Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: A Little Bit of Politics

 

 Mark Fisher: illustration by Amreetha Lethe

 

'It is beginning to look as if, instead of being the end of history, capitalist realism 

was a thirty-year hiatus. The processes that began in the Sixties can now be resumed. 

Consciousness is being raised again.' 

                                                                                                  - Mark Fisher (2015) [a] 

 

 

I. 

 

I would guess that I'm not the only reader of Mark Fisher's work to find his cultural criticism more interesting than his political analysis. It would be foolish, however, to try and draw a hard and fast distinction between the two. 

 

For like Nietzsche, Fisher understands how philosophy and literature have a "profound and congenial relation to each other" [b] and part of the appeal of his text is that he promiscuously draws upon all manner of considerations, including those previously regarded as irrelevant to serious investigation.

 

In fact, I would argue that Fisher's devising of a charmingly idiosyncratic literary-philosophical mode of language and thought and his application of such to a wide range of contemporary concerns is one of his finest achievements. Fisher demonstrates how writing - at its best - is capable of providing a sense of solidarity; i.e., "fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere" [c]. 

 

Fisher's work therefore demands - and deserves - to be read in the round; from the early k-punk pieces to his later stuff on all things weird and eerie via his seminal (but overrated) text Capitalist Realism (2009). 

 

That being said, when tasked with editing Fisher's collected and unpublished writings from the thirteen-year period 2004 - 2016, Darren Ambrose does separate out the political writings as best he can and it is part four of k-punk (2018) that I'd like to comment on here - picking out those things that either inspire or irritate; delight or disappoint.      

 

 

II. 

The lines quoted at the top of the page from Fisher are found in a short piece that is included in part three of k-punk - writing on music - and not in part four containing his political writings. But these lines pretty much sum up Fisher's attitude: neoliberalism bad; acid communism rooted in the countercultural ideas of the 1960s, good [d].

 

Such revolutionary optimism contrasts sharply with my own rather more cynical and pessimistic philosophy; i.e., the kind of ironic nihilism that Fisher equates with postmodernism and which he despises as a form of reflexive impotence preventing radical change or commitment and thus ultimately complicit with capitalist realism.

 

And so, unfortunately, Fisher's political writings, combining psychedelic utopianism, pulp modernism and ghostly lost futures, more often than not cause me to sigh rather than nod in agreement - but at least they allow for a (hopefully amusing) collision of perspectives ...  

 

 

III.  

 

The danger when you produce work that is very much up to the minute - full of names in the news and references to contemporary pop culture - is that your writing is instantly dated. 

 

And Mark Fisher's political writings are full of such names and references, although, reading his work now, in 2026, produces the rather strange effect of making the period in which he was active (2004-16) feel even further in the past than my own childhood. 

 

Tony Blair ... Gordon Brown .... David Cameron ... I know who they are - I remember them - but they seem to have less reality than Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, and Edward Heath.     

 

I'm not sure why that is: perhaps Mike Yarwood was a better impressionist than Rory Bremner. Whatever the reason, it perhaps helps to explain the following sentence: "There was a time when elections at least seemed to mean something." (377)

 

And it also helps us understand what Fisher is getting at here: "Realism has nothing to do with the Real. On the contrary, the Real is what realism has continually to suppress." (380) [e] 

 

That's a sentence that resonates with Baudrillard's philosophy, although the latter refers to raw, unmediated experience as the symbolic rather than the Real and, being a cultural pessimist, he sees it as something that is gone forever - an extinct category - rather than something that continues to threaten realism and thus still needing to be repressed. 

 

I might be wrong, but I get the impression that Fisher thinks we can return to the Real if only we all raise consciousness, join hands, and leap together into a lost future [f]. Baudrillard would regard this as a nostalgic delusion.  

 

 

IV.

 

According to Fisher, Islamofascism is a pseudo-concept: 

 

"There are any number of reasons to consider the idea that there is such a thing as Islamofascism a nonsense. Here are two. First of all, fascism has always been associated with nationalism, but, like global capital, Islamism has no respect for nationality; the first loyalty of the Islamist is to the global Umma. Secondly, fascism is about the State - Islamism has no model of the State, as could be seen in Afghanistan under the Taliban. (390)

 

To be fair, they're quite good reasons - though in response to the first, one might wonder then if Fisher would be more approving of the term Islamocommunism ...? [g]

 

What puzzles me, however, is how he then happily uses the term Islamophobia which is another highly contentious neologism and equally a pseudo-concept; one designed to stifle legitimate criticism of the religion masquerading as a term that operates within an anti-racist framework. 

 

Christopher Hitchens - not an author referred to by Fisher and not one I would imagine him liking - is often associated with the description of Islamophobia as a word 'created by fascists and used by cowards, to manipulate morons' [h]. 

 

And the French writer Pascal Bruckner - one of the so-called nouveaux philosophes who came to prominence in the mid-late 1970s - wrote a famous article on the origin of the term for Libération in January 2011, arguing that it was invented by Iranian fundamentalists with the aim of declaring Islam inviolate [i].    

 

It would seem to me, that either both terms should be avoided, or both should be free to use (whilst open to interrogation). What you can't do is declare the legitimacy of one whilst dismissing the other as a pseudo-concept [j].   

 

 

V.  

 

As a nihilist, Fisher's call for "new kinds of negativity" (432) is something I can get behind. 

 

I'm not quite sure how we square such with his eternal optimism, but let's leave that to one side for a moment. The key thing is to abandon faith in those older forms - such as art - which some on the left still believe to be full of vital revolutionary potential; people such as the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri ...

 

"Art, Negri maintains, is intrinsically rebellious and subversive. Even though Negri himself recognises the dangers of taking too much consolation in art, he ends up retaining faith in it." (432)

 

As Fisher points out, Negri's praising of art as a source of freedom and transformation seems strangely nostalgic - and not just nostalgic, but laughably naive: "For the era of capitalist realism has also seen all kinds of synergies between art and business, nowhere better summed up than in the concept of the 'creative industries'." (432)    

 

It's to his credit that Fisher rejects (or at least challenges) the argument that the art that dominates within capitalist realism is somehow fake art; "a betrayal and dilution of art's inherent militancy" (432). 

 

Why not, says Fisher, simply push Negri's own logic of negativity to the point at which one recognises that "there is no readymade, already-existing utopian energy; that there is nothing which, by its very nature, resists incorporation into capital" (432).

