

I have to admit, therefore, that if I'd been an MA student at Goldsmiths in 2016 taking Fisher's 'Postcapitalist Desire' module, I would have been disappointed to discover we were going to be talking about Herbert Marcuse [c] and the countercultural bohemians of the 1960s and '70s [d] - i.e., a long-dead Marxist and a group of long-haired hippies.

 

For a thinker who once championed the cold, non-human vectors of Gothic Materialism, this trip down memory lane feels (initially at least) like a retreat ...

 

II. 

 

Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) is certainly a fun and deeply Romantic reimagining of Freud, but as I said in an earlier post in this series on Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire, it's not a book one can take entirely seriously. For even when framed within Marxist materialism its libidinal utopianism is simply too good to be true and, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, when it comes to the question of desire and society it falls short [e].

 

Fisher, however, likes the fact that Marcuse places "a high value on the importance of art" (80) and - perhaps more importantly - gives a real sense of what "life beyond capitalist domination could provide" (80); namely, a non-repressive civilisation where work transforms into play, scarcity is eliminated by technology, and culture is driven by pleasure, creativity, and freedom. 

 

It is as the feminist cultural critic Ellen Willis says, "'a social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude'" [f] - so what's not to love?

 

 

III. 

Instincts and drives: Fisher, like Marcuse, wishes to think desire in terms of the latter, not the former, which he rejects as a "quasi-biologistic naturalisation of currently existing desires" (81). Drives, on the other hand, have a more machinic ring - they are non-biological and can, at least in principle, be reformulated and redirected.

 

At this point, Fisher dives into Freud's great work of metapsychology Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), which tells the pessimistic (even tragic) tale of how repression is the foundation of civilisation: "And that's why a lot of Marxist revolutionaries simply reject Freud out of hand, because they say it's just conservative" (88-89). 

 

But Marcuse provides a reading of Freud (in terms of drives) that attempts to find a way out of the tragic impasse suggested by Civilisation and Its Discontents - and a way to finally exorcise the ghost of the murdered Father; "the agency of mortification" (91) and "the basic form of repressive authority within society" (91). 

 

It's not so much that we're not allowed to sleep with our mothers, it's more we're forced into performing unpleasant labour: "There's repression so that people work, so that people can be made to work." (92) This seems a question of sheer necessity - even if the dead dad is done and dusted and even when (thanks to technology) scarcity is no longer such a pressing issue. 

 

In sum: Fisher reads Marcuse as more than a Romantic - he's also "a kind of accelerationist!" (97). That is to say, a thinker who argues that postcapitalism must be built through and beyond capitalism and that by fully automating labour it will enable us to liberate human desire and create a civilisation based not on repression, but the pleasure principle. 

 

Post-work is a crucial aspect of postcapitalism for Fisher, as for Marcuse, as for "members of what you might call the 'bohemian class' [...] inspired by this notion that you can both work less and determine your own needs and satisfactions" (98). 

 

And this, of course, was the "basis of the so-called counterculture of the 1960s" (98) with which Ellen Willis - mentioned earlier - was involved ...

 

 

IV. 

 

For Fisher, there's "some kind of resonance" (99) between Marcuse and Willis - although the latter, writing in the late 1970s, is "already trying to explain what went wrong" (99) and why countercultural revolution in the name of Eros didn't work out as desired.      

 

For Fisher, Willis "overturns a lot of the stereotypes about what the counterculture was and what its unachieved ambitions were" (100). In other words, she helps him understand why he and so many other people still care about the Sixties (man):

 

"Why does it haunt us at the level of iconography and why do its cultural forms persist? I'd say it has something to do with the unrealised desires that were inherent in those forms [...]" (100)

 

The counterculture demanded a total revolution: the overthrow of capitalism, the demolition of the work ethic, and the dismantling of the nuclear family and what Fisher calls domestic realism (i.e., the idea that there's no alternative to the mummy-daddy-me matrix). 

 

Rather surprisingly for a married man and father living in the quiet coastal town of Felixstowe, Fisher openly mourns that "domestic realism is even more powerful than capitalist realism in today's world" (101) and that the countercultural mission "to have done with the family [...] has almost entirely disappeared" (101). 

 

Admitting that the family as an empirical fact is under massive pressure, he insists that as a normative transcendental structure it remains powerful - one that he clearly believes must be overcome by alternative, communal modes of living and collective child-rearing [g].

 

 

V.

 

There is, I feel, a tragic paradox and hidden tension at the heart of Mark Fisher's life and work. It is not simply that he was a square peg in a round hole - a headless and homeless philosopher trapped by a mortgage and a boring teaching job - but that his profound commitment to communism and collective desire prevented him from acknowledging that the lost future he was chasing was ... his own.   

 

Rather than accepting himself as an exceptional individual, Fisher translates his depression into a class issue and mistakes it for a pathological symptom of capitalist realism; a fatal misdiagnosis and category error. To generalise from one's own starry singularity in this manner is, Nietzsche would argue, not only fallacious reasoning, but the hallmark of a herd moralist [h].

 

VI.

