A Man Named Herman (2): Herman Munster

Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster in American sitcom  

The Munsters (CBS, 1964-1966)

 

(Not to be confused with the German master glassmaker, 

Hermann von Münster (c. 1330 - 1392)) 

 

 

I. 

 

If D. H. Lawrence is to be believed, then Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick (1851), is a man with the hate-filled heart of a monster:  "Never man instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, than Melville did." [1]

 

While there may be disagreement amongst literary scholars about the validity and reliability of Lawrence's claim, I think all lovers of classic American sitcoms will agree that Herman Munster, a fictional character played by Fred Gwynne in The Munsters [2], is a monster with the loving heart of a man. 

 

 

II. 

 

The difference between the two Hermans turns essentially on how they experience family life: Melville was only really happy (albeit briefly) on Polynesian islands among palm trees, and lizards, and the people he found there who - despite their savage reputation as cannibals - were gentle and generous toward him. 

 

Unfortunately, Melville had a long chain round his ankle all the time, binding him to the white world of home sweet home and apple pie: 

 

"It was a long chain: and it never broke. It pulled him back. By the time he was twenty-five his wild oats were sown; his reckless wanderings were over. At the age of twenty-five he came back to Home and Mother [...] back on the same old doorstep. Like a fatality." [3]     

 

Lawrence continues:

 

"Melville came home to face out the long rest of his life. He married and had an ecstasy of courtship and fifty years of disillusion.  

      He just furnished his home with disillusions. No more Typees. No more paradises. No more Fayaways. A mother: a gorgon. A home: a torture box. A wife: a thing with clay feet." [4]  

 

A savage-souled artist like Melville doesn't want domesticity and "lovey-dovey fulfilment" [5] found in the bosom of his family. 

 

But a man like Herman Munster, however, wants precisely this ...

  

For despite his monstrous origins [6], hard-working Herman Munster is perfectly content to lead a conventional and traditional family life in his spooky mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane [7], playing the devoted husband to Lily (played by Yvonne De Carlo) and the patient father to his young son Eddie (played by Butch Patrick). 

 

Herman is also proud to act as the supportive son-in-law to his wife's elderly father, Grandpa (played by Al Lewis) and the doting uncle to Lily's blonde niece Marilyn (played by Beverley Owen and later Pat Priest), who lives with them and is amusingly thought of as the ugly duckling of the family. 

 

Much put upon Herman even cleans up after Spot, the family's fire-breathing pet dragon, as well.

 

But let's examine Herman's character in a little more detail before deciding whether he is, in Deleuze-Guattarian terms, an oedipalised figure who has sacrificed his monstrous otherness in order to fit into American suburban life - i.e., one who has retained his neck bolts but lost his balls, so to speak - or is, in fact, what one commentator calls a rad dad [8] and a leading contender for best TV father ever.     

 

 

III.     

 

The consensus is this: Herman is a lovable, good-natured, and clumsy buffoon, prone to stuttering and childish temper tantrums, punctuated with animal-like roaring and a very distinctive laugh.   

 

In keeping with his goofy and childlike personality, Herman loves balloons, candy, and especially his wife's pancakes. He plays with toys and loves to read comic books (despite Lily's irritation at such behaviour). 

 

Above all, Herman is kind to everyone he meets and a champion of liberal values, once famously telling his son Eddie that it doesn't matter what someone looks like physically, or what colour their skin is, as long as they have a good heart and display strength of character.  

 

Which, I suppose, is true to some extent, though I'm philosophically wary of such trite humanism. And I do find Herman's comic silliness boring after a while. 

 

I'm also not convinced that the show's attempt to satirise the typical family sitcom of the era and the American domestic ideal was successful - it often just seems to reinforce such and, as a thinker shaped by Anti-Oedipus (1972), I have serious issues with the character of Herman Munster ... 

IV.

 

As far as I'm aware, despite their penchant for vampires and werewolves, Deleuze and Guattari never wrote about The Munsters. I'm confident, however, that they would diagnose Herman as a profoundly oedipalised figure who has lost his radical otherness and proud monstrosity in becoming a family guy and all-American dad. 

 

Whilst Frankenstein's original Creature managed to liberate a body without organs and become a kind of desiring-machine - disrupting the social order, unbound by law or lineage, refusing the judgement of his maker, etc. - Herman, by contrast, has been stitched together and stitched up within a scientifically organ-ised body and subject to the canned laughter of a '60s sitcom.  

 

The Creature flees into the wilderness and spends much of the time relentlessly wandering across Europe and the vast frozen expanse of the Arctic; Herman settles down to life in Mockingbird Heights, CA. Instead of seeking murderous revenge on his creator and terrorising humanity, Herman is a dedicated employee, a submissive husband and a regular consumer. 