 

Recognise this, and one is obliged to drop the idea that art is opposed to capitalism and that power only restricts and denies creativity (is only ever repressive). As Foucault pointed out, power is itself inventive and creative; it produces new forms and discourses, induces new pleasures [k]. Thus, overcoming capitalism "will not involve inventing new modes of positivism, but new kinds of negativity" (432).   

 

Zarathustra would go along with that [l] - and I go along with that.  

  

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, 'No Romance Without Finance', in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 373. The piece, dated 9 Nov 2015, originally appeared in Bamn: An Unofficial Magazine of Plan C. 

      All further page references to k-punk (2018) will be given directly in the main text.  

 

[b] Nietzsche, 'The Struggle between Science and Wisdom', in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1993), p. 134. 

 

[c] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 18. Whether this in turn opens up the possibility of a new becoming or provides a genuine alternative to the reality principle shaped by neoliberalism, is debatable. 

 

[d] I'm aware of the fact that the idea of acid communism was a late development in Fisher's work and that all that remains of a proposed new work with that title is the (unfinished) introduction. Nevertheless, I'm going to use the term here, somewhat anachronistically, as I don't believe Fisher would object to such retro-intertextuality or prochronism.  

 

[e] Fisher will later describe realism as "not a representation of the real, but a determination of what is politically possible" (380-381).  

 

[f] If Fisher does not in fact think of the Real as a location to which we might return, then he certainly does like to imagine the Real as some kind of external limit in much the same way as Deleuze and Guattari imagine schizophrenia. Or  as "an event completely inconceivable in the current situation, but which will break in a re-define everything" (383).    

 

[g] Today, we are witnessing a strange marriage of convenience between Islamists and those on the far-left; Zack Polanski and the Green Party are playing a dangerous game as they flirt with religious sectarianism on the one hand and political populism on the other. 

 

[h] Apparently, this was actually said by Andrew Cummins and is therefore misattributed to Hitchens - understandably so, as it closely reflects his own view of a term he dismissed as stupid and one designed to suggest that fear and prejudice lie behind perfectly reasonable concerns about a powerful and aggressive religion.  

 

[i] The English translation of this article by Bruckner - titled 'The invention of Islamophobia' (03/01/ 2011) can be found on signandsight.com - click here.  

 

[j] Without wishing to put words into his mouth, I suspect that Fisher would argue that Islamophobia is a legitimate sociological term identifying a factual well-documented phenomenon, whereas Islamofascism is a category error, designed to morally and politically justify Western interventionism and the War on Terror. 

      In other words, the former describes an effect of power (structural racism); the latter is a historically illiterate claim made by power to reduce complex geo-political issues to a simple struggle between good and evil.  

 

[k] See Michel Foucault, 'Truth and Power', in Power, vol. 3 of the Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al (Penguin Books, 2002). 

 

[l] For Nietzsche, only braying donkeys nod their heads all the time and only camels say yes to even the heaviest burdens - the lion, however, dares to say no and this saying no is a creative foundational act, not merely a refusal; it is, if you like, the active negation of the negative. 

      See 'Of the Three Metamorphoses', in part one of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and see also what Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo on the importance of No-saying as a necessary first step toward a revaluation of all values.  

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: Book Meme

 

Mark Fisher and three of his intellectual heroes: 

Messrs. Kafka, Spinoza, and Ballard 

 

 

I. 

 

It hardly seems appropriate to comment on Fisher's reading habits as, for the most part, I have never read the authors that seem to mean the most to him; Kafka, Spinoza, Margaret Atwood, et al.  

 

Well, I've read some Kafka and I value Deleuze and Guattari's study of Kafka in terms of a minor literature, but I've never made of him the "intimate and constant companion" [a] that Fisher makes of him. 

 

I don't know why that is - what does make us love certain writers and the books they produce over others? 

 

Barthes famously answers this question in terms of desire. We privilege those writers whose texts have a sensual appeal; their language and writing style causes a certain frisson resulting in an intense form of pleasure that he terms jouissance. To put it somewhat crudely: it ain't what they say, it's the way that they say it (that's what gets results). 

 

In other words, our preference for certain writers and certain books is subjective and sometimes even authors that we like and like a lot, fail to produce that je ne sais quoi that is required for us to really love them, as Fisher loves Kafka. 

 

And sometimes, even brilliant authors whom everyone insists we should love - such as Joyce, Dostoevsky, Burroughs and Beckett - either leave us cold or rub us up the wrong way. 

 

 

II.           

 

Fisher says that reading a really great work of philosophy - he names Spinoza's Ethics - "is like running a Videodrome cassette: you think you are playing it, but it ends up playing you, effecting a gradual mutation of the way you think and perceive" (25).

 

And that's true, of course. Which is why philosophy is a dangerously perverse practice and why the Athenians were not wrong to charge Socrates with corrupting the youth.

 

Interestingly, Spinoza gave the Nazis a particular headache; as a Jewish philosopher, his works were viewed as un-German and so many of his books were confiscated and banned - but they just couldn't bring themselves to burn them, acknowledging the praise given to Spinoza by great figures in German cultural life including Goethe and Nietzsche. 

 

Having ordered the seizure of a valuable collection of his books from the Spinoza Museum in Amsterdam in 1942, Alfred Rosenberg determined to solve the Spinoza problem by reconciling the philosopher's genius with Nazi ideology - unaware of what Fisher calls the Videodrome effect.      

 

 

III. 

 

J. G. Ballard is an author that Fisher and I share knowledge of and love for, although I value his better-known novel Crash (1973) over his earlier (more experimental) text The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). 

 

That's because I require a little more in the way of plot and character development than Fisher, betraying the fact that I have a background in English literature rather than theory and doubtless making me a bourgeois romantic in the eyes of some.    

 

Still, despite my more conventional character, I agree with Fisher that Ballard helped rescue us from "decent humanist certainties and Sunday supplement sleepiness" (26) and, obviously, that's one of the reasons to admire him.   

 

 

IV.

 

I still find it a little surprising that punk scholar Russ Bestley doesn't much care for Greil Marcus's secret history of the twentieth century, Lipstick Traces (1989); describing the study as "deeply flawed - and unfathomably influential" [b] and a largely failed attempt to "make connections between the Sex Pistols, Dada, Surrealism and the philosophies of much earlier political agitators" [c]. 

