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. 

       

On Nick Land and Albert Camus: From Hyperstition to Absurdism

Accelerating the Absurd 

(Portrait of Nick Land and Albert Camus) 

(SA/2026)

 

 

 

I. 

 

We closed a recent post on hyperstition by suggesting that Nick Land's theory might be understood as a form of post-irony - a conceptual space in which the virtue of sincerity returns, albeit in a compromised (impure, less naive) form. 

 

This yields an amusingly paradoxical result. It becomes possible to speak of the absurd in all seriousness: "Not because you forgot it was absurd, but because you no longer believe that absurdity disqualifies meaning." [1] 

 

By invoking fictions to manufacture reality, hyperstition ultimately abandons us in a world shaped by indifferent, chaotic forces. And by treating reality as an artificial construct, Landian philosophy builds the ultimate Absurd landscape. 

 

Could it be, then, that Nick Land (inadvertently) returns us to Albert Camus, albeit with a dark, cyberpunk twist? 

 

This is the question we will (briefly) address here ... 

 

II. 

 

This is not a question we would have been permitted to ask during the mid-1990s, when the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was aggressively exerting its quasi-occult influence over the philosophy department at Warwick University. 

 

As a PhD student there at the time, I always found Land extremely polite and personable, despite his Mephistophelian reputation. Yet, to the CCRU's zealous inner circle, Camus was a philosophical enemy and I recall being condemned by one of Land's followers for daring to quote from L'Homme révolté (1951) in my doctoral thesis [2]. 

 

The CCRU wanted to dissolve human agency into the techno-capital matrix. Camus, by contrast, insisted on human defiance in the face of a meaningless void. For the Warwick avant-garde, this made Camus an old-fashioned moral humanist clinging to the dignity of Man.  

 

That might be true. But, whilst I may not have shared all of Camus's politico-philosophical prejudices, the fact is that L'Étranger (1942) remains a far more enjoyable read than William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). 

 

And, well, as Elaine Benes would say, Camus was just so good-looking [3] ...

 

 

III. 

 

In Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942), Camus defines the Absurd as the gulf between the human desire for meaning and the sheer indifference of the universe. 

 

Nick Land's cybergothic philosophy has a similar pessimistic starting point and, like Camus, he strips away the comforting illusion of any logic or purpose. For Land, human intentions, morals, and desires are entirely irrelevant; history is driven by the alien and artificial forces of techno-capital. 

 

There is, therefore, a degree of structural affinity between their respective philosophies. One might even compare the Landian subject - trapped in hyperstitious feedback loops and techno-myths determining reality - with Camus's figure of Sisyphus, forever pushing his rock up the mountain. 

 

Both are obliged to accept their fate over which they have no control (which, in fact, controls and engineers them). 

 

Indeed, both are encouraged to affirm their fate and, in the case of the Landian subject, accelerate the inhuman processes unfolding not in order to be happy, but so that they might be erased, as Michel Foucault famously wrote, "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" [4].        

  

Notes

 

[1] Victor Stones, 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection', medium.com (18 Nov 2024): click here. 

 

[2] My thesis - Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000) - dealt with the political character of Nietzsche's philosophical project and I quoted Camus on several occasions on the question of revolutionary violence, state tyranny, etc. 

 

[3] Seinfeld, season 6, episode 5: 'The Couch' (dir. Andy Ackerman, written by Larry David, 1994). 

      The point is, it doesn't always matter what someone's views are. You can forgive a good deal when someone is attractive and Camus is widely considered one of the most handsome of all philosophers, celebrated for his physical features, his sharp sense of style, and his air of iconic coolness. No wonder Sartre was envious of him and their friendship eventually ended in tears.   

 

[4] Foucault was writing in Les mots et les choses (1966), translated into English as The Order of Things (1971), p. 387. 

      That's the crucial difference between Camus and Land: the former leaves his readers with the thought that Sisyphus ultimately finds a way to be happy (that his task is itself enough to fill his heart with joy); the latter offers no such comfort and doesn't give a damn about the happiness (or survival) of humanity. Land knows that civilisation is ultimately designing the technology that will replace us. 