 

No longer a figure of the Outside, Herman Munster has been metaphorically castrated and his monstrosity commodified and packaged as safe, weekly entertainment designed to reinforce the status quo.  

 

In other words, his chaotic potential has been successfully channelled into the service of capitalist production and domestic complacency. Herman doesn't just inhabit the role of the father, for example, he desperately hyper-performs it; fretting about his son's school grades and - as we have seen - giving wholesome, moralising speeches about character.

 

But if this makes him a sap and a sell-out for Deleuze and Guattari, it makes him something altogether different and more positive for others - a rad dad ...  

 

V.

 

According to A. Michelle Smith, Herman Munster deserves to be nominated "as the best dad to ever walk across the television screen" [9] and should be looked up to not just as a father figure that all children can learn from, but the dad "that has the ability to guide other dads to be better dads" [10]. 

 

But then, this is a woman who finds the most admirable thing about The Munsters to be the fact that "despite the fictional characters being unusual and odd in their appearance, they resemble the epitome of what it means to be together as a family at home" [11] - they learn, they love, and they grow together. 

 

Smith congratulates Herman for his noble attempts to ensure his son Eddie grows up to become "the best version of himself" [12] - not by freely expressing his lycanthropic nature, but by repressing such [13]. But that, arguably, is a form of child abuse and I wouldn't be at all surprised if, one day, a teenaged Eddie goes full werewolf, refusing like Arthur Fleck to just sit there and take it like a good little boy. 

 

   

Notes

 

[1] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 122-132. The line quoted is on p. 124.

      And see also the post on Herman Melville that forms part one of this two-part series on men named Herman (published on TTA on 19 July 2026): click here. 

 

[2] The Munsters is an American sitcom about a family of benign monsters that aired from 1964 to 1966 on CBS (Thursday evenings at 7:30). The series was partly a satire of American suburban life and partly an affectionate spoof of the Universal monster movies from the 1930s and '40s (as Universal jointly produced The Munsters, the show was able to exploit the copyrighted characters). A total of seventy episodes were produced.  

      Interestingly, it achieved higher ratings than (the more sophisticated) Addams Family, which aired concurrently on ABC. But the show was cancelled after ratings fell dramatically in the face of competition from a new ABC show that began to air twice weekly in January 1966 called Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward. 

      Today, of course, thanks to re-runs on free streaming platforms and digital on-demand services, The Munsters continues to find new fans.    

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo', in Studies in Classic American Literature, pp. 130-131.

 

[4] Ibid., p. 131. 

 

[5] Ibid.

 

[6] The fictional facts, if we may call them such, around Herman Munster's origins, are rather vague. He is said to be one of Frankenstein's monstrous creations, assembled in a lab in Heidelberg at some undetermined date in the 19th century. Having left Germany for the UK at an early age, Herman was adopted by the Munsters of Munster Hall, a noble family living in the fictitious county of Shroudshire, England.  

      Later, Herman moved to Transylvania, where he met his future wife, Lily Dracula. After marrying, in 1865, the couple emigrated (taking her father, the Count, along with them) to the United States. Herman later enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought in the Second World War. 

      In the early 1950s, Herman and Lily move to the Victorian mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in the fictional town of Mockingbird Heights. Herman finds a job nearby at a funeral home (Gateman, Goodbury & Graves). Although his co-workers sometimes comment on his height and superhuman strength, they otherwise seem to find nothing unusual about his appearance (including the greenish hue of his skin).   

 

[7] Readers would be forgiven for mistaking the house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane for Gothic or Mock-Gothic. It is, rather, a Second Empire Victorian mansion given a haunted house makeover, complete with decaying exteriors, gloomy interiors, and spooky, overgrown grounds. The set was originally built by Universal Studios for the movie So Goes My Love (1946) and features the classic hallmarks of the Second Empire style, including a mansard roof, a wrap-around porch, and ornate woodwork along the cornices and eaves.  

 

[8] A rad dad is a slang term for a hands-on, modern father figure who actively shares his hobbies with his kids, balances fun with guidance, and brings a relaxed, youthful energy to traditional parenting. The phrase was popularised on social media by Millennials and Gen Z-ers who contrast the rad dad idea with a more emotionally distant model of fatherhood concerned with the maintenance of paternal authority.

 

[9-12] A. Michelle Smith, 'Herman Munster Is A Rad Dad', in the online literary journal The Odyssey (13 June 2016).

[13] As a reader of Deleuze and Guattari, one has to use the concept of repression carefully. 

      They no longer frame it simply in terms of biological instincts, but of desire's containment within the Oedipal confines of the family (Mommy-Daddy-Me) and argue that because the child as a desiring-machine is connected to the wider world his development becomes a socio-political question and not just a family affair. 

