Notes on Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs (2025): 1: Foreword by Adam Jones

(Zer0 Books, 2025) [a]

Cover design by Rebecca Wright

 

 

I.

 

Long before he was writing about capitalist realism and acid communism, Mark Fisher was promoting a fusion of cyberpunk fiction and European philosophy that he termed gothic materialism. 

 

And Flatline Constructs (2025) - a work completed in 1999 and submitted that year as a doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick - not only affords a valuable insight into Fisher's early thinking but "retrospectively illuminates the political debility of a cybernetic realism that snuffs out every alternative to the present". 

 

In other words, Flatline Constructs "diagnoses the paralysing predicament which Fisher's subsequent work would struggle to overcome" [b].    

 

 

II.  

 

In his Foreword to the book, Adam Jones roots Fisher's gothic materialism in Marx's insistence that capitalism feeds, vampire-like, on living labour. For Fisher, says Jones - and I agree with him - this is not a simile or merely a "Stoker-esque turn of phrase" (2); the gothic element is "the domain proper to materialist analysis" (2).      

 

In other words, if you want to know about the reality of capitalism, don't waste time asking about what it means or represents - ask rather what it does:

 

"The vampirism of capital does not present itself as representing or standing-in for the capitalist process [...] capital's gothic process is the process of vampirism itself. It is the undeath which feeds on life, and in so doing troubles the very distinction between organic, animated vitality and cold, inanimate mechanism; bringing both together in what Fisher calls the anorganic continuum." (3)    

 

Jones continues: 

 

"Understood in this gothic manner, as suspending the rigidity of the border between life and death [...] capital traverses this boundary which Fisher calls the Gothic Flatline." (3)

 

If we wanted to phrase this in a more Deleuze-Guattarian manner - and Fisher "aligns himself wholeheartedly" (3) with their ontology - we'd speak about a plane of immanence; i.e., a zone of existence where all things exist equally as things and are interconnected regardless of their status.  

 

Vampires may be fictional, but on a plane of immanence they are just as real as rats, robots, or rainbows [c]. And understood "as functional sets of relations which produce actions" (4) vampirism is cybernetically real and gothic materialism basically refers to cybernetic realism.       

 

 

III. 

 

Moving on, but sticking with Jones's preface, I was interested to read his description of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, with which Fisher was closely associated: 

 

"The CCRU was a quasi-department of post-structuralist, post-Marxist philosophy [...] a fictional entity generated by a collection of junglist professors [...] and graduate students with a predilection for Deleuze, Burroughs, Haraway, and amphetamines" (4-5). 

 

However, I was disappointed that he couldn't actually bring himself to mention the name Nick Land, preferring to write that the CCRU was "led by a man who would go on to suffer a complete mental collapse, only to emerge as the philosopher of 'Neoreaction' (5). 

 

I believe the term for this is damnatio memoriae.  

 

Is Jones scared that if he says Land's name something terrible will be invoked, or the man himself might suddenly appear, à la Beetlejuice? 

 

It's an incredibly coy (and I think insulting) omission. Land deserves far more respect than that. For whatever one thinks of his subsequent political trajectory, his philosophical brilliance during the 1990s was the engine of the CCRU and reducing his influence actually weakens our understanding of Fisher's development. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Jones ends his foreword on what appears to be a rather sour note of pessimism and defeat:

 

"The revolutionary flux of social upheaval, accelerated by new technological forces which escaped the regulatory circuits of bourgeois modernity, did not take place. [...] It is hard to have any of what the CCRU would call 'cyberpositivity' two decades later." (10)

 

Capitalist realism triumphed and Fisher was obliged to confront this in his later work, acknowledging that "hyperreality is far more conducive to bourgeois subjectivity than ever" (11). 

 

Jones continues:

 

"Man was given New Flesh by his cybernetic machineries, but in plugging into the Cronenbergian circuits of a technicity fully under enemy control, they have given capital ever more means to regulate the use of human bodies and minds in productive time.

      Where the images of Cyberpunk futures and techno-futurist marketing offered us post-humanity, they have delivered new precarities of all-too-human suffering in the contemporary economy [...] They have enclosed the digital commons, converting cyberspace into a dominion whose organising principle is the production of data as a commodity." (11) 

 

What a bummer, as our American friends like to say. 

 

And yet, who knows, maybe Hölderlin was right to suggest that where lies the gravest danger that most threatens mankind, there grows also the power of salvation [d]. 

 

And maybe Jones is right to suggest that "it is the light of cybertheory's floundering that [...] it is right to to make a critical retrospective turn, back towards its very foundations as a project" (11) - back, that is to say, to Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs ...

 

  

Notes

 

[a] All page numbers given in the post refer to this work. 

 

[b] Remarks made by Ray Brassier in a blurb provided for Fisher's book (no page number). 