      A friend of mine once put it this way: Camus recognises life is an absurd comedy but he still hopes man can provide the punchline; Land thinks of things more as a Lovecraftian horror story and chooses to side with Cthulhu.   

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: A Little Bit More Politics (Sections VII - XIII)

Марк Фишер: Кислотный коммунист

(SA/2026)

 

Note: All page references in this post are to Mark Fisher's k-punk: 

The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), 

ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018). 

 

 

VII. 

 

Fisher may have hated D. H. Lawrence, but perhaps he might have appreciated Lawrence's idea of a democracy of touch [a], as one of his criticisms of the smartphone and other forms of touchscreen technology is that they involve touch devoid of any sensuality: 

 

"When the fingers encounter the glassy surface of the iPhone, everything they touch on the screen feels the same. The fingers are effectively acting as extensions of the eye and the brain - an eye and brain that have now been radically re-habituated by cyberspace." (487) 

 

Fisher thinks it astonishing that this line of thought was anticipated by Baudrillard in the 1980s - but even more remarkable is the fact that Lawrence foresaw all this in the 1920s. 

 

And like Tanizaki, Lawrence also wrote in praise of shadows, which, rather surprisingly, Fisher calls for the cultivation of in addition to the carving out of spaces "beyond the hyper-bright instant" (487). I so much prefer this poetic-philosophical Mark Fisher to the one who bangs on about politics and the financial crisis of 2008. 

 

 

VIII. 

 

The phrase that best sums up Fisher's utopian phase - his acid communism - is red plenty (a phrase he borrows from Francis Spufford's 2010 book of that title). It refers to the collective capacity of the People to "produce, care and enjoy" (510) and is the thing which, he says, capitalism is set up to block: 

 

"The attack on capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about 'wealth creation', capital necessarily and always blocks our access to this common wealth." (510) 

 

In a post-capitalist future, technological advancements and the communist re-ordering of society will provide abundance for all: "Everything for everyone" (510), including bread and roses. Gone forever will be the days of artificial scarcity. 

 

Further, everyone will feel a sense of red belonging - a sense of belonging that has nothing to do with faith, flag, or family and cannot be "reduced to the chauvinistic pleasures that come from being an insider in any group whatsoever" (510-511). 

 

It is, rather, a "special sense of involvement that promised to transfigure all aspects of everyday life in a way that, previously, only religion had promised to, so that even the dreariest task could be imbued with high significance" (511). 

 

The great promise of red plenty and red belonging is that it doesn't matter "where you come from or who you are" (511), you will be cared for unconditionally. 

 

It's clear how this line of thinking might feed into the open borders movement. What's not quite so clear is how such thinking relates to Fisher's own mental health; frankly, I can't see how anyone can promote such ideas without being in some sort of delirium (similar to the mystical state experienced by those who suddenly find God) [b]. 

 

I know some of his more ardent supporters believe that Fisher's speculative nostalgia and hallucinogenic politics is the best way to confront capitalist realism, but for those looking for a rather more practical strategy for transitioning from neoliberalism to a democracy to come, Fisher's work is essentially worthless. It also seems somewhat at odds with his own more pessimistic views and criticism of the moralising left. 

 

In sum: whilst I'm all for the creation of new narratives and conceptual frameworks - and maybe even a little bit of libidinal engineering - Fisher's acid communism fails to convince and red plenty leaves me hungry for something more. 

 

 

IX. 

 

And back to the topic of consciousness-raising ... A practice (or range of practices) that Fisher believes to be of crucial importance to molecular revolution: 

 

"Consciousness-raising opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective experience. It can give us the resources to behave, think and act differently [...]" (514) 

 

For Fisher: 

 

"The roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings, especially their feelings of misery and desperation, and together attributing the sources of these feelings to impersonal structures [...] mediated by particular figures to which we must attach populist loathing" (514). 

 

These figures would include, for example, landlords and entrepreneurs, whom Fisher brands as parasites. We might, I would suggest, see this as a succinct definition of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment and which is central to slave morality. 