      For Eddie to become a healthy, happy adult he has to be allowed to howl at the moon and not forced into an isolated all-too-human identity that leaves him vulnerable to state and corporate control and ashamed of his own lupine desires.    

 

 

Bonus: click here to watch the opening credits to The Munsters. The instrumental theme tune was composed by Jack Marshall and was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1965. 

  

This post is in memory of the actor Fred Gwynne who was born 100 years ago on July 10th, 1926 - the same date as my mother. 

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Four

 

Image via the Acid Horizon 

YouTube channel [a]

 

 

I. 

 

Okay, Lecture Four of Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire [b] - 'Union Power and Soul Power' - a little bit of American labour history (do try and stay awake at the back). 

 

Have y'all done your preliminary reading since I published the post on Lecture Three, the key text being Jefferson Cowie's book Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010), particularly the chapter 'Old Fashioned Heroes of the New Working Class' (pp. 23-75)?

 

Well, don't worry, neither have I; but I'm confident Fisher will bring us all up to speed ... [c]  

 

 

II.  

 

How does group consciousness practically develop in the historical moment? And what might we learn with reference to our own time?

 

These are the questions Fisher wishes to address here. Along with: why did it all fail; why was there no working class revolution in the US in the late 1960s / early '70s? 

 

Or to put it another way, why did Nixon win - and win big - in '72 and why have the neoliberal Right in the shape of the Republican Party continued to win, often with popular working-class support (think Reagan and Trump, for example)?   

 

I think the answer is pretty clear - though not one the Left will ever concede; as a rule, working class people do not like countercultural hippies and radical activists who want to destroy the American way of life - liberty, the pursuit of happiness, apple pie, etc. They don't want "unprecedented ferment" and "diverse leftism" (154). 

 

Some left-wing commentators say this makes certain elements of the working class reactionary and resentful (deplorable as Hillary Clinton would say). Today, young white working class males are invariably demonised as racist and misogynistic. 

 

To be fair to Fisher, however, he never bought into this. Indeed, he frequently pushed back against condescending stereotypes and rejected broad, pejorative characterisations - such as the term chav - arguing that left-leaning intellectuals needed to empathise a little more and moralise less [d]. 

 

Having said that, he does not deny working-class resentment as the "driving force of reaction" (156) in the 1970s and after, defining the term as "a form of anti-solidarity" and "anti-consciousness" (156) that keeps people divided.  

 

 

III.     

 

The idea that there's no class system now - that we're all either middle-class or, in Lawrence's view, one vast proletariat that has become quite literally robotic [e] - is interesting and worth looking at a little more closely. 

 

Technically speaking, Fisher is right that we can't all belong to the middle - "That is an impossible typology" (157). He's amused, however, by the doubleness of the idea: 

 

"It's both disavowing class at the same time as it's assuring the impossibility of completely overcoming it. Because if we're all in the middle class then, really, there is no such thing as class struggle anymore. But hold on! We're still talking about class [...] we still have to use the term class but in the very attempt to eliminate the concept." (157) 

 

That's true, I suppose, but doesn't really say a great deal and I feel as if Fisher has forgotten his Deleuze and Guattari from back in the day when Anti-Oedipus was his main point of reference. If one turns to the section titled 'Capitalist Representation' in chapter 4, one finds a detailed explanation of how a simple idea of class no longer cuts the conceptual mustard:

 

"That the State is entirely in the service of the so-called ruling class is an obvious practical fact, but a fact that does not reveal its theoretical foundation [...] from the viewpoint of the capitalist axiomatic there is only one class, a class with a universal vocation, the bourgeoisie. [...] This proposition contains something other than an ideological blindness or denial. Classes are the negative of castes and statuses; classes are orders, castes, and statuses that have been decoded." [f]

 

What I think that means is that there is no fundamental difference between the banker, the baker, and the candlestick maker; they are subjugated as functionaries into one and the same flow of capital. And ultimately, only the bourgeoisie remains as the decoding and decoded class. Deleuze and Guattari continue (and I'm quoting several paragraphs at some length here as it seems to me important): 

 

"The generalized slavery of the despotic State at least implied the existence of masters [...] But the bourgeois field of immanence [...] institutes an unrivaled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation: there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves [...] The bourgeois sets the example [...] more utterly enslaved than the lowest slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine." [g]  

 

"It will be said that there is nonetheless a class that rules and a class that is ruled [...] the distinction between the flow of financing and the flow of income in wages. But this is only partially true, since capitalism is born of the conjunction of the two [...] and integrates them both in the continually expanded reproduction of its limits. So that the bourgeoisie is justified in saying, not in terms of ideology, but in the very organization of its axiomatic: there is only one machine, that of the great mutant decoded flow [...] and one class of servants, the decoding bourgeoisie, the class that decodes the castes and the statuses [...]" [h]     

"In short, the theoretical opposition is not between two classes, for it is the very notion of class, insofar as it designates the 'negative' of codes, that implies there is only one class. The theoretical opposition lies elsewhere: it is between [...] the class and those who are outside the class [les hors-classe]. Between the servants of the machine, and those who sabotage its cogs and wheels. [...] If you will: between the capitalists and the schizos [...] at the level of decoding [and desire], in their basic antagonism at the level of the axiomatic [...] [i] 

 

 

IV.