 

[c] This is something I have found a lot of non-philosophers have problems with, probably because Western culture likes to separate objective facts from subjective meanings and we are trained to view reality as binary. Fisher's project in Flatline Constructs is to collapse such binaries.

      But here's also confusion over terminology; most people seem to use real and actual as synonymous. Thus, at a recent talk, for example, someone in the audience refused to admit the existence of unicorns no matter how I attempted to explain things in flat ontological terms and illustrate that even non-actual entities lacking physical presence can have conceptual, cultural, and affective reality (the irony was, as a Christian, they at the same time insisted on the truth of God's existence).

 

[d] See Friedrich Hölderlin, 'Patmos', in Friedrich Hölderlin Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (The University of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 462-463. This famous poem - much loved by Heidegger - declares: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch. 

 

 

This post will continue in a future post to be published shortly ...

 

 

Fanged Noumena: To Learn from Trakl is to Howl at the Moon

Messrs. Land & Trakl

 

'Two wolves in the sinister Wood / We mixed our blood in a stony embrace  

And the stars of our race fell upon us.' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

I once published some notes on the case of the Aquarian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl in which I praised his love of silence and admired the blueness of his twilight [2]. No one can deny that there are many arresting - and disturbing - images in his work, as he sets about exploiting the often uncanny ambiguity of the German language. 

 

Wittgenstein was an admirer; Heidegger was an admirer; and Nick Land is also a fan, although he responds in very much his own manner to Trakl whom he regards as an archetypal poète maudit - one who embraced his own lycanthropic nature and thus made a radical break from humanity and its ovine idealism. 

 

 

II. 

 

In his essay 'Spirit and Teeth', Land celebrates the fact that Trakl offers no hope of redemption - neither in his writings nor in his actual life, which is short and not particularly pleasant, involving incest, depression, and a fatal drug-overdose aged 27. 

 

He condemns Heidegger (and Derrida) for trying to spiritualise Trakl and ignore the libidinal tension in his work; the fact that to write as Trakl writes is to write in blood and with rabid impatience: "Trakl took very little time over anything." [3]      

 

Like Rimbaud, Trakl belongs to an inferior race outside of civilisation; a race that is "irresponsible and nomadic" [4], but which possesses sharp teeth with which to bite. 

 

 

III. 

 

Land also wrote an earlier text on Trakl, based on his PhD work at Essex [5]. Titled 'Narcissism and Dispersion', it's a reading of Heidegger's 1953 interpretation of Trakl and it arguably provides justification for Land's war against Heidegger's circular hermeneutics and his "repugnant obstinacy and piety" [6].  

 

I mentioned that in 'Spirit and Teeth' Land rejects Heidegger's efforts to spiritualise and pacify Trakl. Well, in 'Narcissism and Dispersion' we witness how Heidegger attempts this by treating language like a closed (narcissistic and masturbatory) loop; something that only ever concerns itself with itself. 

 

Land counters this with an idea of dispersion [Zerstreuung], insisting that what's important about Trakl's poetry is that it allows language to unravel or decompose and leak into a material Outside.  

 

Whilst Heidegger desperately tries to defend Trakl's verse from being read as a symptom of a degenerating, fragmented ego so as to relocate Trakl back into a grand gathering of Geist, Land is having none of this. 

 

For Land, Trakl is not the poet of home sweet home, but of nomadic wandering and his language does not reflect upon itself in quiet isolation; it rapidly spreads like a rash or buzzes like a mad swarm of flies. 

 

For Heidegger, the blueness of twilight indicates a time of peace when the beast has been tamed; for Land, the latter is forever untameable and wild blueness is akin to what, as a Lawrentian, I would term chaos (the desire for which forms the very essence of poetry) [7].

 

 

IV.

 

So, on the one hand, we have Heidegger's reading of Trakl ... one that sanitises the latter by downplaying the drug-induced mania and seeks to pass off the work as a (mystical) affirmation of Being in order to reinforce his own philosophy.   

 

On the other hand, we have Land's reading of Trakl ... one that celebrates the latter by emphasising its feral character and seeks to pass off the work as a (filthy and furious) affirmation of base materialism in order to reinforce his own philosophy. 

 

Heidegger suggests that Trakl’s language is essentially singing the song of a homecoming - the movement of humanity away from its current alienated, fallen state and toward a primordial beginning.

 

Land says it's a werewolf's howling.

 

The question is: Would Trakl have preferred Heidegger's reading of his work, or Nick Land's?   

 

Obviously, we can never know the answer for sure - and it's highly probable he would have disliked both - but I like to believe that, if forced to choose, Trakl would prefer the latter and recognise himself a little better in Land's reading which, whilst highly theoretical, nevertheless contains something of the ecstatic nihilism that characterised his writing.