 

Fisher claims that the aim of consciousness-raising is to produce more compassion "for others and for ourselves" (514), but I worry that his proposed method of consciousness-raising will only generate class hate and make people feel pretty rotten about themselves too; has knowing that others feel as desperate as you do ever really helped? [c] 

 

 

X.

 

Fisher is grateful to Francis Spufford for reminding us all that "when communism was defeated, it wasn't just a particular ideology that disappeared" (518). 

 

No, the demise of communism - and he's thinking here of the USSR - was also "the disappearance of modernism's Promethean dream of a total transformation of human society" (518). 

 

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that's a good thing. For this dream became a dystopian nightmare, did it not? Surely Fisher knows the history of the Soviet Union - and, indeed, he might also be expected to know what happened to Prometheus (for those who don't recall their Ancient Greek mythology, it ended even worse for him than for Trotsky).    

 

Is Fisher really falling back into what Nick Land would call a sentimental indulgence - i.e., the hope that a political revolution will lead to "new productive, perceptual, cognitive and libidinal possibilities" (518). 

 

I don't want to be a postmodern killjoy who radically lowers expectations and crushes dreams, etc. But, really, c'mon! Knowing, Mark, that there's no way back to old school communism [d], why pin your hopes on renewing (and resuming) class solidarity and the building of radical machineries of desire? 

 

 

XI. 

 

I mentioned above how, for Fisher, "the roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings" (514). 

 

And yet, in another text from 2015, titled 'Anti-Therapy', Fisher acknowledges that the idea that "talking about our feelings could be a political act seems counterintuitive" (521) and that this new emotionalism seems closely linked to capitalist realism - born of Tony Blair's "manipulation of the extraordinary grief jamboree that ensued in the immediate wake of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales" (521). 

 

Fisher rightly says that the new emo-politics enforced by New Labour "went far beyond mere mood-setting" (522) - now we all had to possess the right feelings and share them in the approved manner. Blair "led the way in normalising the emotional self-exploitation that was necessary for the final phase of neoliberalism in Britain" (522) - a phase that Fisher amusingly calls spincerity (the public performance of an emotion you may or may not genuinely feel). 

 

It's enough to make one wish for the return of traditional British restraint and resolve; of stiff upper-lips and stoical detachment. However, Fisher sees this as reactionary and posits in contrast a third way (if I can use such a phrase); one based on his reading of Spinoza. 

 

For Spinoza's philosophy "makes the management of emotions central to its project" (524) and aims not to repress feelings, but engineer joy via the use of reason. This, for Fisher, makes Spinoza "a thinker whose work is an indispensable resource for any progressive project" (524) - a view that is not uncommon amongst neo-Marxist thinkers (particularly those influenced by Deleuze and Badiou) [e].  

 

Get Spinoza on board, says Fisher, and talking about our feelings can become a radical political act; "part of a practice of consciousness-raising that makes visible the impersonal and intersubjective structures that ideology normally obscures from us" (530).  

 

  

XII.  

 

This seems at first a rather disingenuous thing to write: 

 

"It's somewhat ironic that theories of the 'Event' have come to the fore [...] at just the moment in history when it has become clear that events in and of themselves don't change anything." (531)

 

For Fisher surely knows that the Event (as conceptualised by philosophers) is extremely rare and has little to do with the events covered by the news media, such as Live Aid, for example, or the G20 protests. The Event - at least as I understand it (inspired by Lawrence) - is a rent in the Great Umbrella; something that allows a glimpse of chaos and the discovery of a new world via the destruction of fixed forms [f].  

 

But perhaps Fisher was thinking of something said by Zarathustra to the effect that what matters more than noisy, violent events are those changes that take place in us in our stillest hours: "'The world revolves, not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values: it revolves inaudibly.'" [g] 

 

Heidegger picked up on this idea after the War, when he attempted to purge his notion of Transzendenz - Dasein's ability to start over and transform the world - not only from its conventional ties to metaphysics but to the idea of action. What was required, Heidegger argued, was not some great event, but a form of silent waiting. 

 

What seems most to worry Fisher is that events often result in euphoric outbursts of feeling "followed by depressive collapse" (531) - but the same could be said of love, no? 