 

Now, I've no idea why Fisher - who must know this material intimately - didn't bother to refer to it and discuss it with his students. By his own admission in week one, although not on the official reading list, Deleuze and Guattari remained the spectres behind the course - so why not summon them here?

 

Perhaps he simply felt it was time to move on with his thinking; to find more practical points of reference and prioritise different conceptual frameworks - more socio-historical and a little less theoretically sophisticated. 

 

In his late work, as he formulated his ideas around acid communism, Fisher seems keener to figure out the material reasons why the liberatory potential of the late-60s and early-70s collapsed rather than re-engage with the philosophical abstractions of poststructuralism. 

 

And so, if for strategic (and pragmatic) reasons only, Fisher remains committed to the idea of class: class struggle, class solidarity, and the raising of class consciousness - regardless of what Messrs. Deleuze and Guattari write [j]. 

 

Though Fisher also wants to tie class to other things, such as race and gender, and promote the possibility of "an intersectional class politics" (158). Class structures may no longer really exist thanks to the capitalist axiomatic doing away with all traditional social and cultural codes and forms, but it can be reproduced in order to create a little unity and solidarity. 

 

Ironically then, it's communism - not capitalism - that wants to keep class in place; for class "goes against the actual dominant tendencies" (159) of capitalism: to decodify and deterritorialise and to ensure all that is solid melts into air [k].     

  

 

V. 

The danger, of course, is if you bring class back - particularly in an intersectional form - you reify it and it becomes identitarian - that is to say, "defined not by its consciousness or by its agency but by particular identity characteristics that are prescribed to it" (160). 

 

Fisher wants class back in the picture. And he wants intersectionality. But he doesn't want identitarianism. The question is: can he have the first two things without the third today, when everyone is obsessed by identity politics? I doubt it. And he seems a little naive in hoping that people will see that class consciousness is all about working people recognising they share a common position and have common interests "in spite of whatever cultural, personal, subjective qualities"(161) they possess. 

 

For Fisher, it isn't that class is "more important than those other forms of identification or forms of struggle" (160), it's just that "when class is no longer there [...] the given picture is necessarily incomplete" (160) and everything is fatally distorted. 

 

But, for my next door neighbour, being a Muslim matters more - way more - than anything else; including acid communism. Fisher might say that this shows a concern only with his present and his past [l] - that my neighbour lacks a form of consciousness that is "different from identity" (165) and which is about the subject's future becoming as it has a transformative dimension and has hyperstitional effects. 

 

Unfortunately, my neighbour - newly arrived from Pakistan with his wife, parents, children, and brother - probably wouldn't understand wtf Fisher was talking about and would care even less. He just wants to extend his kitchen and perform his obligatory daily prayers (Salah - the second pillar of Islam). 

 

What is more, I suspect that if you were to ask him what needs to be done to resolve the crucial antagonisms that divide society he would doubtless argue for the imposition of Sharia - again, I'm pretty sure he'd not call for acid communism. 

  

 

VI. 

   

Fisher closes Lecture Four with a series of what ifs ... 

 

"What if "countervailing forces hadn't managed to assert themselves in the Seventies?" (170) What if a "new alliance of workers, the counterculture, etc., had come together in a sustained way?" (170) What if neoliberalism hadn't triumphed and everyone had demanded the abolition of work?    

  

To me, this is pretty desperate stuff - but Fisher feels these are some of the key questions of our age and which open up a vision of the future and a "potential route into postcapitalism" (170). 

 

Does anybody remember the scene in an episode of The Inbetweeners [S2/E3] when Will, exasperated by the views and behaviour of French exchange student Patrice, launches into an anti-French rant? Challenged by Simon on its racist content, Will exclaims: "He's made me racist!"

 

Well, that's kind of how I feel when reading Fisher at times: I don't want to be cynical - but he's made me cynical! 

 

"What if there was no 1973? What if there was no recession?" (170) What if we could turn back time and reverse the conditions of the late 1960s and early '70s into the current moment? Arrgh! So many hypotheticals on one page! 

 

Posing such questions is not a sign of resistance - more a sign of political hopelessness and philosophical exhaustion. Fisher has nothing else to say other than what if and nowhere else to go other than yesterday; no wonder he suddenly starts listening to The Beatles when all his troubles seemed so far away.   

 

 

VII. 

