(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 ...
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