 

Still, if events are the be-all and end-all - if change doesn't happen through them alone - "there are nevertheless moments which function as thresholds, opening up a new terrain of struggle, and allowing different collective emotions to propagate" (532). 

 

Which is basically saying things can still happen out of the blue ...   

 

 

XIII.  

 

Finally, we come to the two short texts, both from 2016, with which part four of k-punk closes; firstly, 'Cybergothic vs Steampunk' and, secondly, 'Mannequin Challenge' ...

 

In the former, Fisher argues that the global terrorist network ISIS "holds up a mirror to twenty-first century capitalist nihilism" (544). A form of nihilism that is essentially a type of existential poverty. We might not like to admit it, but ISIS offer a solution to this (albeit a horrifically false solution). For like criminal gangs and religious cults, ISIS offer those who join fellowship and meaning.    

 

Perhaps more interestingly, Fisher describes ISIS in relation to his concept of the cybergothic:

 

"There are no 'pure' archaisms, nothing ever repeats without difference, and ISIS is properly understood as a cybergothic phenomenon which combines the ancient with the contemporary (beheadings on the web)." (546)

 

And whilst he is obviously not a supporter of ISIS, Fisher - a bit like Foucault, who greeted the Iranian Revolution in 1979 with warm enthusiasm [h] - is excited by "the rising tide of experimental political forms in so many areas of the world at the moment" (546). 

 

And that's because, for him, this shows that "people are rediscovering group consciousness and the potency of the collective" (546).     

 

I can't help wondering whether, if he were alive today, Fisher (like Foucault in his late work) would find it necessary to rethink questions central to the Enlightenment and to liberalism. To concede, for example, that whilst the individual is a political fiction, it's nevertheless a useful one which needs vigorously defending; as does secular society when threatened by militant religious fascism. 

 

In the latter piece, Fisher comments on Donald Trump and his successful campaign in 2016 to become President of the United States. 

 

In contrast to Clinton and her team of "political robots playing out an exhausted programme" (547), Trump's campaign "was possessed of a sense of effervescing excitement, of anarchic unpredictability, the feeling of belonging to a building-movement" (547). 

 

Fisher understands how Trump caught the mood of popular dissatisfaction with capitalist realism and performed with a certain libidinal freedom that was attractive not only to his supporters, but to many who wouldn't vote for him in a million years and were appalled by his rhetoric and immoderation. His campaign may have been ugly, but at least it wasn't boring. 

 

In brief, like many other commentators of a certain generation, Fisher recognised that Trump was the punk candidate (what this tells us about the latter is an interesting question we might discuss one day).   

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written several posts referencing this Lawrentian idea; see, for example, the post dated 14 May 2014 - 'Towards a Democracy of Touch' - click here. 

      Note that the word 'hated' is used deliberately here; Matt Colquhoun confirmed to me in a recent email (7 May 2026) Fisher's visceral hostility toward Lawrence.

 

[b] Normally, I would not comment on someone's mental health. However, since Fisher and his followers make such a point of politicising depression - arguing that it is a social phenomenon heavily influenced by capitalism rather than a purely chemical or biological issue - I feel justified in doing so.

      Note, however, that my use of the term delirium is not simply intended in the narrow clinical sense, but more in the philo-political sense deployed by Deleuze and Guattari, for whom delirium is a way the unconscious invests in the social field, sometimes opening up revolutionary lines of flight. I suggest that Fisher's vision of acid communism operates as this precise kind of political delirium; an elaborate, idealised alternative reality constructed to escape the immense psychological claustrophobia of capitalist realism. Such a vision of utopia functions as a temporary, internal flight mechanism from profound depression. Suddenly, the world feels meaningful and loving once more. 

      However, as a political strategy, this hallucinogenic clarity borders on a mystical state rather than practical materialist organising. And, unfortunately, such states seldom last; when the speculative fantasy dissolves, the individual comes back down to earth with a bump, resulting in renewed depression. Fisher, as most readers will know, tragically committed suicide less than two years after writing the text discussed here.