 

Having said that, Trakl scholars almost universally prefer Heidegger's reading over Land's and Heidegger's work is treated as foundational (even if problematic and at times deeply flawed). Land remains seen (at best) as an eccentric, peripheral figure by the Academy. 

 

The fact that his interpretation of Trakl is highly regarded within certain marginalised circles and subcultures (and on blogs like this) only confirms their idea of Land as someone who arouses fellow lunatics but has very little to offer serious scholars within the field of German literary studies who, much like Heidegger, after reading Trakl's poems are able to simply lay down their books, close their eyes, and enjoy a good night's sleep [8].  

 

 

   

Notes

 

[1] Georg Trakl, 'Passion', in Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Alexander Stillmark (Northwestern University Press, 2005), p. 302. 

      These lines are quoted by Land in his essay 'Spirit and Teeth' (1993), see note 3 below. 

 

[2] See the post 'Drinking the Silence: Notes on the Case of Georg Trakl' (17 Dec 2018): click here.  

 

[3] Nick Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 175-201. The line quoted is on p. 181.

      This essay was originally published in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. David Wood (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.  

 

[4] Nick Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 183. 

 

[5] Land received his PhD in 1987 from the University of Essex under the supervision of David Farrell Krell. His thesis focused on Martin Heidegger's 1953 essay 'Language in the Poem' [Die Sprache im Gedicht] and its interpretation of the poetry of Georg Trakl.

 

[6] Nick Land, 'Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger's 1953 Trakl Interpretation', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 118. This essay first appeared in Philosophers' Poets, ed. David Wood (Routledge, 1990), pp. 72-90.  

 

[7] I'm thinking here of Lawrence's essay 'Chaos in Poetry' - much loved by Deleuze and Guattari - which served as an introduction to Harry Crosby's poetry collection Chariot of the Sun (Black Sun Press, 1931).

      The essay can be found in D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116.

 

[8] I'm paraphrasing Land's ending to 'Narcissism and Dispersion'. Land regarded Heidegger as an exhausted and ageing philosopher with Platonic instincts who "felt nauseous at the thought of losing control, and perhaps still believed in God". Fanged Noumena, p. 121. 

 

 

A Reply to Rosamund Pike

Poster for Suzie Miller's play Inter Alia (2025) 

Starring Rosamund Pike as Jessica Parks 

Wyndham's Theatre (London)

 

 

I. 

 

I don't know why, but I've always had something of a soft spot for the English actress Rosamund Pike, even though, as far as I can recall, I've only ever seen her in a couple of films - Jack Reacher (2012) and Gone Girl (2014). 

 

Maybe it's because she's a Londoner. Or maybe it's because she's a bit posh, has a nice voice and an unusual face. Or maybe I just like the name, Rosamund, which has a fascinating dual etymology [1]. 

 

Whatever the reason, I'm afraid to say that I don't entirely sympathise with her calling out of an audience member for daring to text while she was performing at a West End theatre [2].    

 

 

II. 

 

Returning to the stage after the cast had taken their final bows, Ms Pike addressed the audience directly, telling them how hard it is to tell a story and keep the magic of the moment when people are using their phones to take photos or send messages. 

 

Apparently, she received a round of applause for this. 

 

But I would like to remind her and the growing band of thespians who have chosen to criticise the contemporary audience for their lack of etiquette, that we are in 2026 and the hyper-connected digital world is very different from the analogue world of just thirty years ago. 

 

In 1996, when the auditorium lights went down, the outside world vanished and people sat up in their seats, shut up, and paid attention to what unfolded on the stage. But - whether we like it or not - smartphones have changed all that. 

 

Now, not only is there an expectation of continuous connectivity, but so too is there an acceptance of (and even a need for) constant distraction. Audiences quickly become bored and impatient with a drama that demands sustained intellectual and emotional engagement. 

 

The simple fact is theatregoers today do not think of themselves as participants in some quasi-religious art event unfolding in a semi-magical space, but as consumers who have paid good money to have a good time. And just as they are not going to queue up for tickets any longer or dress up in their Sunday best clothes, so they are not going to turn off their phones or stop taking images to share on social media. 

 

III.

 

And let me remind my actor friends also that theatres were once incredibly rowdy and highly interactive places. The enforcement of absolute silence in the auditorium was a relatively modern development; part of a campaign to tame the audience spearheaded by the rising middle class during the Victorian era [3].

 

Prior to the late-19th century, theatregoers did not sit passively in the dark, nervous even about clearing their throats or rustling a sweet paper. Essentially, playhouses were more like modern music halls or taverns. The auditorium was lit just as brightly as the stage and people went to the theatre to socialise, to flirt, and to be seen in their finery, rather than merely watch actors treading the boards. 

 

Audience members would not only loudly converse with one another, they would actively heckle the performers. And if they particularly disliked what they saw, they might even throw rotten fruit. The possibility that things might kick off and lead to a riot was ever-present. 

