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

Zer0 Books (2025) [a] 

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk 

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IV. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

V. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

  

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

Ripped & Torn: Operation Raise the Colours Nine Months On

 

Tattered Flag (Noak Hill, 2026) 

 

Dead dreams, dead dreams flying flags / Flapping in the breeze, 

wave your coloured rags - Public Image Limited (1987)

 

 

Some readers may recall a post I published last September written in response to the Raise the Colours campaign [1].

 

That piece was prompted by an article by Laura Dodsworth published on her Substack, wherein she extolled the beauty of Union flags flying proudly on her local high street, claiming the bright colours "cut through the drizzle like fireworks" [2].

 

Well, nine months on, and where are we?

 

Are people like Ms Dodsworth still feeling energised by these cheap polyester flags, mostly imported from mass-production sweatshops in China? 

 

I doubt it. 

 

For it's difficult to feel anything other than a mixture of anger and shame when one looks up at the tattered remnants still fluttering from local lamp posts. More rags than flags, they have literally been left to rot by those who raised them. 

 

This neglect tells us all we need to know: the operation's organisers are far more focused on blanketing new areas to generate social media than maintaining existing displays. For while it takes effort putting the things up in the first place, it takes far more responsibility to remove and replace old flags and ensure they are disposed of safely. 

 

(Standard petroleum-based polyester flags take anywhere from 20 to 200 years to decompose in a landfill and instead of returning naturally to the soil like organic material, they break down into toxic microplastics. One would have thought genuine patriots might be concerned about polluting the very soil they claim to love.)

 

In other words, it's relatively easy to make a short-term political gesture, but significantly harder to provide long-term care and commitment. As an apolitical vexillophobe who despises both sides of the tribal debate whilst also hating flags as flags - i.e., distinctively designed pieces of cloth intended as identifying symbols - I find the entire spectacle depressing. 

 

Personally, I would be far more impressed if the people who loudly claim to love their country organised teams to regularly pick up local litter, or perhaps provide practical support to elderly neighbours who may need help with the shopping or odd jobs doing around the house.

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] See 'Vexillophobia: You Can Wave Your Coloured Rag All You Wish Ms Dodsworth, But I'll Not Be Flying the Flag' (2 Sept 2025): click here. 

 

[2] Laura Dodsworth, 'The Rise of Vexillophobia: fear of the flag is this nation's greatest malady', The Free Mind (31 August 2025): click here. The article is partly tongue in cheek, which is - for me at least - its saving grace.  

 

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

Zer0 Books (2025) [a] 

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk 

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

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

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

He writes:

 

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

 

Fisher continues:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II.  

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

   

 

III. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IV.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

V. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Fisher writes:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

   

Fisher concludes:

 

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

 

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

 

VI.

 

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

 

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

 

Anyway, I was not impressed: 

 

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

  

Fisher, however, LOVES the film:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

VII. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

VIII. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IX. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

  

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

   

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

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

       

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs (2025): Introduction and Chapter One

Zer0 Books (2025) [a]

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

'The more artificial you can make it, the greater the chance of its looking real.' [b]

                                                                                                 

  

I. 

 

As is only right and proper for an Introduction, Fisher sets out some of his key terms (my emphasis in bold):

 

"Gothic flatline: a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate, and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive." (14) 

 

This anorganic continuum, says Fisher, is the "province of the Gothic" (15). 

 

Just to clarify, he adds:

 

"The Gothic flatline designates a zone of radical immanence. And to theorise this flatline demands [...] the theorisation of immanence. This thesis calls that approach Gothic Materialism." (15)

 

Fisher also informs us of his major aim: to pursue cybernetics to its limits by asking 'What if we are as 'dead' as the machines?' "Much of what follows is an attempt to answer this question" (15) and reach the Gothic flatline. 

 

As might be apparent, Fisher is deeply indebted in his thinking to Deleuze and Guattari (and their reading of the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer). For Deleuze and Guattari, the Gothic refers us to nonorganic life and has nothing to do with anything "supernatural, ethereal or otherworldly" (15) [c]. 

 

That said, Fisher does rather want to sex up the idea of materialism by thinking it "in terms closer to Horror fiction than to theories of social relations" (15) and demonstrate how the anorganic "is not the dead matter of conventional mechanistic science; on the contrary it swarms with strange agencies" (16).