 

[c] Historically, of course, it has. In the second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups of the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, sharing personal experiences of isolation, shame, and subjugation was precisely what allowed women to see that their private misery was structural and political. This collective realisation was a vital catalyst for solidarity and agency. 

      However, my contention with Fisher is that his specific formula for consciousness-raising risks short-circuiting this therapeutic transformation. Rather than moving from shared misery to structural agency, Fisher's explicit demand for populist loathing targeted at parasites paves a direct line toward Nietzschean ressentiment. It risks trapping the participants in a permanent state of reactive anger and class hate, which ultimately toxicifies the self and breeds a new form of psychological misery. 

      Of course, Fisher himself is aware of this danger, which is why he later refers readers to Wendy Brown's essay 'Wounded Attachments' (1993) - an essay in which she diagnoses the psycho-libidinal origins of an identity politics and what those on the right call wokism. 

      Fisher writes: "Drawing on Nietzsche's account of resentment [...] Brown wrote of a political subjectivity which 'becomes deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuge the pain of its powerlessness through its vengeful moralizing, through its wide distribution of suffering, through its reproach of power as such'" (526-527). And Fisher concludes that today "the mixture of moralizing aggression and investment in impotence has proliferated in a political atmosphere now substantially shaped by the online environment" (527).

      Brown's essay can be found in Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (August 1993), pp. 390-410. It can be accessed via JSTOR by clicking here.  

 

[d] Fisher says as much: "I don't believe that the old signifier 'communism' can be revived [...] It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the twentieth century" (520). Funnily enough, however, a few months later he names his new politics of desire emerging from the future ... acid communism.  

 

[e] As a Lawrentian, I have my reservations about Spinoza and his rationalism. Nevertheless, his work is useful in exposing the myth of the autonomous individual at the heart of the liberal tradition which drags with it notions of free will and responsibility.   

 

[f] See the post titled 'on Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella' (10 June 2013): click here.  

 

[g] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 153-154.  

 

[h] Writing in an Italian daily newspaper (Corriere della Sera), Foucault praised the Iranian Revolution as an authentic anti-imperialist movement and a spiritual revolt against Western-imposed modernity, rather than just a religious coup. See my post dated 14 August 2014, in which I discuss this: click here. 

 

 

This post is a continuation of my previous post on Fisher's political writings in the book k-punk (2018): click here. 

 

And for earlier thoughts on Fisher's political writings in the above work, please click here.

 

  

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.  

 

We're Born Naked ... Notes on Simon Doonan's Complete Story of Drag (Part 3: On Popstar Drag, Movie Drag, and Radical Drag)

Simon Doonan: Drag: The Complete Story (2019) [a]

Alt. cover feat. Curtis Dam-Mikkelsen (aka Miss Fame)  

Photo by Albert Sanchez and Pedro Zalba

 

 

I.

 

And so we come to chapter 7: Popstar Drag ...

 

Doonan claims that for most of the 20th century, "the guiding principle for men's clothing design was anonymity" (163) and that's true, though perhaps requires some qualification - and I don't believe it's because the average male is "terrified of being stared at" (163). 

Actually, the desire for anonymity - founded upon uniformity of dress and the will to conformity - can be traced back to a shift in sensibility known as the Great Male Renunciation, which began in the late- 18th century and saw men abandon ornate and colourful clothing in favour of more sober, functional attire. 

 

It was the age of the dark suit, designed to signal seriousness and professionalism as well as social conformity. But the aim was not anonymity per se, but to look the business whilst not being conspicuous [b].   

