Zer0 Books (2025) [a]
Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk
Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)
I.
I've heard it said that Mark Fisher doesn't actually bring anything new to the table; that he merely assembles ideas from several other thinkers. But that's unfair and, I think, inaccurate. Yet even if it were true - so what?
One of the reasons I admire Fisher - apart from his intelligence and refusal to be bound by conventional academic concerns and references - is because he and I share the same technique as writers; we both cut up dead bodies of text and stitch stolen ideas together in a Gothic manner à la Dr Frankenstein.
Fisher's genius - like mine - is being able to provide the electric spark or lightning flash of inspiration which makes the assembled piece of intertextual theory-fiction breathe with new life [b]. It may not make him an original [c] thinker, but the process yields fascinating results, demands skill and hard work, and marks him - like me - as an artist and alchemist [d].
Anyway, let us now proceed with our reading of Fisher's Flatline Constructs - Chapter Three: Xerox and Xenogenesis: Mechanical Reproduction and Gothic Propagation ... I'll try not to "pause and be philosophical" too often, "because from a philosophical standpoint it's dreary", I know [e].
II.
The central topic of this chapter is the deterritorialisation of sexual reproduction.
Baudrillard chooses to imagine a posthuman future in terms of cloning and the triumph of sameness "across all levels of culture - sexual, political, aesthetic" (143), amounting to a complete denial of difference (including death). This, however, is not something Baudrillard welcomes, as his controversial term for it - the final solution - indicates [f].
Deleuze and Guattari, meanwhile, prefer to take a more Gothic line and "oppose all reproduction (sexual or otherwise) to a model of 'contagion' [...] which takes its cue from vampirism, lycanthropy and disease" (141). In other words, anorganic propagation - which bypasses the need for mum and dad and replaces old school methods of breeding with inhuman and alien models - is a key feature of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and they seem to be in favour of it.
For Fisher too, contagion is the preferred option because it is messy, unpredictable, and viral - the ultimate model for how a counter-culture spreads through a population like a virus.
However, before any impressionable young readers decide to forswear all conventional sexual activity and remain childless, I would like to remind them that Deleuze was happily married to the same woman for
almost forty years and that they had two children together, conceived - as far as I know - in the old-fashioned manner.
As more than one commentator has noted, there's a stark contrast between Deleuze's relatively conventional middle-class life in Paris as an academic intellectual and his philosophical writings with Guattari on non-normative experiences and revolutionary ways to escape oppressive systems and institutions.
And Fisher, of course, was also married with a young son at the time of his death, in 2017. So one assumes he either dropped the views expressed
in Flatline Constructs, or was never actually advocating for the literal elimination of biological reproduction and the family unit. That he
was, rather, just exploring theoretical and fictional ideas and offering an analysis of how non-living objects, structures and systems replicate [g].
Back in the day, when Nick Land was exerting his
influence over the philosophy department at Warwick via the CCRU, Fisher's writing delighted in using transgressive ideas and provocative terminology -
such as alien xenogenesis - to snap readers out of their complacency. But his philosophical preference for contagion over filiation needs to
be viewed as an aesthetic and political metaphor for how culture, desire, and anti-capitalist resistance might best replicate. Later choices made in his personal life, therefore, do not necessarily contradict or invalidate his earlier ideas.
Then again, treating theory-fiction as just a metaphor - or isolating a thinker's biography from their text - feels a bit feeble. Arguably, it does a disservice to the very philosophical tradition Fisher was operating in and to say he didn't literally mean what he wrote erects a conventional, comforting binary that his own work sought to dissolve.
When viewed from this less generous perspective, the tension between Fisher's philosophy and his domestic life cannot be neatly explained away. It represents a genuine, lived contradiction of the kind that in my punk days I would have been extremely intolerant and unforgiving of.
Still, it does help explain how he ends up preaching acid communism and reclaiming the domestic and social sphere from capitalist realism, rather than purely trying to escape it via machinic xenogenesis.
III.
I'm pleased to see that Fisher recognises Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) as "in many ways, the founding text of the modern genres of science fiction and horror" (148) and central to which is the displacement of sexual reproduction:
"Victor Frankenstein's achievement in artificially synthesising the means of reproduction is presented, by Shelley, as the moment where alchemical ambition is vindicated by electro-libidinal science; there is no need to posit a supplementary, extra-material, or supernatural dimension - Nature can overcome itself." (149)
This sentence nicely captures the genius of Shelley's novel and the dream of perfect (asexual) reproduction is one that "Baudrillard tracks to its latest manifestation in cloning and genetic engineering" (149) (even though Baudrillard does not, in fact, mention this work).
Of course, as we all know, the story of Frankenstein and his creation does not end well; the latter takes its revenge - as all objects are wont to do; even brooms, as Goethe illustrates in his poem 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' [Der Zauberlehrling] (1797).