 

Now, without wishing to anticipate what Fisher says later in Flatline Constructs, I think it might be helpful to clarify this point by stressing that the anorganic (or nonorganic) is entirely different from the inorganic. Whilst the latter is - like a Monty Python parrot - completely devoid of life, the former is a vibrant, unorganised form of intensive life operating on a flatline. 

      

Unfortunately, things get complicated because techno-capitalism, argues Fisher, has collapsed these distinctions, rendering human subjects inorganic and machines anorganic and thus it is that we end up discussing "the gleaming products of technically sophisticated capitalism" (16) in the "ostensibly archaic terms familiar from Horror fiction: zombies, demons" (16), etc. 

 

 

II.

 

Finally, there are two other names who are central to Flatline Constructs: Freud and Baudrillard ...

 

Freud emerges in Fisher's study as "a somewhat ambivalent figure, sometimes an ally, sometimes a foe, of Gothic Materialism" (17). The problem is, although Freud flirts with the idea of the inanimate becoming active in his essay The Uncanny (1919), he ultimately dismisses it. 

 

As for Baudrillard (whose work at times parallels that of Deleuze and Guattari, but which is by no means compatible) [d], his interest in cyberpunk fiction and film combined with "his fascination with automata and simulacra, make him both the object of a Gothic Materialist theory, and a contributor to it" (18). 

 

Baudrillard matters for Fisher also because it is Baudrillard "who is most associated with the emergence of theory-fiction as a mode" (19), putting an end to theory and fiction as separate genres. In Flatline Constructs, Fisher wants to take Baudrillard's thinking in this area very seriously "and approach fictional texts, not simply as literary texts awaiting theoretical 'readings', but as themselves already intensely theoretical" (19) [e].  

 

 

III.  

 

Chapter One of Fisher's thesis "examines the nexus of postmodernism, cybernetics and the Gothic" (20) and is titled 'Screams, Screens, Flatlines'. It opens with an analysis of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) or as those who prefer novels to films know it, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick, 1968); a key cyberpunk text. 

 

The chapter also "aims to show ways in which Cybernetics has been haunted by the Gothic" (20) [f] and how the language of Horror is important for Deleuze and Guattari's cybernetic realism or what Fisher calls the hypernatural - a concept that is positioned "as an intensification of naturalism, and by opposition the supernatural" (20).  

 

Before examining these things in more detail, let me just confess that I have minimal interest in the kind of films and novels that fascinate Fisher. I've seen Blade Runner - and, to be honest, I found it a bit boring; but not half as boring as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), which sits alongside George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) as the book I most wish I'd never attempted to read.

 

So, while I'm curious about Fisher's work, I move in a very different cinematic and fictional universe. 

  

 

IV.

 

Dick-Gibson-Burroughs-Ballard-Cronenberg ... Fisher wants to envelop this literary-cinematic line along with a legion of other names - Lovecraft, Freud, Marx, Deleuze, Guattari, Worringer, McLuhan, Jameson, Baudrillard - into Gothic Materialism conceived as an alternative postmodernism.

 

He explains that the writers and filmmakers with whom he mostly enjoys interfacing are already haunted by Gothic Materialism. They are not postmodernists "who process reality through a textualist or linguistic grid, but theorists who understand 'postmodernity' as an essentially material phenomenon, describing its effects primarily in terms of the impact that new telecommercial configurations have on the human nervous system" (27). 

 

They (to a greater or lesser degree) understand that man is no longer alienated, but ecstatic - ecstasy being defined as a free-floating experience that arises "when the subject is jacked into late capitalism's network of cybernetic communications" (28) and retreat to a private space is no longer an option. 

 

This terminal lack of retreat breeds a distinct gothic dread; not a traditional psychological fear of castration or external penetration by technology, but a realization that we no longer possess any organic interiority. We have been turned radically inside out - everted into the circuit (a thought that might make even an android scream).    

 

Once jacked in this manner, it's naive to still posit a "transcendent and authentic human agent" (29) who might resist and overcome capital. In fact, rather than think of human subjects, better to speak of non-subjectified forms of individuation - i.e., individuals who have become one with their environment. And nobody helps us conceive of such posthuman individuals than some of the names listed above:

 

"Gothic Materialism locates in Baudrillard's ecstatic communication, Gibson's Cyberspace, Jameson's total flow and Cronenberg's Videodrome, the map of hypermediatised capitalism that is decoding privatised subjectivity." (31)

 

  

V. 