 

That might be true, but it's often the case that we learn more from such failed attempts to form rhizomatic connections than we do from successful, self-contained books based on arborescent models that are proud of their own organic interiority, etc.  

 

And so, I agree with Fisher that the work's "vast web of connections opened up an escape route" (26) and brilliantly made the point that pop music "can only have any significance when it [...] reverberates with a politics that has nothing to do with capitalist parliamentarianism and a philosophy that has nothing to do with the academy" (26). 

 

It's not perfect by any means, but it largely succeeds in registering the impact and importance of punk - particularly the Sex Pistols - which is why, I suppose, Malcolm McLaren was always a big fan of the book.   

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, 'book meme' (20/06/2005), in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 24. All future page references to this work will be placed directly in the post. 

 

[b] Russ Bestley, Turning Revolt Into Style, (Manchester University Press, 2025), p. 13. I discuss Bestley's book at length in several posts previously published on TTA: click here.

 

[c] Ibid., p. 57. 

 

 

This is one of several planned posts in the 'Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk' series: click here.  

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) 1: Chapters 1-3

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism 

(Zer0 Books, 2022) [a]

 

'The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction ... 

From a situation in which nothing can happen, 

suddenly anything is possible again.' 

 

 

I. 

 

It's arguable that since his death in 2017, Mark Fisher has gone from being merely a cult figure within certain academic circles to something resembling a posthumous spiritual leader to an entire generation; one who is "quoted feverishly by his disciples" [b]. 

 

That's not his fault, I suppose - I can't imagine Fisher would have wanted faithful followers forever asking themselves What would Mark think? when confronted with the latest political or cultural development. 

 

But we are where we are and the fact is that, today, Fisher has become an enormous cult and it amuses me to think of him doing his best Kenneth Williams impression up in Heaven, telling the angels of his status [c].

 

As one might imagine, there is an ever-increasing number of articles, essays, books, and films made about him and his work; particularly his seminal debut text, Capitalist Realism (2009), and it's this slim volume I would like to discuss here ... [d]  

 

 

II.  

 

The title of the opening chapter provides the book's tagline: "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." (1) 

 

It's a borrowed phrase by which Fisher refers to the fact that capitalism is more than an economic arrangement of society or a political ideology; that it has become a singular reality that is so all-encompassing that we mistake it for the natural order or inevitable way of the world. 

 

This, in turn, makes alternative models either unimaginable or seem foolish and utopian. 

 

It's a neat trick: though Wilde might say that capitalism's passing itself off as natural is merely an irritating political pose. 

 

Nevertheless, pose or not, it remains a huge problem for those who, like Fisher, want to bring about revolutionary change and a form of what he later calls acid communism - something which, apparently, will unleash post-capitalist desire, raise levels of consciousness, and reclaim the creative ideas and countercultural energies of the world before neoliberalism.       

 

For the record, I'm broadly sympathetic to this line of thinking. I don't accept the argument that capitalism is in fact natural and aligns with the human condition by fostering competition and the innate desire to trade, invest, own property and aspire to a materially more comfortable existence. 

 

Or, if this is in fact a valid argument, then, for me, it simply reinforces the Nietzschean idea that man is a bourgeois compromise and, as anti-humanist philosophers, we are obliged to value that which lies overman [e].    

 

Having said that, I'm a little more cautious - maybe even a little more liberal - than I was thirty years ago when developing my own politics of desire in the philosophy department at Warwick University [f], and just as I wince at some of the things I wrote then, so too do I cringe at some of the things in Fisher's book.

 

Capitalism may not be the same as the Real, but I seriously doubt there's anything particularly acidic (or in any way unmediated) about communism ...    

 

 

III. 

 

One of the pleasures of reading Fisher is that he doesn't seem to make any hard and fast distinction between fiction and theory, or the world of thought and that of feeling. 

 

I can see how this might irritate those readers who, like Jürgen Habermas, believe that the false assimilation of one enterprise to another robs both of their substance, purpose, and productivity [g], but, for me - as a lover of Nietzsche and Lawrence - I approve of this intertextual promiscuity. 

 

Like Fisher, I think that philosophy, the arts, and politics have a profound and congenial relation to one another and that the best writers are those who produce a text that is radically and openly figurative, drawing upon all manner of considerations; including those ideas and images found within popular culture that were previously regarded as unacceptable or irrelevant to serious critical debate.     

 

Fisher's devising of a highly idiosyncratic mode of accessible (but never simplistic) language in his writings - and its application to a wide variety of contemporary issues - is undoubtedly one of his strong points (and it's something I have tried to replicate in my own manner here on Torpedo the Ark).

 

The key thing is this: in Capitalist Realism Fisher is essentially trying to imagine an alternative reality principle; one that is capable of providing new forms of practice, new attitudes, and new historical possibilities - even if, by his own admission, "for most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism" (8) isn't really an issue. 

 

Further, he wants to provide an authentic sense of solidarity and community; to "fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere", as Deleuze and Guattari would say [h]. For Fisher, it's not capital which is the essence of reality; but the complex and shifting world of relationships between people [i].

 

But - and this is what worries me - hasn't Fisher's book already succumbed to the fate that met Picasso's Guernica in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006); the dystopian film that Fisher discusses in chapter 1?

 

That is to say, hasn't Capitalist Realism - "once a howl of anguish and outrage" (4) - simply morphed into another popular bestseller "accorded 'iconic' status" (4); just another cultural artefact available for free delivery with Amazon Prime? [j]

 

  

IV. 

 

Am I mistaken, or does Fisher hanker after something to believe in? 

 

That's a concern if true (and would explain how he ends up promoting acid communism). We will need to be on the lookout for signs of religiosity when (re-)reading through Capitalist Realism. 

 

Sadly for him, one of the things he can't believe in anymore is pop culture; the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994 "confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock's utopian and promethean ambitions" (10) and as for hip-hop, well, that was pretty much stillborn and complicit with capitalist realism from the get-go. 

 

Likewise, movies and comic books became equally hopeless; a mixture of neoliberalism and neo-noir (although that's a pretty seductive combination if, like me, you happen to like Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Frank Miller's Batman). 

 

 

V. 

 

Chapter 2 of Capitalist Realism poses an interesting question: 'What if you held a protest and everyone came?' 