      

Actually, Fisher does have one additional point to make in Lecture Four - and it concerns aesthetics ... 

 

Fisher thinks that what carried the revolutionary forces along and sustained the necessary conditions for change was the counterculture; "and the counterculture the was primarily driven through music" (171). It was pop music - as much as politics - that offered the "vision of a liberated world" (171) [m]. 

 

As Dewey Finn taught his students at Horace Green: One great rock show can change the world! [n] 

 

Or as Fisher puts it, music feeds into the revolutionary struggle, man; and the revolutionary struggle feeds into the music, creating a "positive feedback loop" (171) and a "vector for the dynamics of transformation of the social world" (171) - which is nice, but nowhere as catchy and explains why his career as a Hollywood script writer never really took off. 

 

For Fisher, culture leads the way; "in lots of ways" (172) and the counterculture is "not just a counter-politics; it's a range of forms of cultural expression" (172) that allowed us "to imagine a completely transformed world" (173) in an act of performative anticipation. 

 

As Miss Brodie would say, in her best Edinburgh voice: For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. [o]   

 

But for those like me, made cynical - and yes, even a little irritated by Fisher's utopianism - this is just tiresome. Particularly as he knows as well as I do what happened: 

 

"It failed. It went wrong. There were moments of rupture. There were glimmers. There was a sense of something that could have been different. But it didn't work out that way." (172)

 

And rock 'n' roll rebellion - whether led by hippies wearing Afghan coats or punks in their leather jackets - was just as commodifiable as anything else.  

 

Nevertheless, we are, I suppose, encouraged to try again (for if at first you don't succeed ...) - to desire anew and find our mojo once more (or transformational libido as Fisher calls it). And that means turning to Jean-François Lyotard and falling back into French theory ... 

 

See you for Lecture Five ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This podcast from the Acid Archives - Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher (Full Episode) - was uploaded to the Acid Horizon YouTube channel in December 2022, but first put out in September 2020. Matt Colquhoun guest stars. Those who would like to listen can click here.  

 

[b] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references to this book will be given directly in the post.   

 

[c] Amusingly, when Fisher asked his class to share their responses to Cowie's book he was met with silence, which tells us either they were naturally reticent, or that quite a few of them hadn't read it either.   

 

[d] See, for example, his important essay 'Exiting the Vampire Castle' (2013), which can be found in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 659-667. 

      I believe that Fisher got a lot of shit from some readers for this text, in which, amongst other things, he champions Russell Brand and sticks up for Owen Jones. It can be read online here. See also my post on Torpedo the Ark (30 Sept 2023) in which I discuss this essay. And readers who are interested might like to also check out Em Colquhoun's xenogothic website where they have mounted a spirited defence of the piece on several occasions. 

 

[e] In the second version of his final novel, Lawrence writes: 

      "There was no longer any such thing as class. The world was one vast proletariat. Everything else had gone. The true working class was gone, as much as the honourable bourgeoisie, or the proud aristocracy [...] a vast homogeneous proletariat made up the whole of humanity." 

      See The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 492.   

 

[f] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press Ltd., 1984), pp. 253-254.  

 

[g] Ibid., p. 254.  

 

[h] Ibid.

 

[i] Ibid., p. 255.

 

[j] Actually, Deleuze and Guattari would support him in this as a matter of praxis. The task, they write, of any revolutionary socialist movement is to organise a "bipolarity of the social field, a bipolarity of classes" and to both embody the idea of class interest in consciousness and actualise it in an organised political party "suited to the task of conquering the State apparatus" (Anti-Oedipus, 255). 

       

[k] This phrase - 'all that is solid melts into air' - is famously found in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848). 

      Funnily enough, this was Nietzsche's main gripe against capitalism too; that it made society and culture impossible. From his earliest writings, such as 'The Greek State' (1871/72), Nietzsche argued that capitalism undermined the 'internally sturdy and sensitive bonds' that existed between rulers and ruled in noble society. This essay can be found in On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 176-186.

          Readers might like to note that I examined Nietzsche's critique of capitalism in my doctoral thesis, Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000), written during the same late-90s period in the philosophy department from which Fisher himself emerged.

 

[l] Fisher says that if minority race and religious groups understand themselves only by the features which they already possess, this is a form of reification: "You are already what you identify with." (167)

      Unfortunately, it's not these features - as positive as they may be - that define a people as a revolutionary class: "It's their structural and antagonistic position and the potential for transformation that occurs once consciousness develops that makes them potentially revolutionary agents." (167) 

      This, I think, explains why it is the radical Left likes to flirt with Islamists and secure the Muslim vote; it sincerely believes that one day the Muslims will see that their best interests are not served by Muhammad but by Marx. It's a fantasy, of course, and - ironically, one might even say a form of false consciousness.   