 

To recap: Gothic Materialism = cybernetic realism. 

 

And the key feature of all cybernetic systems is feedback - both positive and negative.   

Which is why criticism of the system and forms of resistance to it are futile; for both, as Baudrillard pointed out, can easily be fed back into a system that "doesn't work by suppression, or repression, but through participative processes" (40). 

 

For Fisher, the fact that there is a "convergence of cybernetics and sorcery on the Gothic Flatline" (43) appears to be a paralysing predicament to say the least. However, the flatline is where everything happens; "the site of primary process [...] not a line of death but rather a continuum enfolding [...] beyond both death and life" (43).

 

I'm not sure that is meant to be encouraging, but it sounds strangely positive to my ears - almost hinting at a kind of dark and secret utopianism. There may be no hope for humanity in a conventional sense - no god to save us or revolution to liberate us - but by flattening human identity into an immortal, self-assembling network of digital code and alien desire, the flatline offers a release from personal neurosis into a state of inhuman euphoria. 

 

Ultimately, the Gothic Flatline excites because it invites us to merge with a vast cosmic machine (at least I think that's what's on offer). 

 

It's a shame that The Matrix was released in the same year Fisher submitted his PhD (1999), as he might have found it a useful point of reference, even if Baudrillard was unimpressed by the film and thought it a fundamental misunderstanding of his work [g]. As it is, he relies heavily on Neuromancer, in which the term flatline is central.   

 

 

VI. 

 

As Adam Jones rightly said in his Foreword to Flatline Constructs, Fisher likes to promote the idea of a Gothic Marx; one who emphasised the vampiric character of capitalism:

 

"The modern world for Marx is peopled with the undead; it is indeed a Gothic world haunted by spectres and ruled by the mystical nature of capital." (44)

 

But - and this is important - as capitalism develops and mutates it "outstrips Marx's most horrified descriptions of it" (45), just as the Gothic "escapes codification as a generic, psychological or fantastic mode to become the most persuasive materialist account of the contemporary socioeconomic scene" (45). 

 

Fisher continues:

 

"For cyberpunk, Marx's most Gothic language has become his most realistic, whereas his organicist protestations against capital look like antique sentimentalities." (45)

 

Recognising this, Deleuze and Guattari's work "inherits and supplements Marx's Gothic vocabulary" (45), which is why they like to speak of vampires, werewolves, and the body without organs - although it should be noted that there's nothing horrific about the latter as open system full of possibilities; it's the organ-isation of the body into an organism or "homeostatically sealed and hierarchically arranged bio-container" (49) that should give us the shivers.  

 

 

VII. 

 

Of course, embodiment isn't everything; and it certainly doesn't underwrite subjectivity. 

 

As Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr discovers, a brain in a liquid-filled jar "can have the experience of subjectivity - all the memories and dreams that post-Freudian man thinks define him uniquely - so long as the right material conditions are simulated" (51) [h].     

 

Thus - and this is something which again I know some readers will have trouble accepting - the jar matters just as much as the brain inside. Identity needn't be something essential or even personal; it can be engineered just like a prosthetic leg. 

 

And if that's the case, then does it really matter if you are dealing with an old school human or a genetically engineered bio-synthetic humanoid (what they term replicants in Blade Runner)?

 

Fisher concludes section 1.4 of his opening chapter by pointing out that debates around the question of whether Deckard is or isn't a replicant miss the Gothic Materialist implications of the film:

 

"Since, in Blade Runner, the criteria for rating the human above the replicants [...] have now evaporated, Cartesian epistemological questions have been obsolesced by functional / operational criteria. Since you could be a replicant [...] it is already as if you were a replicant, a desiring-machine. Becoming-replicant is therefore not a matter of identifying oneself as a technical machine; it is not a question of identification at all, but of recognising all identity as construction." (54)  

 

I have to admit, that's a brilliant insight - and probably more relevant to the world we live in today than anything I wrote in my PhD.  

 

 

VIII.  

 

In the end, it all comes down to (an art of) lines: organic (naturalistic) lines and geometrical (mechanical) lines. And of course, the Gothic flatline ... These lines determine how we interact with our environment and, indeed, what kind of environment exists to interact with.  