 

Though it's perhaps a question that any teenager who ever decided to throw an open house party when their parents went away for the weekend might be able to answer. I refer readers to the 2012 teen comedy film directed by Nima Nourizadeh, Project X, which tells the story of three friends who attempt to gain popularity by throwing a party which then quickly escalates out of their control.   

 

I would remind readers also of Nietzsche's warning against the attempt to turn a subtle revolutionary idea into a mass movement by dumbing down one's philosophy and painting "great al fresco stupidities" [k] on the walls. 

 

I'm not saying this is what Fisher has done. But he does give the impression at times of being a political and social fantasist, inviting a revolutionary overturning of the global economy in the belief that "fair humanity will then rise up as though of its own accord" [l]. 

 

In such a dangerous (and delusional) dream, says Nietzsche, one hears "an echo of Rousseau's superstition, which believes in a miraculous primeval but as it were buried goodness of human nature and ascribes all the blame for this burying to the institutions of culture" [m].    

 

Unfortunately, history has taught us that whilst mass uprisings and revolutions can unleash "the most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages" [n], they can neither perfect man nor society. 

 

That said, Fisher is smart and honest enough to recognise that the anti-capitalist protest movement - with its hysterical demand for the impossible - invariably just reinforces capitalism itself: "Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism, and the anti-capitalist protests share rather too much with hyper-corporate events [...]" (14) 

 

Fisher particularly loathes Live 8 [o], which he describes as "a strange kind of protest; a protest that everyone could agree with" (14) and one which "the logic of the protest was revealed in its purest form" [14]; basically, a chance to scream at Daddy (or the Man). 

 

For it is "not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of the Father" (14) and he explicitly tells his readers the harsh truth that they themselves are complicit "in planetary networks of oppression" (15) - even when pumping their fists in the air or singing along with Bono and the boys at Wembley. 

 

Fisher writes: 

 

"What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, ad the zombies it makes are us." (15)

 

What this means, therefore, is that in order to reclaim real political agency, one must first of all accept one's "insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder" (15). 

 

This, for me, is Fisher at his most Landian - and I like it. His exposure of the myth that caring individuals "could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganisation" (15) - provided they bought the right products - is brutal and brilliant. 

 

 

VI. 

 

Chapter 3 returns us to the question of capitalism and the Real ... 

 

And a confession from Fisher that not only was the phrase about it being easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism not his - it was earlier used by both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek - but neither is the term capitalist realism an original coinage: 

 

"It was used as far back as the 1960s by a group of German Pop artists and by Michael Schudson in his 1984 book Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion, both of whom were making parodic references to socialist realism." (16)  

 

I don't really have a problem with borrowings like this and, besides, Fisher doesn't just adopt the term, he ascribes a more expansive (and more exorbitant) meaning to it. For Fisher, capitalist realism "cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions" (16). 

 

It is in fact, "more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action" (16). 

 

Fisher at this point openly reveals his hand, in a crucial passage worth quoting:

 

"If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism [...] only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort." (16)

 

Quite simply, I don't agree with that. I don't think it makes much difference whether capitalism is consistent or inconsistent, real or false - any more than whether God is an actual entity or virtual being. Marxists have been droning on for years about the many internal contradictions of capitalism and how these would one day trigger a crisis from which it would be impossible to recover - and yet, here we are.

 

Unfortunately for those who pin their hopes on this idea, contradictions have not caused a terminal collapse because the system is highly adaptive and able to stumble on from one crises to the next, sustaining production and restoring profitability, even without ever resolving the underlying issues (such as massive inequality).  

 

The masses are not going to be spurred into revolutionary action when it is revealed to them that capitalism is a fraud, anymore than the faithful simply abandoned God following the announcement of his death. Nietzsche famously concedes that God's posthumous shadow or ghost would be encountered for thousands of years, meaning humanity would continue to uphold the same moral values long after faith in the existence and authority of an actual deity had vanished (that's why the revaluation he called for will not happen overnight) [p]. 

 

Similarly, the overcoming of capitalism isn't as easy as simply revealing its structural inconsistencies and internal conflicts. Perhaps it will even require the kind of accelerationism that Fisher probably subscribed to when under the influence of Nick Land during his days at Warwick and involvement with the Ccru (Cybernetic culture research unit).       

 

In other words, perhaps the revolutionary path is not to withdraw from the global economy into private fantasy or try to simply side-step the coldest of all cold monsters like a crab, but accelerate the forces that the market economy has itself unleashed:

 

"To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization. For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character." [q]        

 

From the viewpoint, that is, of the theory and practice developed by Deleuze and Guattari - writing here in Anti-Oedipus (1972) - who argue that, through its process of production, capitalism "produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy" [r], which it is obliged to repress but which, nevertheless, continues to act as capitalism's external (and absolute) limit.   

 

The task, therefore, is to accelerate the process, so that capitalism can no longer bind these schizo-revolutionary forces and flows which it has itself unleashed. Capitalism, like all great historical systems, will thus "perish more as a result of its successes than its failures" [s] or its contradictions. Admittedly, however, this is a risky (potentially fatal) strategy that will require an exterminating angel who scrambles all the codes.    

 

 

VII. 

 

Finally, we return to the idea of the Real ...

 

Fisher is right to say that "what counts as 'realistic', what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations" (16). And that the real trick, as we noted earlier, was to naturalise ideological values, magically transforming values into facts. 

 

"As any number of radical theorists [...] have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a 'natural order', must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency [...]" (16)  

 

In other words, radical theorists wish to give the game away - to pull back the curtain, like Toto the dog; or, if you prefer a recent cinematic reference, convince others to pop a red pill. The problem, of course, is that most people, given the choice, prefer blissful ignorance and eating virtual steaks. 

 

Who wants the Real - "a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in fractures" (18) - if it provides none of the comforts of reality - if it risks making one even more depressed (and impoverished) than the illusory world of capitalist realism?  

 

  

Notes

 

[a] This is the most recent edition of Fisher's seminal text published in 2009. It comes with a Foreword by Zoe Fisher, an Introduction by Alex Niven, and an Afterword by Tariq Goddard. All page numbers given in this post refer to this edition.

 

[b] Rosa Abbott, writing in a post titled 'Ghosts of Mark Fisher' (5 Feb 2021), published on her Bad Taste Substack: click here.