 

[m] So you see, my remark about The Beatles with which I closed section VI wasn't just inserted to be humorous or to take a pop at Fisher for the sake of it.    

 

[n] As I'm sure most readers will know, this line is from the film School of Rock (dir. Richard Linklater, 2003), starring Jack Black as Dewey Finn.  

 

[o] As I'm sure most readers will know, this is a line from Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Macmillan, 1961).  

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One can be read here.

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Two can be read here.

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Three can be read here. 

 

 

Musical bonus: The Beatles, 'Revolution', B-side of 'Hey Jude', a single release from 1968: click here.

 

  

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One

Repeater Books (2021) [a]

Design by JohnnyBull.uk

 

 

I.

 

Arguing that modern nihilism is essentially the collapse of all values into exchange value and that the revolutionary struggle has become a war waged by lovers, my doctoral thesis Outside the Gate [b] might have been subtitled: towards a postcapitalist politics of desire.

 

And so, I was naturally interested to see what Mark Fisher's approach to this subject would be in a lecture series he began (but didn't finish) at Goldsmiths in 2016 [c].  

 

 

II. 

 

Desire is one of those words that remains a key concept in critical thinking and is used widely across several disciplines (though not always in quite the same way). More than a simple biological urge, it tends to be viewed as a complex socio-linguistic construct that shapes human subjectivity, drives consumer culture, and interacts with power structures.

 

Like Fisher, I took my understanding of the term from Deleuze and Guattari, who critiqued traditional psychoanalytic views by arguing that desire is not caused by lack, but is a productive revolutionary force that shapes reality and builds new connections - an interpretation also found in the work of D. H. Lawrence, who writes that desire is a "strange current of interchange" [d] flowing between all things and bringing them into touch.

 

By the time I'd submitted the above thesis in March 2000, however, I was already a bit tired of the term and sympathetic to Foucault's argument that - despite everything - it always carried with it the assumption that human desires are not only innate but innately positive and healthy and that society only ever represses, exploits, or distorts them. 

 

Foucault famously told Deleuze he couldn't bear the word desire and preferred to speak only of bodies and their pleasures, arguing that localised pleasures acted as sites of transgression that could resist the normalising power structures that create categories of desire and identities [e].  

 

However, as I've mentioned, I'm intrigued to see what Fisher makes of this concept in his final lectures; how he excavates forgotten forms of desire from out of the past and invokes new and futuristic forms of desire beyond capitalism. 

 

And so, let us then turn to Lecture One: What is Postcapitalism (7 November 2016) ...

 

 

III. 

 

Fisher boldly puts to his class of students the following idea (much promoted by neoliberalism): Protestors against capitalism don't really want what they say they want ...

 

"What they want is all the fruits of capitalism - and ultimately that's why capitalism will win. They may claim, ethically, that they want to live in a different world but libidinally, at the level of desire, they are committed to living within the current capitalist world." (39)

 

They want global equity and justice, but they want their iPhones more.

 

Obviously, Fisher as a left-wing accelerationist and acid communist - i.e., one who believes in the existence of postcapitalist desire - rejects this. He thinks it's possible to "retain some of the libidinal, technological infrastructure of capital" (41) while at the same time move beyond it.      

 

Unfortunately, I don't share his political optimism rooted in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1970s. 

 

My thinking remains rooted (some would say trapped) much more in the cynical and destructive nihilism of the Sex Pistols and I'm a little disappointed as well as surprised to see Fisher, who had "previously been scathing about the legacy of the counterculture" [f], beginning to trust the hippies after all and daydream about what might have been if only the fusion of the counterculture and radical politics had "been more successful" (42) and lasted longer than it did.  

 

I agree with Fisher that Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) prefigures the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, but it's only incredible in that it's not to be taken seriously. I referred to it several times in Outside the Gate, but even at the time I recognised its utopianism was, like all forms of utopianism - even those presenting themselves as framed within Marxist materialism - too good to be true.  

 

Fisher tells his students that Marcuse is "a kind of precursor of Deleuze and Guattari" (42), but I think that's a little misleading - even if qualified by the use of the words kind of. 

 

For whilst it's true that Deleuze and Guattari admired Marcuse's intentions, they fiercely criticised his work in L'Anti-Œdipe (1972), arguing that Eros and Civilization does not go anywhere near far enough - in fact, even Wilhelm Reich went much further when it came to radically thinking the question of desire and society. 

 

Marcuse - and Fisher must know all this - continues to frame desire through Freud's lens of repression (and lack); fails to break out the Oedipal triangle; and, finally, maintains a dualistic division between work and play, which Deleuze and Guattari wish to dissolve.  

 

IV.

 

And then there's the question of consciousness ... Something Fisher is looking to raise in order to challenge the "ambient political assumption" (43) of capitalist realism that there's no alternative to the free market [g]. 