 

In brief, we might think of organic lines as the ones that shape nature and the representation of nature in classical art. People who love these flowing, undulating lines - think rhythymic waves and rolling hills - are seduced by a relaxing, harmonious aesthetic and will probably imagine Mother Earth with exaggerated female curves à la the Venus of Willendorf.

 

Geometric lines, on the other hand, are rigid and right angled; they can be found in abstract art, modernist architecture and mathematics. Those who love the precision of these lines are seduced by a fascist aesthetic and wish to impose structure and order onto a chaotic world; they value logic and wish to impose systems, grids, or networks in order to exercise control.         

 

As for the Gothic flatline, well, as we have discussed, this is beyond the binary of the organic and geometric and dissolves the distinction between them. In other words, it flattens the biological and technological on to the same plane; things become entangled so it becomes impossible to say where biology ends and machinery begins. 

 

In other words, for Fisher and his cyberpunk chums, humans are no longer independent organic beings who simply use tools and machinery; rather, we are fully integrated parts of a massive techno-digital landscape: "In the move from Naturalism to hypernaturalism [or cybernetic realism] the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism [...] collapses." (60)

 

And there's no point in calling for either a neo-vitalism or a neo-thanatropism, as neither will provide a satisfactory description for the world today. What we need is a concept - or at least a term - that we can use to discuss what arrives on the flatline - and Gothic fiction gives it to us: undeath (which is, of course, synonymous with unlife).    

 

"Following Freud [...] we can think of unlife and undeath not as opposed to life - or death - but as designating a continuum which includes, but moves beyond, the so-called living." (62) [i] 

    

Notes

 

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

 

[b] Francis Bacon, in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 148. Quoted by Fisher in Flatline Constructs, p. 35. At the close of chapter one of Flatline Constructs, Fisher suggests that Bacon is the painter who best helps us visualise the world from a Gothic Materialist perspective.

 

[c] It's because Fisher wishes to disassociate his theory of Gothic Materialism from some of its existing cultural associations, that I find Graham Harman's description of Flatline Constructs as "a precious gift from the other world, where he [Fisher] now resides", so profoundly mistaken. If I were the publishers, I'd remove this remark from the front of the book. 

 

[d] One of the aims of Flatline Constructs, says Fisher, is to "play off Deleuze-Guattari and Baudrillard against each other" (18). 

 

[e] This is one of many points on which Fisher and I are in accord. In my own doctoral thesis completed at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s (and submitted just a few months after Fisher submitted his), I had a section of the Introduction titled 'On Dissolving the Genre Distinction Between Philosophy and Literature'. 

      See Outside the Gate: A Study of Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation as Mediated Via the Work of D. H. Lawrence (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. 

[f] Fisher has the slightly irritating habit of capitalising words that don't require capitalisation. For the sake of consistency, I follow his lead and adopt his practice. If Gothic requires a big G, still there is no reason as far as I can see why cybernetics should come with a capital C. 

 

[g] In a k-punk post titled 'dis-identity politics' (25/04/2006), Fisher claims that he is "no fan of the Wachowskis' Matrix" - even if it did become a "massively propagated pulp mythos" which "suggested that what counts as 'real' is an eminently political question". 

      See k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 136. 

 

[h] I'm referencing The Man with Two Brains (dir. Carl Reiner, 1983), starring Steve Martin as Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, a pioneering neurosurgeon. 

      Whilst not mentioning this film - do CCRU members ever enjoy comedies? - Fisher does mention Gibson's novel Count Zero (1986) in which Josef Virek lives as a disembodied consciousness inside a life-support vat and notes that "if subjectivity can be experienced by a brain in a vat [...] what is interesting [...] is not the subjectivity but the vat" (47). 

        

[i] Without knowing anything of Fisher's work at the time, I explored similar ideas in a six-part series of talks at Treadwell's in 2006 entitled Thanatology. 

      See the first two essays - 'On Dissolving the Distinction Between Life and Death' and 'All Being is a Being Towards Death' - in The Treadwell's Papers, Vol. II, (Blind Cupid Books, 2010). Or click here for a thanatological fragment based on material in the first of these essays posted on TTA (27 Sept 2014).   

 

 

For a post discussing Adam Jones's Foreword to Fisher's Flatline Constructs (5 June 2026), please click here.  

 

 

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

Zer0 Books (2025) [a]

Cover design by Rebecca Wright 

charcoalstudio.co.uk

 

 

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 edition of Flatline Constructs. 

 

[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 ...