 

[c] I'm referring here to Williams's hilarious interview with Terry Wogan in which he declared himself to be an enormous cult (Wogan BBC TV): click here and go to 1:49. 

 

[d] For some reason, I have resisted doing so until now, despite having previously written about two other books completed by him; Ghosts of My Life (2014) and The Weird and the Eerie (2017) - click here and/or here. 

 

[e] I'm not familiar enough with Fisher's reading of Nietzsche to know for sure how he relates the idea of the Übermensch to his own political thinking (or if he did so). One assumes that he would interpret the concept in communal rather than individualistic terms (i.e., as the realisation of a collectively imagined future that breaks the spell of the capitalist realism and the perpetual present).     

 

[f] Whilst Fisher and I were both doing doctoral research in the philosophy dept. at Warwick in the 1990s - he completed his PhD on cybernetic theory-fiction in 1999 and I submitted my study of Nietzsche-Lawrence-Deleuze the following year - we didn't know one another, nor, I believe, ever cross paths. He was far more involved with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) than I was, even though Nick Land was overseeing my progress in 1994-95. 

 

[g] See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Polity Press, 1994), p. 210.  

 

[h] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 18.   

 

[i] As Alex Niven writes in his Introduction: "At its most basic level, whatever political and theoretical nuances it might otherwise have implied [Capitalist Realism ...] was a book which called for a joining of human hands." [xiv] 

 

[j] This isn't, of course, Fisher's fault; he himself noted that capitalist realism works by rapidly absorbing dissent and neutralising it. And maybe I'm being unduly pessimistic; people on the left still insist the book remains relevant and its central argument remains valid (even if it is not the key to unlocking the future that some had once hoped). To date, Capitalist Realism has sold over 250,000 copies and it has been translated into many different languages.    

 

[k] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 438, p. 161. Nietzsche goes on to quote Voltaire at this point: Quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu ... 

 

[l] Ibid., I. 8. 463, p. 169.  

 

[m] Ibid. 

 

[n] Ibid. 

 

[o] Live 8 was a string of benefit concerts that took place in July 2005, in the G8 states and South Africa, marking the 20th anniversary of Live Aid. The call was to make poverty history. More than a thousand musicians performed at the concerts, which were broadcast on 182 television networks and two thousand radio networks. The BBC estimated the global audience to be around 1.5 billion. 

 

[p] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, III. 108. 

 

[q] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 239.  

 

[r] Ibid., p. 246.

 

[s] Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life (Routledge, 1997), p. 178. 

 

 

Parts two of this post can be accessed by clicking here. 

 

Part three of this post can be accessed by clicking here.    

 

You Are Reading a Post About Making a Film About Mark Fisher

We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025)

Poster image by Joe Magee 

closeandremote.net

 

We are assembling a post about Mark Fisher and, 

now that you're reading this, so are you ... 

 

 

I. 

 

There was an interesting piece in The Guardian a couple of days ago, by Lauren Kelly [1]. It was on Mark Fisher; a cultural theorist who, somewhat ironically, continues to haunt the media almost ten years after his death and seventeen years after he published the slim volume - Capitalist Realism (2009) - that ensured he would be born posthumously.

 

It's a good book [2]. But, like many other works regarded as seminal, it now risks becoming a kind of foundational text - i.e., essential reading for those who wish to have an understanding of contemporary neoliberal culture conveniently packaged and given a stamp of approval by critics, commentators, and other left-leaning intellectuals who secretly envy its astonishing popularity and sales figures [3].

 

Ultimately, it's easier to keep referencing Fisher c. 2009 and regurgitate his critique, rather than imagine an alternative future oneself. Of course, that's not Fisher's fault and, in his later work, he seemed keen to stress that Capitalist Realism was only ever intended as a starting point and not meant to be the last word on any of the subjects it touched upon.

 

Fisher spoke about developing post-capitalist desire and acid communism, but it's his debut book that most readers seem to fixate on and find most relevant [4], in the same way that orthodox punk fans still think Never Mind the Bollocks was the Sex Pistols' finest moment, rather than The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.       

 

 

II.  

  

Whatever one thinks of Fisher, the fact is he's an increasingly influential and pervasive figure and there's currently an experimental documentary doing the rounds that aims to disseminate his ideas to a still wider audience by mixing theory with real-world footage.

 

Titled We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025), this 65-minute film written and directed by Simon Poulter [5], cheerfully places itself outside the world of mainstream production; it was funded by Poulter and fellow artist Sophie Mellor (who edited the work), using an Instagram account to recruit a network of seventy collaborators - including a technical crew - to assist with the project.

 

There was no advance budget; no studio backing; and no institutional permissions - just the determination to make a film that affirmed Fisher's belief that decapitalised cultural production and collective agency was still possible among the ruins of neoliberal atomisation.

 

Methodologically, the work draws from both situationism and the rhizomatic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari - rejecting arborescent models in favour of open systems of exchange:

 

"By way of archival recordings, interviews and fictional performance, Fisher's philosophy of 'hauntology' recurs throughout [...] maintaining that modern society, as a result of 'capitalist realism', is haunted by futures that failed to happen [... as] narrator Justin Hopper explains." [6]  

 

Since the autumn of last year, Poulter's film has been screened "in universities, back gardens, cinemas, living rooms and art galleries located everywhere from Coventry to Brisbane, Australia, via Malmö, Sweden" [7]. 

 

I've not seen it yet - I'm hoping to attend the screening at the ICA on 19 May - but would like to offer support to the work carried out by Mellor and Poulter working as Close and Remote. I might not share all their political views and moral values, but, nevertheless, I feel a certain level of comradeship - not least of all because Poulter is an old punk rocker and a man who loves butterflies ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lauren Kelly, 'The man who saw the future: the legacy of cultural theorist Mark Fisher', in The Guardian (17 April 2026): click here. 

 

[2] Funnily enough, I haven't written a post critically reviewing the book, even though I have done so for other works by Fisher: click here, for example, for fragmened remarks on Ghosts of My Life (2022); or here for part one of a two-part post on The Weird and the Eerie (2016). I am planning to examine Fisher's most well-known text shortly. 

 

[3] According to Lauren Kelly in her Guardian piece: "As of December 2025, more than 250,000 English-language versions of Capitalist Realism have been sold, with translations available in Spanish, Italian, Arabic Mandarin, German, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Hebrew, Korean and Danish."  