 

All of which I'm sure Ms Pike - as an Oxford graduate with a degree in English Literature - must surely know, making her on-stage griping purely performative and a little disingenuous.  

 

Notes

 

[1] The genuine origin of the name is Germanic, deriving from the terms hros and mund and translates in modern English as protector of horses. During the Middle Ages, however, the name became associated with the Latin phrases rosa munda (pure rose) and rosa mundi (rose of the world) - the latter of which was often used to refer to the Virgin Mary.

      As for her surname - Pike - it is not clear whether this refers to the weapon or the fish. It has also been speculated that it might derive from the word 'peak' (the highest point of a hill or mountain). 

 

[2] The play was Suzie Miller's Inter Alia (2025) - a feminist moral drama - and the performance took place at Wyndham's Theatre on Saturday 30 May, 2026. The play earned critical acclaim upon its original National Theatre run and its current West End staging has also had mostly excellent reviews, particularly Pike's performance as Jessica Parks.   

 

[3] As the bourgeoisie grew in economic power and self-confidence, they sought spaces that reflected their values of respectability and restraint. And so it was decided that working-class audiences would be increasingly priced out of mainstream theatres and obliged to frequent cheaper venues, such as music halls.

      Plays were rebranded as high art rather than low-brow amusement and actors began to take themselves seriously as artistes who belonged on an elevated stage and in the limelight - whilst the audience were literally left down below in the dark. The only time they could express themselves was at the end of the performance, when it was hoped they would clap and cry bravo!  

      Just to be on the safe side, theatre managers even began printing rules of etiquette directly into playbills and putting up placards instructing audiences on how to behave. Shushing became an accepted method used by the bourgeois to silence and humiliate anyone who broke the rules. 

      By the early 20th century, the transformation was complete; the working class largely abandoned the so-called legitimate theatre for the interactive freedom of the music halls and, later, the cheaper, more casual environment of early cinemas.  

 

Bring Back the Lengthsmen!

 On the left: a lengthsman in the village of Bramshill, Hampshire (1911), 

seen with his wooden wheelbarrow containing traditional tools of the trade 

(a long-handled shovel, a scythe, etc.) 

 On the right: a 'ground maintenance crew' working in the London Borough of Havering 

with their machinery and PPE in June 2023 [1]

 

I. 

 

I hate to begin a post with one of those proverbs that inane people often like to trot out as if they're in possession of some profound ancient wisdom, but ... If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well [2] is something that should be drilled into the teams of subcontracted operatives sent by my local council to tend for what remains of the natural environment - the roadside hedges, grass verges, trees, ditches, brooks and streams, etc.      

 

It's not so much a demand for greater excellence, as a demand for care. I want the men responsible for the above to possess a reasonable amount of skill and a certain degree of knowledge - want them to take pleasure and have pride in their work - but most of all I want them to care about the vegetation and wildlife and stop using noisy and destructive machines such as tractor-mounted flail-mowers.    

 

II. 

 

Without coming over all Jack Hargreaves [3], there once was an England - before severe budget cuts forced councils to use uncaring private contractors, adopt strict maintenance schedules, and use power tools that rip and rend rather than prune - in which open green spaces, shaded woodland, wild flower meadows, and small ponds, etc. were cherished and cared for not only as natural habitats for a huge variety of creatures, but as magical places in themselves.   

 

There was a time, indeed, when there were characters known as lengthsmen [4] who cheerfully kept a stretch of road neat and tidy, or worked as stewards along the canals and railways [5].  

 

Employed either by the Lords of the Manor or the parish councils, these men - dressed not in ghastly hi-vis coveralls and various items of PPE, but traditional heavy-duty clothing (a hat, thick woollen trousers, leather boots, and a durable jacket) - would prevent the vegetation from running riot (but without spraying toxic chemicals such as glyphosate), keep drainage ditches clear, repair fences and walls, lay hedges, and plant wild flowers. 

 

They would even collect litter - such as it was prior to the 1950s [6] - not shred it with electric strimmers into thousands of ever-smaller pieces of plastic and then drive off, uncaring, with sound systems blaring.     

 

Notes

 

[1] The first image comes via the Facebook group Historic Hampshire in old Photographs and was posted by Gary Allam on 11 August 2021: click here. The second image is via Havering Council's account on X -@LBofHavering - and was posted on 28 June 2023: click here. 

      I don't wish to single out Havering Council as being particularly bad when it comes to environmental issues; I refer to them simply because they are the ones charging me over £2000 a year in council tax. 

 

[2] The earliest documented version of this proverb was penned by Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, in a letter to his son in 1774. 

[3] Jack Hargreaves was an English television presenter who, in an entertaining but non-sentimental manner, attempted to explain old countryways and rural traditions to a predominantly urban and suburban audience. He presented a weekly show, Out of Town, for over twenty years on ITV which I used to enjoy watching as a child in the Seventies. 