 

When it comes to consciousness raising, Fisher says we can all learn from feminist activists and members of various civil rights movements; i.e., people who like to share experiences in support groups, insist that the personal is political, and examine how different forms of inequality and subordination intersect.  

 

Obviously, while raising awareness does not automatically fix things or bring about meaningful change, it is, arguably, the crucial first step toward challenging the status quo. 

 

However, as someone who has sat in on a number of seminars and meetings designed to politically enlighten, let me tell you, they can also be boring as fuck and waste huge amounts of time; they can also quickly become echo chambers in which pre-existing views and prejudices are reinforced.    

 

Fisher seems to be particularly concerned with class consciousness, which is understandable given his background. Born in 1968 in the East Midlands to working-class parents - his father was an engineering technician and his mother a cleaner - Fisher's perspective was fundamentally shaped by his childhood experiences and he would later argue that being working class involved a deeply internalised feeling of ontological inferiority [h].  

 

As an Essex boy also born in the 1960s to working-class parents - my father was a printer at the Bank of England and my mother a housewife who had part-time jobs cleaning - I absolutely understand what he means. My own political consciousness was raised when I was about six years old and my mother told me a story about how my father was once knocked off his bike as he cycled to work by one of the bosses in a big car who didn't even bother to stop; that told me all I needed to know about class.    

 

 

V.

 

The final lecture that Fisher gave - in week five (5 December 2016) - was a reading of Jean-François Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1974) and I'm looking forward to hearing what he says about a work that, in Fisher's own words, makes the particularly strong case that "there's no possible retreat from capitalism - there's no space of primitive outside to which we can return, we have to go all the way through capitalism" (45) now, like it or not.  

 

It's a shame that we never got to hear his thoughts on the subjects due for discussion in weeks six through fifteen - including accelerationism, cyberfeminism, and the work of Baudrillard - but there you go; the course was, as Matt Colquhoun puts it, "tragically interrupted" [i]. 

 

And it's kind of touching that, apparently, for the first few weeks after his suicide "students continued to use the seminar room during the module's scheduled Monday morning time slots to sit together and remember their lecturer" [j]. This mournful vigil eventually transformed into a self-organised reading group - a collective act that tells us something not insignificant about Fisher's impact. 

 

 

VI. 

 

Opening things up to his students, Fisher encourages them to share their thoughts on the course structure and content. He hopes that they will supply what is missing - namely, ideas drawn from the world of art and culture, suggesting that the role of aesthetics in political theory is often "underestimated by elements of the so-called Old Left" (50).    

 

He also hopes they'll interrogate the term postcapitalism, which he uses in preference to communism or socialism, words "tainted by association with past failed and oppressive projects" (50). Fisher argues that postcapitalism also implies victory:

 

"If you're talking about postcapitalism, it implies that there's something beyond capitalism. It also implies [...] a victory that will come through capitalism. It's not just opposed to capitalism - it's what will happen when capitalism has ended. It's not some entirely separate space [...] we're not required to imagine a sheer alterity, a pure outside." (50-51)

 

I have to say, I'm not sure about this: the prefix post doesn't always mean beyond or after when used in a cultural and/or philosophical context, does it? Take, for example, postmodernism - a term that implies neither a simple temporal progression nor a clear victory over modernism. It signifies a critical engagement with and a transformation of the root word rather than what comes after.

 

To be fair, Fisher recognises the somewhat complicated (even ambivalent) relationship between capitalism and postcapitalism; the fact that we might enjoy the pleasures and products it provides but still want something else, something more, something different. The fact is, capitalism and postcapitalism have overlapping timelines and the latter relies on the former in order to make its critique. 

 

Rather than think in terms of victory or progress, it would be better to view postcapitalism as capitalism coming to terms with its own ambiguities, limitations, and, indeed, radical possibilities - or does that make me capitalocentrist?    

 

 

VII.

 

In response to a question from a student, Fisher mentions his concept of acid communism and Matt Colquhoun is surely right to say that he uses his new lecture-seminar series "to workshop his next book" [k], which he defines here as psychedelic consciousness plus class consciousness; i.e. the becoming-hippie of Arthur Seaton.  

 

Again, as I think I've indicated, acid communism is not an idea I'm convinced by, though it's an interesting turn of phrase in which each term modifies the other and breaks them out of existing associations.   

   

I am more onside with Fisher when he says that one of the things most needed is a politics free from ressentiment. 

 

He suggests that solidarity might be crucial to the building of such. However, because solidarity is "tainted by association with Leninism" (61), he prefers the term fellowship - a more Lawrentian-sounding term, although - ironically - the word originally referred to a type of business consortium [l].  

 

 

VIII. 