 

[4] I think it's fair to say that Fisher's concept of acid communism has not attained the same widespread cultural recognition as his thinking on capitalist realism. Primarily, that's because his work in this area was cut short by his suicide in 2017 - acid communism exists only as an introduction and a few notes - but it's also the case that the former was a far more speculative concept, whereas the latter is a tangible malaise experienced here and now. 

      Given the choice, most people, it appears, prefer to feel depressed by the present, than imagine their future happiness based on the retrieval of old dreams and unrealised desires. A few academics, artists, and old school k-punk fans might be excited by the concept, but acid communism is a bit niche for mainstream readers (and maybe - since it relies on a certain level of political and countercultural utopianism rooted in the late 1960s and early 1970s - it seems a tad nostalgic and old-fashioned for younger readers who don't remember this time).  

 

[5] Torpedophiles will recognise the name of artist and aurelian Simon Poulter from a post published on 1 Feb 2026: click here.    

 

[6] Lauren Kelly ... see reference and link in note 1 above. It should be pointed out that Justin Hopper doesn't narrate as himself, but in character as Professor Parkins; a spectral guide to Mark Fisher's life and work.

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

 

Bonus: click here to play the trailer to We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025). 

Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 5: Tomorrow (Chapters 11 and 12)

Simon Reynolds: Retromania
Cover of the German edition (Ventil Verlag, 2012)

I.

In chapter 11, Reynolds - a former sci-fi fanatic - indulges in nostalgia for the Space Age; a time of giant steps and final frontiers, as he describes it. 

 

He also mourns the "absence of futuristic-ness" [a] in the fabric of daily life and says neostalgia became an increasingly widespread feeling during the opening decade of the 21st century, though, I have to admit, I didn't feel this "pang for the future that never arrived" [362]; perhaps because I preferred The Flintstones to The Jetsons [b] - or maybe because I hate motorists at ground level and the last thing I would want to see is flying automobiles blotting out the sky. 

 

Whatever the reason, I'm not particularly disappointed the future didn't arrive - for I never really expected or wanted it to. And when it has interfered with the present in the form of advanced (and alien) technologies, it's not been entirely advantageous - are we really any happier or better off now that we experience the world via a series of screens or have outsourced our thinking to AI? 

 

I don't think so: and Reynolds isn't particularly impressed by the digital age, which he describes as more decadent in character than heroic. He wants the world of Star Trek and to be able to beam on board the USS Enterprise - not the future glimpsed in Blade Runner in which it rains all the time, or the grotty on-board conditions of the commercial starship Nostromo, as seen in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).  

 

 

II.  

 

Sooner or later, Reynolds was always going to relate this idea of nostalgia for the future to the world of popular music - which I guess is fair enough, considering he's a music journalist, critic and author. 

 

But, if I'm honest, it gets a little boring reading about bands and DJs and genres of music I've never heard of and I can't help wondering at the kind of books Reynolds might have given us had he spent a little more of his time reading literature and philosophy and a little less listening to records ... [c] 

 

III.

Is nostalgia chiefly a "not feeling at home in the here-and-now, a sensation of alienation" [370]? That seems to view it as tied to a model of deficiency and/or lack; a model which, as a Deleuzian, is obviously problematic for me. 

 

Might we not think nostalgia as a form of desire; something positive and productive? By tying nostalgia to the (socially constructed) idea of lack, Reynolds views it as the pursuit of a missing (ideal) object, which is all very Freudian and Lacanian, but is that really where he wants to go? 

 

(I think perhaps he does, but I don't.)

As for alienation ... Why bring in a dated 19th century concept like this; one that relies on the very deficiency model rejected above? Further, if there's no human essence - and there is no human essence - then how can a subject ever really feel or be alienated? 

 

Perhaps Baudrillard is right to say (rather amusingly) that we are today alienated from alienation and that we have moved beyond the dramas of alienation played out in modernity. Either that, or that alienation is now total within an age of simulation in which the individual is fully codified. 

IV.
 

"In recent decades, nostalgia for the future has gradually lost its vagueness and become tied to a specific idée fixe: an archaic and sometimes comically ossified idea of what the future is going to be like." [370] 

 

In other words, it's become a retro-futurist emotion, stimulated by popular culture and in particular a vision of the future that was in large part invented by the Disney Corporation: 'Tomorrowland' (1955) providing the material blueprint for the plastic utopia to come. 

 

Amusingly, Tomorrowland is now a museum - and, after visiting, Reynolds came to much the same conclusion as Bruce Handy writing in Time in 1998: The future isn't what it used to be - i.e., it's "desperately uninspiring and lugubrious" [372] - which is shit in anybody's language. 

 

But is the fault less Disney's and more ours? Have we lost the ability to dream as a culture and "to come up with visionary goals to aim for" [372]?

 

Possibly. 

 

But again, let's enter a note of caution before throwing ourselves on the floor and bewailing our own inability to imagine the future. For mightn't it be a sign that we have wised up a little as a culture; that the postmodern abandonment of grand utopian visions - particularly when these are tied to dangerous political ideologies - is something we should be proud of. 

 

I certainly don't wish to resurrect the myth of rational progress and recommit to a single telelogical future; I rather like the ambiguity of the present and have no desire for a better world. I believe in the ruins of The City of Tomorrow and if that makes me a cynic, or a pessimist - or even a defender of capitalist realism - well, so be it. 

  

 

V.   

 

Moving on ... and essentially skipping a couple of sections, we come to the end of chapter 11, in which - to my surprise - Oswald Spengler again puts in an appearance; just what is Reynolds's fascination with this historically significant but intellectually marginal (and marginalised) figure? 

 

He refers us to the Faustian spirit identified by Spengler in his 1931 work Der Mensch und die Technik - a spirit which, says Reynolds, "is the dynamic behind modernism and modernisation, the impulse that propelled both the space race and twentieth-century music's exploration of sonic space through electronics" [394]. 