      In each episode Hargreaves appeared in short film reports on some aspect of rural life, introduced and narrated by him from a studio set based on the interior of a garden shed.  

 

[4] Although the official term lengthsman was coined in the 1700s, there have been men effectively fulfilling this role since the Tudor period. 

 

[5] Obviously, I'm painting a slightly rosy picture here of the past; I'm aware that rural labour was often extremely gruelling and poorly paid. 

 

[6] The nature (and sheer volume) of litter changed significantly with the post-WWII boom in mass-produced, single-use plastics and packaging. Prior to the mid-20th century, roadside rubbish consisted primarily of degradable paper, cardboard, and highly recyclable tin or glass. Thus, an old-school lengthsman clearing a ditch was dealing with materials that would either rot or hold value. 

      Now, the environment is littered daily with millions of casually discarded objects engineered to last for centuries. Thus, when modern maintenance crews choose to run over these items with heavy machinery rather than collect them, they are not merely failing to tidy up; they are actively transforming macro-pollution into thousands of indestructible microplastic fragments, permanently poisoning the local soil and waterways. 

Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons

Nick Land and Die Nacht der Amazonen [a]

'We are the Amazons. We are the killers of beasts and men. 

Wild ourselves, we inhabit the wild places. Freedom courses in our blood, 

and death whispers at the tip of our arrows. 

We fear nothing, fear runs from us. Try to stop us, and you will feel our rage.' [b]

                                                          

 

I. 

 

For a thinker who once dismissed politics as "the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind" [c], Land spends an awful amount of time addressing political issues and discussing modern philosophy in relation to capitalism. 

 

And although he was never a traditional leftist even in his early writings, it's amusing to note just how deeply rooted in Marxist analysis, postcolonial theory, radical feminism, and femdom fantasy his thinking was in the late-1980s.   

 

 

II. 

 

In his essay 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest' (1988), Land is at pains to argue that the Sage of Königsberg's philosophy cunningly disguised the violent, exclusionary realities of free-market capitalism, such as racism, by hiding them behind abstract, universal moral ideals:  

 

"Kant was able to remain bourgeois without overtly promoting racism only because he also remained an idealist, or in other words a Christian [...] and identified universality with ideality rather than with power." [d] 

 

Western modernity may portray itself as enlightened and speak of freedom and equality, but it's structurally dependent on class and racial hierarchies in order to exploit labour and foreign resources. Liberals want to reap the benefits of the bourgeois order, but they want to do so without feeling morally compromised by its more brutal aspects and Kant provides them with a way to wriggle off the hook and evade their guilt.      

 

That makes Kant not just a crypto-theologian, but also an apologist for capitalism; someone who enables the liberal elite to preach universal human rights whilst, at the same time, build a global economic system that is radically inhuman and which will eventually do away with mankind altogether.   

 

 

III. 

 

Not that Land objects to the death of man, of course. 

 

In fact, he wishes to accelerate the forces that capitalism itself unleashes by dissolving all borders and boundaries, all structures and identities (particularly national structures and identities). Ultimately, Nick's objection to the bourgeois order is that it never goes far or fast enough toward its own external limit. 

 

Similarly, his objection to old school socialism is that it isn't revolutionary enough; being as it is all too male, pale, and stale it doesn't offer the unrestrained programme born of the "theoretical and libidinal dissolution of national totality" (77) that he longs for. 

 

And so, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, at the end of 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest', Land turns to militant feminists, such as Monique Wittig, for support ...   

 

 

IV.

 

Wittig - a French philosopher and lesbian theorist - is also known for her fictional writings, including the hugely influential novel Les Guérillères (1969) [e].  

 

This term, a neologism, is sometimes translated into English as 'warrior women', but Land has a penchant for the idea of new Amazons, who, in his view, are alone capable of destroying the patriarchal and nationalistic structures that act as brakes on global capitalism, finally unleashing the market's unrestricted flow of desire.

 

Land writes:

 

"The only resolutely revolutionary politics is feminist in orientation [...] It is because women are the historical realisation of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communicative function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they are invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands." (78)

 

Whilst praising Luce Irigaray's meticulous analysis of patriarchal power, Land says the political solutions she suggests "are often feebly nostalgic, sentimental, and pacifistic" (78). It is only Wittig who has "adequately grasped the inescapably military task faced by any serious revolutionary feminism" (79). 

 

Land argues that liberating women from an ethno-geographical identity will result in a revolutionary subversion of the state.  He dismisses liberal feminism and reformism as co-opted mechanisms that simply give women access to wealth while leaving the brutal patriarchal-capitalist system intact.

 

But Land also insists that uprooting the patriarchal endogamy requires a fierce willingness to fight the modern state and he posits feminist violence as crucial. His new Amazons, as schizonomadic agents of feminist chaos, will end the bourgeois order (or Human Security System) not with love and kisses, but bullets and bombs. 