However, as we noted earlier, Fisher thinks Baudrillard's work is a bit limited and old-fashioned in this area. He prefers to follow Deleuze and Guattari, for whom "there is something else involved here beyond a straightforward 'revenge' of an 'object'" (153).
Fisher is interested in processes that go beyond reversibility and instead "require a whole reconfiguring of questions of temporality and causality under the sign of rhizomatics and a - strictly non-metaphorical - sorcery" (153).
I'm not quite sure I understand what he means here, but I think it has something to do with the surplus value of code and what Nick Land called machinic desire - something which involves "'self-regenerating circuitry, cumulative interaction, auto-catalysis, self-reinforcing processes, escalation, schismogenesis, self-organisation, compressive series, deutero-learning, chain-reaction, vicious circles, and cybergenics'" (153) [h].
IV.
From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) ...
Like many readers, I wondered when we would mention the latter novel: another rightly celebrated work which, as Marshall McLuhan points out, was one of the first to explore "'the curious ways in which machines were coming to resemble organisms'" (154) whilst at the same time the people who tended them "'were taking on the rigidity and thoughtless behaviourism of the machine'" (154) [i].
Before speaking of this book, however, Fisher wants to clarify where Baudrillard and Deleuze-Guattari part company. It's all to do with code - or, more precisely, the question of decoding. They agree that the dominant operating systems today run primarily on code rather than language, but it is Deleuze and Guattari who "follow the logic of code through to the point where it yields something other than banal reiteration of blind programme" (154).
In other words, Deleuze and Guattari "emphasise the way in which all code includes its own margin of decoding" (154) - Baudrillard allows for no such possibility (no such hope of escape).
What's more, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that when two or more codes come into contact "strange, unheralded new assemblages can emerge" (154) - this is the surplus value of code and it results in rhizomatic relationships and drives becoming as a form of aparallel evolution.
All these ideas are introduced by Deleuze and Guattari during a discussion of Erewhon and Butler's book is at the heart of the third chapter of Flatline Constructs to do with machinic replication which, it is important to remember, is not the same as mechanical reproduction (the latter referring only to "the mass reproduction of the same object by machines" (156) and not the propagation of machines themselves).
Two other points it's important to note: (1) machines do not make other machines in their own image; machinic replication, in other words, is a heterogeneous form of production; (2) unlike Marx, "Butler does not believe that the agency ascribed to machines is a false reification [...] but that machines may indeed grow to possess [...] a 'diabolic' intelligence that will begin to [...] erode human power" (158).
With reference to the latter point, it's amazing to recall that Butler was writing eighty years before Alan Turing and John McCarthy began to posit the idea of artificial intelligence [j]. Largely remembered as a brilliant (if iconoclastic) literary outsider, Butler's relative obscurity as a writer - outside of certain circles - is regrettable I think. He not only challenged Darwin, but provides those of us who wish to take a pop at Kant with ammo:
"'The Book of Machines' emerges [...] as a kind of counterblast to Kant's Critique of Teleological Judgement, in which the special status Kant gives to humanity - as the agent capable of consciousness, purposiveness, and moral action - is radically put into question." (158)
In sum, what Butler discovers "is the cybernetic diagonal cutting across the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism" (159) and, in so doing, he effectively collapses it. No wonder Deleuze and Guattari admire him so - and no wonder Fisher too is such a fan. Butler obliges us to see - and to admit - that the organic is "inextricable from the inorganic" (161) - just consider a hen's egg! [k]
V.
Readers will recall I mentioned sorcery above in section III and, as if by magic, Fisher returns to this idea in section 3.4 of Flatline Constructs ...
For Deleuze and Guattari, writing in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), sorcery is all about "the production of unanticipated consequences" (164) and the "engineering of the unexpected and the unprecedented; the art of avoiding the probable" (164).
The becoming-animal of the human being is an act of sorcery; one that involves demonic alliance and processes of "swarming, teeming, seething and spreading" (165) - all terms familiar from horror fiction which Fisher is happy to incorporate into his Gothic Materialism, but what really interests him is the crucial question of "a non- or anti-sexual mode of propagation" (166) or nuptials against nature.
For Deleuze and Guattari and for Fisher, sexual reproduction doesn't do the trick; it merely passes on characteristics in an arborescent manner; in other words, it's the "capturing of becoming into a hierarchically organised, pre-determined and punctual system" (167).
It might produce offspring who have their father's nose and mother's eyes, but "the dualistic sexual machinery of bio-reproduction screens out heterogeneity by minimising diversity" (167). Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari don't want children, they want monsters, born not of the family unit but the demonic pact.
I refer any newlyweds to section II above before deciding how this should best be (not interpreted, but) decrypted ...