 

It's the modern pop star - that 20th century dandy born of the music business in the 1950s - who challenges this: "In order to sell records, the male popstars of the conservative American mid-century needed fans to take notice, and a sure-fire way to stand out was to raid the feminine repertoire." (163)

 

Doonan continues (in a passage that again rather reinforces the argument often put forward by conservative critics; namely, that pop music was an assault on manly virtue):

 

"The boys were encouraged in their flamboyance by a select and influential group of homosexuals, such as gallery owner Robert Fraser, interior designer Christopher Gibbs, Brian Epstein (manager of The Beatles), Robert Stigwood (Cream and Bee Gees), Simon Napier-Bell (The Yardbirds, Marc Bolan), Billy Gaff (Rod Stewart) and Ken Pitt (David Bowie). These gay Svengalis were drag enablers ..." (165) [c]  

 

For Doonan, two names in particular stand out when it comes the golden age of glam rock in the 1970s: Bolan and Bowie - but they were by no means the only two camping it up:

 

"Billowing bohemian blouses and cascading tresses became the norm. Boys wore girls' skimpy knits and crop tops with unisex crushed-velvet bellbottoms. Ladies' accessories [...] were piled on with gypsy-ish abandon. The emerging popstar drag was nothing if not radical." (166)

 

At this point, Doonan return us to his (strangely unisex) vision of utopia "where men and women overcame their vast differences by dressing alike" (168). 

 

I'd really like to know what he thinks these differences are exactly; is he here talking about differences that are constructed socially, or differences that have a crucial biological basis? If these differences are so vast - his word - then can they really be overcome simply by wearing the same clothing or shade of eyeshadow? I doubt it. 

 

And I'm pretty sure also that Doonan's claim that glam rock (or what he calls popstar drag) was "repellent to the establishment" (171) is simply not the case. It may have been viewed by some members of the older generation with mild disdain and dislike, but, in general, it was met with confusion and amusement. It was certainly not feared and hated in the way that punk rock would be a few years later (or even the countercultural, drug-taking hippie movement had been in the '60s) [d]. 

 

While androgynous fashions, a garish use of makeup, and gender troubling behaviour were scandalous to some, glam was a popular, commercial force that was ultimately tolerated - and often enjoyed - by the wider public; Bowie and Bolan and company were regulars on Top of the Pops and their records were not banned (cf. the Sex Pistols). 

 

In sum - and despite what Doonan likes to think - popstar drag was considered frivolous rather threatening and its huge commercial popularity meant it was soon just seen as another form of showbiz. That was true in the 1970s and it remained true in the 1980s, when figures like Boy George and Marilyn [e] were dominating the charts and airwaves.     

 

And don't get me started on Eurovision - an annual festival of "gloriously naff pop, easy to mock but never boring" (181) - if Doonan really thinks this is in anyway radical or presents a positive vision of the future, then, I'm afraid to say, he's more naive than I thought he was.  

 

 

II. 

 

From the world of pop drag to the world of movie drag ... 

 

Those of you who read part 2 of this post will recall I have already noted my favourite celluloid scene involving drag. 

 

For those of you who haven't read part 2, it's the one in Carry On Constable (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1960), in which officers Benson and Gorse - played by Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey respectively - drag up as Ethel and Agatha in order to go undercover as store detectives.      

 

For me, this scene is as good as it gets when it comes to comedy drag on film and I rank it above the work even of Laurel and Hardy in Twice Two (dir. James Parrott, 1933), or Curtis and Lemmon in Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot (1959). But, funnily enough, Doonan doesn't mention the film - so I guess it's not amongst his favourites, although he predictably raves about the latter as "the most beloved movie of all time" (187).  

  

Doonan also indicates how movie drag is often associated with pervy horror and homicidal insanity - starting with Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and coins the amusing term dragsploitation. Being dressed to kill often means putting on a frock and wig in the mainstream cinematic imagination.   

 

Meanwhile, underground movie makers - including Andy Warhol - also liked to include elements of drag: 

 

"What was unsavoury and objectionable to a mainstream audience - as we've seen, drag was acceptable only as laughable slapstick or the prelude to a homicidal bloodbath - was given a warm and rousing reception in the art houses of yore." (192) 

 

What he had done for soup cans, Warhol also did for drag queens and trans women: 

 

"Warhol's genius was to plonk [... marginal figures and] unconventional attention junkies in front of the camera and let their natural charisma do the rest. Plots were thin but the screen magic is undeniable." (192)

 

I don't mind Candy Darling, but, I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of Divine; described by Doonan as the "empress of underground movie drag" (192), so will skip past the films made by John Waters ... 