  

He finds it dispiriting that women have historically shown "enormous reluctance [...] to prosecute their struggle with sufficient ruthlessness and aggression [...] feminism is often particularly fastidious in this respect, even reverting to absurd mystical and Ghandian [sic] ideologies" (79).  

 

Land calls this reluctance idealistic recoil and insists that terror and atrocity are "the very motor" (79) of politics and that a "revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell" (79). 

 

This is what Land terms a harsh truth ... 

 

He ends by relating this call to "escalate the cycle of violence without limit" (79) in the name of overthrowing "the contemporary world order " (80), back to Kant, whose philosophy remains for Land at the heart of the problem:

 

"With the abolition [...] of Kantian thought - a sordid cowardice will be washed away [...] But the only conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst." (80) [f] 

 

 

V.

 

So, what are we to make of all this? 

 

Well, if you're a Nick Land fanboy or happen to fantasise about dominant women, then I suppose you'll say he's speaking here with the voice of a "revolutionary and a feminist male who has shifted into hyperaccelerationist mode" and cheer him on as he sides with futural amazons fighting a guerrilla war that "displaces five thousand years of patriarchal endogamy and the rule of androcracies" [g].

  

But if, like me, you wrote your PhD on various post-Nietzschean forms of politics (including the politics of desire, cruelty, and evil), then you might have certain reservations about those who speak in favour of revolutionary violence and justify even the most atrocious acts and echo Deleuze and Guattari's call for caution at all times [h].  

It seems to me that Nietzsche was right to say that whilst revolutionary violence can be a source of stimulation via the resurrection of the "most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages" [i], it can do no more than this. For change of a truly profound nature, it requires something else. Not something noisier or more brutal in character, but, on the contrary, something that administers small doses of change "unremittingly over long periods of time" [j].  

 

In other words, the revaluation of all values involves patience. 

 

Unfortunately, that's probably not a Landian virtue and it might explain why Land fails to give his own philosophy a plausible political identity (although I'm sure he would say that was not something he ever wanted to do). 

 

It might also help to explain how it is Land goes from expressing a desire to escape from all fatherlands to promoting a neoreactionary philosophy based on corporate techno-feudalism and ends up living in Shanghai - which is ironic when one recalls that Nietzsche often characterised Kant as Chinese [k].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] While the Amazon shown here is an illustration for the 1937 programme for Die Nacht der Amazonen by Albert Reich, this is not to imply that Land would have been anything other than horrified by the open-air Nazi propaganda and variety event held annually in Munich during the period 1936-39. 

      It may have delighted thousands of German spectators with its mix of mythology, racial ideology, and near-naked showgirls dancing or parading on horseback, but I can't imagine it would have been Nick's cup of tea and, as we will see in this post, his Amazons are of a very different kind to those lusted after by the leaders of the Third Reich. 

 

[b] Anne Fortier, The Lost Sisterhood (Ballantine Books, 2014), p. 3. 

 

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

 

[d] Nick Land, 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), p. 72. 

      Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post between round brackets.

 

[e] Les Guérillères is today considered a pivotal text for feminist and lesbian thinkers around the world. It was first translated into English by David Le Vey in 1971 and published in a recent edition by the University of Illinois Press, 2007. Wittig clearly had an influence on Land - particularly the idea of Amazonian women leading a violent revolution. Also, for Land, heteronormative lifestyles are one of the major brakes on capital and so Wittig's lesbianism is valued in and of itself. 

 

[f] This invoking of new Amazons is similar to Nietzsche's calling upon a new breed of barbarians who come from the heights and combine spiritual superiority with an excess of physical well-being. See The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), IV. 899-900, pp. 478-479. 

 

[g] S. C. Hickman, 'Nick Land: Amazons and the Post-Capitalist World', The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and the Digital Arts (16 December 2016): click here. 

 

[h] In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write: "Staying stratified - organised, 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." See ATP, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 161. 

      Land of course violently repudiates Deleuze and Guattari's warnings against the dangers of going too far, too fast and the need to exercise caution. In Land's eyes, this 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 [D&G] had previously so effectively challenged". - Mackay and Brassier writing in their 'Editor's Introduction' to Nick Land's Fanged Noumena ... p. 30.

 

[i] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 463, p. 169. 

      Admittedly, this is Nietzsche writing in one of his calmer periods and one can find plenty of examples - even in the same work - of him offering support for grand politics and "the greatest and most terrible wars" - HAH, I. 8. 477, p. 176.  

 

[j] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), V. 534, p. 211.

 

[k] Nietzsche called Kant the 'Chinaman of Königsberg' because of the latter's rigid, dogmatic, bureaucratic moralism. See, for example, Beyond Good and Evil § 210 and The Anti-Christ § 11. 