 

Fisher likes the old Situationist idea of it being perfectly reasonable to demand the impossible. It fascinates him how, at one time - in the 1960s and early '70s - it was realistic, for example, to propose abolishing the family and have everyone move into communes: "Obviously that was ridiculous. But it didn't seem ridiculous at the time!" (102)

 

What happened to this Promethean ambition to bring about a complete transformation of everyday life? Why did the Revolution fail? For Willis, there are several reasons, but for Fisher "the key thing she points to is impatience" (104). 

 

Those damn hippies were conceited and complacent enough to believe that they could replace the family overnight - in a generation at most! "But [communes] didn't have the persistence that families did. [...] So even relatively successful communes only lasted a few years." (105)  

 

If they had read their Nietzsche, they would have known that great change cannot be created at a single stroke; that if a change is to be of a profound nature, then the means to it must be administered in the smallest doses but unremittingly over long periods of time [i]. 

 

In other words, as Willis says, it takes patience - and the exercising of caution; not qualities one associates with privileged middle-class brats who are used to immediately getting their way and who know deep down that having dropped out, they can drop back in again whenever they choose to do so [j]. 

 

Also, just because these hippies claimed to hate their families, the fact is it's simply not that common. And even those who do hate their parents, usually still retain some attachment with them. Willis is right to point out that the family structure is not only powerful, but is ultimately one that meets real needs.      

  

Still, not wanting to end on a slightly sour note ... Fisher suggests to his students that they "reframe what was happening in the 1960s not as some Golden Era where everything was great and then all went wrong" (106), but as a stalled project that can yet be brought to fruition - with a little patience and by making alternative lifestyles accessible to more people (not just the young and relatively privileged).   

 

As I said in the opening section of this post, if I'd been in Fisher's class on 14 November 2016, I'd have left feeling a tad disappointed.  

 

Next week (next post): 'From Class Consciousness to Group Consciousness' (with György Lukács) ... 

 

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 text. 

 

[b] Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction was published by Zer0 Books in 2025. I have published five posts on this text on TTA, the first of which (discussing the Foreword by Adam Jones) can be accessed here. 

 

[c] Herbert Marcuse (1898 - 1979) was a prominent German-American philosopher of the Frankfurt School whose sharp critiques of capitalism, modern technology, and consumer culture made him a leading intellectual figure for the New Left in the 1960s. Key text: One Dimensional Man (1964).

 

[d] Even Matt Colquhoun admits that Fisher "surprised friends and fans alike by writing positively about the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s" in his late work. In his k-punk days, he had been scathing about the hippies and their hedonic infantilism, but in his acid communist phase he's effectively telling us all to mellow out. See Colquhoun's Introduction to Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire (2021), p. 1.

 

[e] See section III of 'Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One', Torpedo the Ark (19 June 2026), where I explain why this is so: click here.  

 

[f] Ellen Willis, 'The Family: Love It or Leave It', in Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 158. The line is quoted by Fisher on p. 101 of Postcapitalist Desire and he was great admirer of Willis (not least for her writings on pop culture). 

 

[g] Fisher insists that collective child-rearing has got to be better than child-rearing within the context of the nuclear family model. Indeed, even the traditional extended family is preferable to the latter, he says, though without getting too nostalgic for it. Basically, his argument is that if you have a bigger group of people involved in child-rearing, "the odds of it going badly wrong or of very specific neuroses being passed on are surely much less" (104), but provides no evidence for this, allowing me - with no evidence to the contrary - to simply disagree.

      For me, communal living is simply a form of neo-primitivism; it may have been the historical norm for our species, but I would have absolutely hated it as a child. Further, I suspect that stability and access to resources - including fresh air and open spaces, not just toys and technology - is key to successfully rearing happy children rather than the family structure per se.  

 

[h] I'm aware that this is a provocative and controversial interpretation and I'm more than happy to be shown why it's a crass misunderstanding of Fisher. 

      I'm willing, for example, to concede that his having a job, a mortgage, and a traditional family life does not invalidate his political critique of those institutions; that it may in fact prove his point that capitalism forces everyone - even acid communists - into these structures in order to survive (that there is no outside).

      On the other hand, I wish to make clear that my reading is Nietzschean in character not neoliberal and that Nietzsche's concept of the individual in terms of starry singularity is not the same as found within bourgeois ideology (which Nietzsche, like Fisher, also despised - if for different reasons).  

      Nietzsche criticised those exceptional individuals who on the basis of their own exceptionality called for universal emancipation and I'm saying Fisher does something similar; he thinks his desire for a life less ordinary is one shared by everyone who happens to belong to the same socio-economic class and that no one can be free and happy until all are free and happy. 

      If, for the neoliberal there is no alternative to capitalist realism, for Fisher there is ony one possible alternative - communist collectivism. He seems happy to ignore entirely Nietzsche's radical aristocratism and opts to suffer in solidarity with the masses and gradually become the roles he was forced to take on (teacher, husband, father) whatever the personal cost.       

 

[i] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Daybreak, Book V, § 534. 

 

[j] Willis, as Fisher reminds us, pointed out the important role played by wealth and privilege in the counterculture. Those who dropped out could, in most cases, afford to do so and "didn't have that base level of anxieties about the risks of leaving behind conservative structures" (106).  

 

 

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 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.