 

And, because I hate them so, I'm also not going to say anything either about those "upbeat, non-sexual, non-homicidal, and worthy" (195) films made in the 1980s, when drag became family-friendly, Tootsie (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1982), starring Dustin Hoffman, and Mrs. Doubtfire (dir. Chris Columbus, 1993), starring Robin Williams. 

 

Similarly, I don't wish to say anything about The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (dir. Stephan Elliott, 1994) - although that's not a film I've seen (and, by the sound of it, don't think I want to, either; even Doonan describes it as shrill and cartoony).   

 

Ultimately, whilst I'm all for films spreading joy and celebrating individuality, I don't want to have sequins thrown in my face and an ideological message shoved down my throat to do with the need for greater DEI. 

 

In other words, I prefer those films involving drag and/or trans actors that are non-shrill and non-cartoony and don't invite audiences to dress up and sing along à la The Rocky Horror Picture Show (dir. Jim Sharman, 1975) - films such as Sean Baker's Tangerine (2015), described by Doonan thus:

 

"Tangerine is a groundbreaking 2015 movie that combines the early Warhol approach - find charismatic gender-fluid individuals and let the cameras roll - with more solid plotlines. It is is also very Warholian in that the individuals are not presented as noble or worthy." (204)    

  

 

III. 

 

And finally ... chapter 9 - Radical Drag - and a chance to really examine the politics of the topic (or at least Doonan's understanding of such) ... 

 

Before we turn to the material in chapter 9, however, I'd like to pick up on a sentence from earlier in the book (ch. 8), which suggests where I think Doonan will be heading:   

 

"In these trans-positive times [...] nobody is going to high five a hetero dude for frocking up unless he actually means it. Dragging up purely for attention or dough would, in our era of increased sensitivity, be viewed as less than respectful." (185)

 

That, I think, is true - but it's also a call for authenticity that I find problematic and something which has led to a lot of recent debate within the acting profession: should a straight cis male actor be able to play gay or trans (even if he does so in all sincerity and his performance is sympathetic and convincing)? [f] 

 

I would answer 'yes' to this, but understand the controversy surrounding the issue - particularly when it is presented in terms of representation and opportunity, rather than in terms of authenticity or the need for lived experience in order to play a part (lived experience is the most overrated thing in the world - something that the unimaginative unempathetic pride themselves on). 

 

And surely, if drag is radical in any sense, it's precisely because it deconstructs gender roles; how does that square with a modern sensitivity that insists only certain people have the right to inhabit certain identities? Answer: it doesn't.    

 

Moving on ...

 

Predictably - but still a bit disappointingly - in chapter 9 Doonan returns to all his favourite themes to do with Victorian prudery and puritanism in contrast to the subversive fuck you attitude of drag queens whose rebellion against the binary nature of society is to be uncritically lauded:

 

"Even when done in jest, the donning of a frock or a drag king suit is a provocation that automatically messes with the stale conventions of any society." (208)

 

Subscribing to this line of thought gives Doonan a good deal of what Foucault called speaker's benefit - i.e., a false sense of pride in one's own courage and rebelliousness in daring to speak up and speak out on issues which are (mistakenly) believed to still be feared and subject to censorship by mainstream society. 

 

Foucault argued this perceived transgression actually reinforced existing power structures and that the benefit of speaking in terms of repression and resisting power is merely a way to feel edgy and enlightened, while still adhering to an old-fashioned and untenable model of sexual politics.  

 

It strikes me as a little odd that, having compiled a complete history of drag, Doonan sometimes writes as if nothing important really happened before the late-1960s and '70s (i.e., when he was a young man):

 

"When, in the late 1960s, the counter-culture began to bloom - black power, gay lib, women's lib - drag followed suit. With the gays for solidarity, drag finally had the support it needed to hit the streets and to walk tall [...] Harassment and discrimination continued, but this time the dragsters fought back, birthing new and creative genres of drag activism." (210)

 

Out of this period of political upheaval, three radical groups emerged: the Cockettes [i], the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence [j], and the Radical Faeries [k] ... Now, without wishing to denigrate members of these groups - about whom my knowledge is strictly limited - one might ask whether they are truly sticking it to the Man or, actually, just engaging in theatrics and arty provocation?   