 

 

For the first post in this series of posts on Nick Land's writings in Fanged Noumena (2011), please 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.

 

 

Reflections on a Dead Rat

Portrait of a Dead Rat 

(SA/2026) 

 

'From the point of view of mankind, the rat is an unmitigated nuisance and pest. 

There is nothing that can be said in its favour. Its destructiveness is almost unlimited.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

It's not often Phoevos the Cat manages to catch (and kill) a rat; but that's what he did today. 

 

Not a very big rat, I grant you. But a rat all the same. 

 

And disposing of the body brought to mind two very different essays by two very different authors: a soon-to-be-published work by punk scholar Russ Bestley [2]; and a much older text written by the philosopher Nick Land [3]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Bestley insists on the symbolic meaning of the rat within punk subculture, history and design - or what he terms punk lore. The rat, he says, is something that can be read - although how it might be read is constrained by the fact that it comes with "a range of negative linguistic connotations [that] have persisted for more than 500 years" [4]. 

 

When you think of all the terrible things threatening man and society - disease, decay, degeneration - the rat is associated with all of them and whilst "the negative symbolism of rodents" [5] horrifies most right-minded individuals, it appeals to those "seeking to shock and disrupt" [6] - from Hell's Angels to punk rockers; mad poets to cybergothic theorists like Nick Land ...  

 

 

III. 

 

Like Bestley, Land also has a thing for rats (he likes wolves too, but that's another story). 

 

However, whereas Bestley sees the rat merely as emblematic of counterculture, in his 1993 essay, 'Spirit and Teeth', Land positions the long-tailed rodent as positively anti-historic - a barbarian force of desire that challenges the two things he places himself vehemently in opposition to: academic philosophy and progressive humanism. 

 

Operating in sewers and deep underground tunnels, the rat gnaws away at the lofty speculations and high ideals of enlightened philosophers and old-school theologians upon which Western civilisation is founded. 

 

Indeed, Land wishes to demonstrate that even Heaven "is not without ratholes, its sewage system, an entire impersonal architecture characterised by porous heterogeinity" [7]. Thus, irrespective of his celestial visage, the Lord Almighty "still has ratbites on his ass" [8].

 

For Land, philosophy should be evaluated not just from the perspective of man - which he regards as no more privileged than that of sea slugs - but from the perspective of an uncontrollable swarm. Thus, rather than viewing death, for example, as a tragedy for the individual, he asks us to view it from the perspective of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe: as an impersonal, global event.

  

Land allies himself with thinkers and outsiders he refers to as rat-poets - Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and Georg Trakl, for example. Their work, he argues, is a plague of the spirit, bringing an end to rigid thought structures by descending into formless chaos. He singles out Trakl's superb poem Die Ratten as a text that "functions as a vermin-core for an entire pattern of infestation" [9].

 

 

IV.

 

In sum ... 

 

For Land, rats are not merely symbols or abstract representations of meaning and metaphor; they are engines of chaos that directly impact reality. 

 

Bestley wants to know what rats mean - to read and interpret them so as to make sense of punk imagery. But Land, like Willard, "in a gesture of beautiful treachery against mankind" [10] wants to feed them and breed them and set them free to do their thing, decomposing interiorities and triggering irreversible changes.

 

One final thought ... 

 

In killing the rat, does Phoevos not only express his predatory instinct, but also demonstrate that the cat remains the eternal enemy of the rodent and thus (inadvertently) acts as the guardian of humanity, protecting us and our civilisation from chaos, destruction, and disease?  

 

As Bestley and the other contributors to Punk & the Animal might well ask: Are cats the anti-punk creatures par excellence? 

 

If we need a libidinal rat theory "from beyond representational discourse" [11] on the one hand, then so too do we need a feline politics that recognises their animality in all its cultural and philosophical complexity.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] An adapted quotation from Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (Bantam Books, 1965), pp. 150-151. Cited by Nick Land in his essay 'Spirit and Teeth' (1993) - see reference in note 3 below.   

 

[2] The essay by Bestley - which he has kindly sent me to read in advance of its forthcoming publication - is titled 'Rattus rattus: the Rat in Punk Lore'. It forms chapter 2 in Punk & the Animal: Ethos, Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Laura D. Gelfand and Angela Bartram (Intellect Books, 2026), pp. 25-44.  

      I published a post on TTA in anticipation of this book earlier this month (17 May 2026): click here. 

 

[3] Nick Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 175-201. This essay was originally published in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. David Wood (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.  

 

[4] Bestley, 'Rattus rattus: the Rat in Punk Lore', in Punk & the Animal ... p. 25. 

 

[5] Ibid., p. 30.

 

[6] Ibid

 

[7] Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 192.

 

[8] Ibid.

 

[9] Ibid. 