 

That may or may not be true, but this Faustian spirit is also tragic in nature and Spengler is adamant that there can be no prudent retreat into the past - not even one made in order to recover a lost future. He also dismisses optimism as a form of cowardice [d], so, ultimately, I can't see the appeal of his work for Reynolds, though he has clearly been influenced by the latter as this paragraph illustrates:

 

"When you look at the culture of the West in the last decade or so - the dominance of fashion and gossip, celebrity and image; a citizenry obsessed with decor and cuisine; the metastasis of irony throughout society - the total picture does look a lot like decadence. Retro culture would then be just another facet of the recline and fall of the West." [394-395]          

 

Reynolds suggests that this leaves opens "the possibility of the new coming from outside the West, from regions of the globe where culture is less exhausted" [395]. He specifically mentions China and India - "set to be the economic and demographic powerhouses of the century" [395] - and two cultures which, interestingly enough, Spengler also regarded as high-level, equal in spiritual greatness to the West. Obviously, both are ancient cultures and yet, paradoxically, they "feel 'younger' than us at the moment" [395].    

 

I have to admit, I have my doubts (and concerns) about the idea that the economic and geo-political future belongs to Asia; for there are multiple factors (including some we cannot foresee) that might prevent the global dominance of China and India. 

 

Nevertheless, Reynolds also seems to pin his musical hopes on the non-Western world, now that the "Anglo-American pop tradition is all innovated out" [396]. But again, I'm not sure the Chinese Communist Party will allow an explosion of "popular energies and desires" [396] amongst the young. 

 

And the last time they encouraged such it resulted not in the Summer of Love, but the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, so those who advise the West to simply rest and outsource the future to Beijing should be careful what they wish for.    

 

 

VI. 

 

I smiled to hear that even William Gibson has given up on the future; that he prefers these days to speak of atemporality and the digital Now. 

 

When I was in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s and the CCRU was a thing (if it ever was a thing), Gibson's 1984 novel Necromancer was required reading. Unfortunately, I found it to be one of the most boring books I have ever attempted to read - right up there with Naked Lunch (1959) and Silas Marner (1861).   

 

However, I agree with Gibson that the 21st century is richer, stranger and more complex than any imaginary future and that science fiction, therefore - at least in the traditional speculative sense - is now redundant: the future is here already and our task today is to explore the alien present [e]. 

 

Reynolds, however, isn't of this view: "Gibson's perspective is so completely other to my own that I'm flabbergasted." [397] I'm sorry about that, although it's always nice to see a piece of 18th century British slang being used.

 

 

VII. 

 

And now, the end is near - chapter 12 - the final chapter: 'The Shock of the Old' ... Time for Reynolds to address those questions he posed, but perhaps failed to fully address along the way. 

 

Questions such as: Given that I enjoy many aspects of retro, why do I still feel deep down that it is lame and shameful? [403 - italics in the original].

 

I'm tempted to suggest it's because, Simon, you still labour under the illusion of psychic depth. If you were a little less soulful - became a little more floral - you'd miraculously find much of the shame you experience (which seems more moral than instinctive in nature and which often serves to hinder your enjoyment) simply fades away. 

 

Of course, becoming-flower isn't easy. But, if a wasp can manage it, I'm sure you'll be able to find a way (and can always turn for advice to Deleuze and Guattari writing in A Thousand Plateaus).  

 

 

VIII. 

 

Reynolds admits that his understanding of rock and pop is very much infused by the "belief that art has some kind of evolutionary destiny, a teleology that manifests itself through genius artists and masterpieces that are monuments to the future" [403]. The funny thing is, he says this in part due to the fact he was born in 1963 - 'The Year That Rock Began'. 

 

But I was born in the same year, and my understanding of popular culture isn't weighed down by this belief. Perhaps that's because I was born under a different star sign [f]; or perhaps it's because I took the work of postmodernists such as Lyotard more seriously than Reynolds and have made terms such as irony, incredulity, and insouciance watchwords rather than belief, teleology, destiny, etc.        

 

Again, by his own admission, his obsession with and loyalty to music served only to consolidate his outmoded ideas and beliefs:

 

"Although by the early eighties modernism was thoroughly eclipsed within art and architecture, and postmodernism was seeping into popular music, the spirit of modernist pop carried on with rave and the experimental fringe of rock. These surges of renewal served as a booster shot for me, reconfirming the modernist credo [...]" [404] 

 

That's a really rather terrible admission of bias; superhonest, but shocking. And for me it confirms Jamie Reid's idea that music prevents you thinking for yourself [g]. 

 

Reynolds continues: "There is an argument that the linear model of progress is an ideological figment [...] [404] - well, yes, I made exactly this argument earlier in this post. 

 

But despite having his belief in progress badly shaken by recent events, Reynolds sadly chooses to avoid the argument and instead just doubles-down on his position: "As a died-in-the-wool [sic] modernist [...] I would find it hard to break the habit of a lifetime [...] Giving it up would feel like giving in, learning to settle for less." [404]  

 

Again, that's honest, but disappointing: he sounds like one of those Japanese soldiers stranded on a Pacific desert island for many long years and refusing to accept the war finished long ago. I know some people admire holdouts - and perhaps there is something admirable about an act of defiant resistance - but ... well, there are surely better hills to die on than that of popular music. 

 

 

IX.  

 

Reynolds doesn't like flatness and so he won't think much of Pancake Tuesday, Jane Birkin's physique, or the Deleuze and Guattari text recommended earlier. 

 

For as the title suggests, Mille plateaux is all about flat terrain and molecular politics, rather than mountain peaks and what Reynolds describes as the momentous and by which he refers to molar events and the idea that these alone bring about significant historical change or progress. 

 

As an object-oriented philosopher, I subscribe of course to a flat ontology, which is to say, to the idea that all objects exist on the same plane of reality and I can't help suspecting that Reynolds would not care for this model of being; that he rather likes hierarchical structures that allow for judgement. 

 

Or perhaps he just has a fear of feeling emotionally flat and this explains his need of newness and constant stimulation, including, during his rave days, the entactogenic drug ecstasy [h].

 

 

X. 

 

Another thing Reynolds does not like is stillness; he wants things to keep moving - and moving forward at pace. But hasn't he heard that sometimes one can be quick even when standing still (that speed and intensity do not necessarily require movement)? Stillness isn't synonymous with stasis and stagnancy.

 

I refer him once more to Deleuze and Guattari, and their notions of lines of flight and deterritorialisation; neither of which are progressive ideas - there's no linear movement from A to B - but both of which allow for radical change and the breaking away from established habits, structures, and identities so as to invent new ways of thinking and acting. 

 

Stillness is a keyword for me now; as it became for Roland Barthes in his late work on the Neutral  and I'm pretty sure the latter also writes in praise of flatness too.  

 

 

XI. 