  

The fact is that, during the period Doonan specifies, drag was already being recuperated into the Spectacle as a safe (and highly commercial) form of subculture - as he himself has shown in his chapters on popstar drag and movie drag.  

 

I have respect and admiration for those highly idiosyncratic individuals and brave souls who "through a combination of daring, resilience and reckless disregard for their own safety, lubricated the wheels of social progress" (218), but I have to admit I'm increasingly bored by radical activists of every stripe - dragged up or otherwise.      

That doesn't mean I'm a Trump supporter. But it does mean I don't find drag so "wickedly compelling in these new politicized times" (233) and don't believe that drastic times require dragtastic measures. 

 

Doonan closed his 2019 study insisting that, thanks to technology and social media, "mocking, shocking, radical satirical drag" (233) would spread into "every corner of the universe" (233), presumably changing things for the better. 

 

And yet, as we know, Trump won the Presidency for a second time in 2024 - winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote - and his administration has taken a firm stance against drag culture, prioritising the removal of drag performances from public venues like and limiting federal funding for related initiatives. 

 

So it seems that a revolt into a queer politics of style might not be the answer after all ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The page numbers given here (in round brackets) refer to the 2024 concise paperback edition published by Laurence King. 

 

[b] Roland Barthes writes about all this in The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter (Berg, 2006).  

 

[c] Some might also suggest that Doonan's enabler narrative strips the artists of their own agency; framing them as puppets of a homosexual cabal (a trope that again feeds into the conservative and homophobic agenda). 

 

[d] Doonan doesn't say much about punk, other than that it was unconventional in every way, but not drag-friendly: "While drag was largely anathema to the genre, the punk makeup styles [...] have proven influential to subsequent drag queens." (175) 

      Again, I'm tempted to push back on this claim ... An openly queer aesthetic - informed by the drag queens, transvestites, and transsexuals associated with Warhol - was crucial to the clothing designed by McLaren and Westwood for their boutique, Sex. Iconic items of punk clothing - such as bondage trousers and the Tits T-shirt - were intentionally transgressive and could be worn by either sex.  

      One might even describe Jordan - with her extreme theatrical look - as a kind of drag queen. And who can forget Malcolm's cross-dressing in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)?  

 

[e] Doonan obviously had the hots for gender-bending popstars Boy George and his pal Marilyn, admitting that he was "totally smitten" (176) with the former and claiming (rather laughably) that the latter's appearance on Top of the Pops in 1983 "is seared into the national consciousness" (178). 

      That might be true of a few ageing new romantics and homosexuals, such as Doonan himself, but I suspect it's not true for most UK residents. 

 

[f] The same debate is also taking place with reference to race and disability; should a black actor, for example, be allowed to play a role previously associated with a white actor (a lot of people were exercised by the prospect of Idris Elba becoming James Bond); or should an able-bodied actor be given the role of a paraplegic - think, for example, of Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic in Oliver Stones's Born on the Fourth of July (1989)? 

      Again, as I say in the main text, I recognise that there are a limited number of roles open to actors belonging to minority groups, but, even so, I can't get behind the idea that an actor must be X, Y, or Z in order to play the part (though the current trend within the profession seems to be moving more and more in that direction).  

 

[h] See Foucault writing in The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge (1976). 

 

[i] With their glitter-encrusted beards, the Cockettes "pioneered a delightfully amateurish do-it-yourself genre of performance drag" (213). 

 

[j] The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were a "group of gays [... wearing] nun's habits and a smidgen of makeup" (214), who wished to challenge religious fundamentalism with impromptu street theatre. According to Doonan: "By combining elements of religious piety with rampant decadent artifice, they successfully satirize conventions of gender and morality." (214)

 

[k] Founded in California in the late '70s, the Radical Faeries "embody many aspects of counter-culture, including environmentalism, paganism, communal living and free love" (215). Their drag is characterised by "a wilful randomness and lack of rigour" (215) and often they prefer nudity and body paint.  

 

To read part 1 of this post, click here.

To read part 2 of this post, click here.