    This poem by Trakl - translated into English by Eric Plattner as 'The Rats' - can be read on the All Poetry website: click here. 

 

[10] Ibid., p. 193. 

 

[11] Ibid., p. 200. 

 

 

On Sexiness (With Reference to Malcolm McLaren's Shallow 1-21)

 

A still from Malcolm McLaren's Shallow 1-21 (2008) 

showing a woman slowly eating some grapes in a sexy fashion 

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art  

 

'What excites today - after the orgy as Baudrillard would say - 

isn't explicit pornography, but very slow-moving portraits of people 

thinking about, desiring, wanting, wishing for, and imagining having sex.' 

 

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence famously equates sex with beauty, insisting that they are one and the same thing; "like flame and fire" [1] and that sex appeal is, therefore, the appeal of living beauty. 

 

Barthes, however, isn't having any of this. 

 

For Barthes, the sexiness of a body has nothing to do with its beauty. Rather, it "inheres in the fact that it is possible to discern (to fantasise) in it the erotic practice to which one subjects it in thought" [2].     

 

That's a definition which would make Lawrence splutter in his tea. He'd accuse Barthes of having his sex in his head (to be fair, the above does very much lend itself to such a reading). 

 

But it's a definition that I think Malcolm McLaren would have immediately understood and appreciated; for, in a sense, it provides the key with which to unlock the secret of his multimedia artwork titled Shallow 1-21 (2008). 

 

 

II. 

 

Consisting of a series of what he liked to call musical paintings, the work combines some of McLaren's favourite songs and pieces of music with appropriated video clips from vintage films of people just before they engage in sexual acts, looping moments of heavy breathing, the parting of lips, or the slow unbuttoning of a shirt [3].

 

By focusing entirely on the excitement of anticipation rather than explicit acts, McLaren conceptualised the 86-minute work as a subversion of pornography and hoped to demonstrate the truth of Casanova's famous claim that the finest of all moments in the game of love comes when one is climbing the stairs [4].    

III.

 

Lawrence, of course, would hate McLaren's film. 

 

But Barthes, I think, would have appreciated the work. Indeed, it might be argued that, in some manner, Shallow is a version of Barthes's projected work on sexuality.

 

Enchanted by a young couple sitting opposite him on the train - "the woman is blonde, made up; she is wearing big dark glasses, reads Paris-Match; she has a ring on each finger, and each nail on both hands is painted a different colour from its two neighbours" [5] - Barthes conceives the idea of a new book (or of a film). 

 

In this work, there would be "nothing but secondary sex characteristics (nothing pornographic); in it one would grasp (would try to grasp) the sexual 'personality' of each body, which is neither its beauty nor even its 'sexiness' but the way in which each sexuality immediately lets itself be read" [6].

 

From this, one can see why Barthes once described himself as a homotextual. 

 

He continues:

 

"For the young blonde with the harlequin nails and her young husband with his tight pants and warm eyes were wearing their couple-sexuality like the legion-of-honour ribbon in a buttonhole (sexuality and respectability relating to the same kind of display), and this legible sexuality [...] filled the compartment, by an irresistible metonymy, much more certainly than any series of coquetries." [7]   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 145. For a discussion of this piece, see the post dated 24 September 2018: click here.  

 

[2] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac 1995), p. 164.  

 

[3] McLaren developed the first eight videos for Shallow in 2007 for a New York group show. He completed the rest of the 21 musical paintings in 2008, officially premiering the entire collection at Art Basel in Switzerland in June 2008. 

      For those readers who might be interested, McLaren discusses the work on Artforum (16 July 2008): click here. 

 

[4] Interestingly, Michel Foucault points out that whilst this may well have been true within an eighteenth-century heterosexual context, the reverse is probably the case within the world of homosexuality. Foucault claims that the modern homosexual would be more likely to say something along the lines of: The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi. 

      He explains: "It is when the act is over and the boy is gone that one begins to dream about the warmth of his body, the quality of his smile, the tone of his voice. It is the recollection rather than the anticipation of the act that assumes a primary importance in homosexual relations. This is why the great homosexual writers of our culture (Cocteau, Genet, Burroughs) can write so elegantly about the sexual act itself, because the homosexual imagination is for the most part concerned with reminiscing about the act rather than anticipating it." 

      This brilliant observation was made in the interview conducted by James O'Higgins titled 'Sexual Choice, Sexual Act'. It can be found in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (Semiotext[e], 1996), pp. 322-334. The lines quoted above are on page 330. 

 

[5] Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes ... p. 164. 

      The interview can also be read in the American quarterly magazine Salmagundi, No. 58/59 (Fall 1982 - Winter 1983): click here to read online.  

 

[6] Ibid.

 

[7] Ibid.

 

 

For a related post to this on the politics of accelerationism contra slowness with reference to Shallow 1-21, which was published on 11 April 2025, click here.