  

This couple of sentences made me smile: 

 

"This attachment on the part of young people to genres that have been around for decades mystifies me. Don't they want to push them aside?" [408]

 

Apparently not! 

 

But is it any more mystifying than why the author of Retromania should wish to cling on to ideas from the late-19th and early-20th centuries to do with progress and making everything new.   

 

Maybe young people don't give a shit anymore about when a genre was first invented and don't feel that "vague nostalgia [...] for a lost golden age when music had power and integrity" [410] that Simon and Sandi Thom think they should. 

 

Maybe they prefer music that is less potent and less meaningful, but also doesn't demand that they adhere to it with fanatic loyalty and at the exclusion of all other interests; maybe they don't need mythical rock gods (or even the NME) to tell them what to think and feel any longer [j].     

 

 

XII.

 

Reynolds's closing remarks on the economics and politics of pop culture in an era of postproduction were provocative. I particularly like the bit about meta-money and meta-music being connected at some fundamental level (although I don't know if it's true outside of Marxist analysis):  

 

"Culture, as the superstructure to the economy's base, reflects the gaseous quality of our existence. The insubstantiality of the economy revealed itself, horribly, a few years ago. We are still waiting for the music-about-music bubble to burst." [420-421]

 

For Reynolds, it is fashion which provides the "nexus between late capitalism and culture" [421] - the point where they intermesh. If video killed the radio star, fashion killed popular music; infecting the latter with its "artificially accelerated metabolic rate, its rapid cycles of engineered obsolescence" [421].

 

The logic of fashion has polluted the sweet river of time that once flowed gently but inexorably from past to future. Or as Reynolds writes: "Fashion - a machinery for creating cultural capital and then, with incredible speed, stripping it of value and dumping the stock - permeates everything." [422]

 

As a philosopher on the catwalk, I smiled at this. But I also feel I have to push back a little - even if Reynolds himself slightly qualifies the above by conceding that the fashion-isation of the world "can't totally explain the rise of retro rock" [422].

 

Firstly, it's a little surprising that a self-professed modernist like Reynolds should so dislike fashion - the most modern of all modern phenomena. But then lacking any telos - any final purpose - I suppose fashion was always going to seem trivial and superficial to Reynolds. 

 

One might have imagined, however, based on the experimental and radical nature of the music he privileges, that he'd rather approve of the manner in which fashion ruptures the order of referential reason, dissolving old values and conventions. It may only provide the illusion of change, but there is a genuine passion at its heart: the passion for empty signs and cycles and for making the insignificant signify and it's this which makes it of interest (to me at least). 

 

 

XIII.    

 

If fashion is for Reynolds is a non-starter and if "it is now pretty clear that pop is living on borrowed time and stolen energy" [422], then where do those who care about cultural vitality and rescuing lost futures go from here?   

 

Reynolds says he'd "love to nominate hauntology" [423] as the answer to this question and as "the alternative to the curatorial model of art" [423]. But he can't bring himself to do it. For he knows that in many ways even those figures he admires working in this area, such as Ariel Pink [i], "are postproduction artists too, rummaging through the flea market of history and piecing together the audio equivalent of a junk-art installation" [423].    

 

By his own admission, this leads to a tricky question for Reynolds as an Ariel Pink fan and champion of the hauntological in general: what exactly is this music's contribution? 

 

"In fact, what in today's musical landscape is rich enough, nourishing enough - which is to say, sufficiently nonderivative - to sustain future forms of revivalism and retro? Surely, at a certain point, recycling will just degrade the material beyond the point that further use-value can be extracted." [424]. 

 

That seems a fair observation. But surely then, when this point is reached is precisely when people will - from necessity - create new sounds. So he should find comfort in this idea - and that thing he cherishes called hope. 

 

And indeed, he does: concluding his study with a line that might have come from Fox Mulder's bedroom wall: "I still believe the future is out there." [428] 

 

So, there was really nothing to worry about all along ... 

 

  

Notes

[a] Simon Reynolds, Retromania (Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 362. Future page numbers will be given directly in the text and refer to this edition. 

 

[b] Strangely, however, I prefer Lt. Ellis in her silver mini-skirt [click here] to Loana in her fur bikini, although I'm not blind to the appeal of prehistoric women: click here.  

 

[c] His brief reading of Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet on page 369 is excellent and I only wish Mr Reynolds wrote more on Portuguese poets and French thinkers such as Baudrillard - whom he mentions several times, but never really engages with - and spent a bit less time discussing rap music, rave culture, and obscure electronic groups from the 1990s.     

 

[d] Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: a Contribution to the Philosophy of Life, trans. C. F. Atkinson, (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1932), p.103.  

 

[e] That's really not such an outlandish view; J. G. Ballard said much the same thing way back in the seventies; i.e., that sci-fi should stick to exploring the all-voracious present and mapping inner space and the impact of modern technology on the human psyche. For Ballard, in sum, the job of the writer is to invent reality as we already live inside a fictional world order. See the Preface to the French edition of his novel Crash (1974): click here.  

 

[f] I was born on 13 Feb and that makes me an Aquarian; Reynolds was born on 19 June and that makes him a Gemini (and so more prone to belief and less sceptical in character) - or so I'm told by someone who takes this kind of thing seriously.  

 

[g] I'm referring to Jamie Reid's 'Stratoswasticastor' design: click here for details on punkrocker.org.uk 

 

[h] See Simon Renolds, Generation Ecstasy (Routledge, 1999), in which he takes the reader on a tour of the world of rave culture and techno music as a dosed up and blissed out insider. For Reynolds, MDMA was the essential ingredient or catalyst; the magic pill that allowed for a communal and transformative experience bordering on the spiritual (although he does also acknowledge its more troubling aspects).   

 

[i] Reynolds names the American musician and singer-songwriter Ariel Pink as (probably) his favourite artist of the 2000s, even if his hypnogogic sound is "woven out of blurry echoes of halcyon radio pop from the sixties, seventies and eighties" [xxiii] - i.e., the "grand period of primary pop productivity" [423].  

 

[j] As a father of children, Reynolds recognises that younger people do not think the same way that people of his generation think; do not care about the same things: "they're not the least bit interested in the capital 'f' Future, barely ever think about it" [425-426] and their urge to escape the present is satisfied "through fantasy [...] or digital technology" [426].  

 

 

Other posts in the Retromania series can be accessed by clicking here.