 

At the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Mellors sends Connie a letter in which, amongst other things, he sets out his vision of a postcapitalist world, arguing that communal regeneration was possible once men and women realised that life and the pursuit of money are not one and the same thing:

 

"'If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend [...] if they could dance and hop and skip, and sing and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash [...] They ought to learn to be naked and handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on [...] Then they wouldn't need money. And that's the only way to solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness, without needing to spend.'" [m]

 

I thought of this when Fisher introduced the idea of folk politics to his class - a concept developed (but not shared) by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, which argues that radical politics should consist of "'localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism'" carried out by people "'content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations'" (62) [n].

 

Fisher also rejects folk politics - and I can see the problems. On the other hand, however, I worry about the revival of grand political narratives and those who think in terms of great events and the total transformation of society.  

 

It would seem to me that acid communism can only succeed if it learns how to be "content and constant in invisible activities" [o] and change is administered in what Nietzsche calls small doses over long periods of time. Rome wasn't toppled in a day. And: "The chicken does not break the shell out of animosity." [p]    

 

 

IX.

 

I had to smile at Fisher's confession that he doesn't know anything about economics - particularly as a friend of mine bought the book hoping to learn something new and insightful on this subject (which he teaches). 

 

I did try to pre-warn him that Fisher was basically a cultural theorist more interested in the impact of capitalism on mental health, the arts, and desire rather than the risk of inflation or what to do about the trade deficit. 

 

More interested in suggesting, for example, that The Beatles provide a great example of what a post-work society might look like:

  

"They didn't have to work. They'd made enough money, surely, by the early Sixties to just not work [q]. Then their most interesting, experimental stuff emerged [...] partly because they were freed from the pressure of having to worry about a salary [...]" (76). 

 

Fisher then asks his class: "Is that a silly example or not?" (76), which, perhaps from politeness, is a question left hanging (though I think we all know the answer).    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references given in the post (in round brackets) refer to this edition. 

 

[b] Stephen A. Hall, Outside the Gate: Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation Mediated via the Work of D. H. Lawrence (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. This thesis was supervised by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Michael Bell. A revised version was published in 2010 by Blind Cupid Press.  

 

[c] The course was supposed to last for fifteen weeks, but Fisher killed himself on Friday the 13th of January 2017, so the remaining ten weeks of the seminar did not go ahead as planned. The course syllabus (along with suggested reading) is included as Appendix One in Postcapitalist Desire (211-216).  

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's Two Years Before the Mast', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 109. 

 

[e] Deleuze, in turn, expressed his hatred of the term pleasure, which for him marked an interruption of the immanent process of desire. See 'Désir et plaisir', in Magazine littéraire, Issue 325 (October 1994), pp. 59-65. Note that this text was actually written in 1977 as a private letter from Deleuze to Foucault (via their mutual friend François Ewald).   

      An English translation of this text by Melissa McMahon can be accessed via the Monash University website: click here. It can also be found in Deleuze's Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975 - 1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 122-134.        

[f] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 1. 

 

[g] See Colquhoun's Introduction for an interesting discussion of Fisher and the idea of consciousness raising, pp. 15-17. 

 

[h] See the article 'Good For Nothing' in The Occupied Times (19 March 2014): click here. The piece can also be found in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 668-670 (the phrase 'ontological inferiority' is found on p. 669).

 

[i] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 29. 

 

[j] Matt Colquhoun, Appendix One, Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 211.   

 

[k] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 9.

 

[l] Fellow derives from the Old English fēolaga, which translates literally to 'one who puts down money in a joint undertaking'. So a fellowship was originally a group of partners in property or business. It was only later that it took on the broader modern meaning of a community of people sharing common interests.  

 

[m] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 299-300. I discuss the contents of Mellors's letter in Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 258-261. 

 

[n] Fisher is quoting Srnicek and Williams writing in '#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics', in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Urbanomic, 2014), p. 354. 

      Just to be clear, the authors reject folk politics in favour of a model that is 'at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology' and which 'seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow'.   

 

[o] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Book V, § 534, p. 211.  

 

[p] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 305. 

 

[q] I don't think it's being overly pedantic to point out that, as a matter of fact, although by 1964 The Beatles were generating astronomical revenues, their personal wealth was limited and cash flow was restricted by poor early recording contracts, high British taxes, and manager Brian Epstein's initial handling of their business and publishing rights. 

      It was not until the following year that the four members of the band finally had millions of pounds in their personal bank accounts. 

       

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

Zer0 Books (2025) [a] 

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk  

Three variations by SA (2026)

 

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

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

 

I.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

  

 

III.  

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IV. 

 

Does anyone still refer to cyberspace? 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

V. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

   

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

 

 

VI.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

VII.

 

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

 

Fisher notes: 

 

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

 

As for demonism, Fisher writes:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

VIII.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

  

IX. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Gothic Materialists: 

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

 

   

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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