Fisher, meanwhile, suggests we study Neuromancer if we want to see an "exemplary working-out, in fiction, of the themes of mechanical reproduction and gothic propagation" (169). He describes this novel as a sorcerous narrative, which perhaps it is. But it's also one I find unreadable, so I think I'll close this post here, if I may, and initiate a discussion of Chapter 4 in a subsequent post.
I would just say in closing, however, that Flatline Constructs has reminded me - in a good way - about just how out there some of the work produced in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s was - particularly from those affiliated with the (never officially sanctioned) CCRU.
More conventional members of the department viewed this material with increasing consternation, and embarrassment, particularly as it veered away from traditional scholarship toward experimental, occult, and sci-fi infused theory-fiction, but, thirty years later, I am increasingly drawn to it and regret the fact that, at the time, I didn't allow my own research to be infected by a little more Gothic Materialism and a little more madness.
Notes
[a] All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition of Flatline Constructs.
[b] My understanding of Frankenstein's monster as pieced together from body parts taken from numerous stolen corpses and reanimated by the use of electricity, owes more to the movies than Shelley's novel of 1818. In the original text, Frankenstein discovers the secret principle of life and it's this that allows him to painstakingly develop a method to vitalise inanimate matter, though the actual process is left rather vague. Nevertheless, the good doctor does assemble body parts, so I think my comparison stands.
[c] Along with authenticity, originality is one of the concepts I despise the most: I don't care if my posts on Torpedo the Ark lack originality. And besides, as Oliver Goldsmith once wrote in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), we can "pardon the want of originality, in consideration of the exquisite talent with which the borrowed materials are wrought up into the new form".
Or, as Roland Barthes would argue, the post-as-text is not expressive of an author's unique being. It's explainable only through other words drawn from a pre-given, internalised dictionary. Every new post is therefore, in some sense, already a copy of a copy of a copy whose origin is forever lost and meaning infinitely deferred.
To put that another way, if, as I do, you accept the idea of intertextualité, then questions of authorship and originality go out of the window and Síomón Solomon is right to claim in his study, Hölderlin's Poltergeists (2020), that every piece of writing is already a translation at some level and the author, whilst masquerading as a unified subject, is actually a multiple assemblage - like Frankenstein's monster - who speaks with many tongues (some of which are forked).
[d] I am essentially self-plagiarising a post titled 'My Name is Victor Frankenstein' published on TTA on 6 March 2022: click here. Again, whilst I know that text recycling and double dipping annoys the Timmys of this world who think it unethical, I don't have an issue with it.
[e] Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Doubleday, 1968), p. 146. For context, see Flatline Constructs, pp. 139-140, where the passage from which this line is taken is quoted in full.
[f] I have discussed Baudrillard's work in this area in several posts on Torpedo the Ark, often in relation to the fictional writings of Michel Houellebecq. See, for example, 'Revenge of the Immortals' (22 April 2013) - click here - and/or 'Michel Houellebecq and Nellie Mackay on the Question of Cloning' (4 Sept 2022): click here.
[g] Perhaps like Nietzsche, Fisher should have added a sort of disclaimer at the front of his thesis: "A book for thinking nothing else: it belongs to those for whom thinking is a delight, nothing else."
See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed.Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), p. xxii. As Kaufmann explains in his Introduction, this line was written in a draft preface to a projected (but ultimately abandoned) work to be titled Der Wille zur Macht.
The original notebook entry is dated spring 1888 and can be found in the critical German edition of Nietzsche’s works - the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) - edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari; see Nachlass 14 [80]. It reads: Ein Buch zum Denken, nichts weiter: es gehört denen, welchen Denken Vergnügen macht, nichts weiter …
[h] Fisher is quoting Land writing in 'Machinic Desire', Textual Practice, Vol. 7, Issue 3 (1993), pp. 471-482. The essay can also be found in Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 319-344.
Land's influence on Fisher's thinking in Flatline Constructs is significant and shouldn't be downplayed or overlooked - as it is by Adam Jones in his Foreword. Discussing Fisher's involvement with the CCRU, Jones chooses not to mention Land by name, referring to him simply as "a man who would go on to suffer a complete mental collapse, only to emerge as the philosopher of 'Neoreaction'" (Foreword, 5). That, I think, is quite outrageous.
As for non-metaphorical sorcery, a friend of mine who knows more about this kind of thing explains that for members of the CCRU this also referred to the idea that things can loop back from the future to physically alter the present. This hyperstitional notion was sometimes called Lemurian cultural acceleration. I will say more about sorcery in section V.
[i] Fisher is quoting McLuhan writing in The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 99.
[j] The term artificial intelligence (AI) was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955. He first introduced it to the public in a 1955 proposal for the legendary 1956 Dartmouth workshop.
Prior to that, British mathematician Alan Turing published 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' (1950) and proposed a method to determine if a machine can demonstrate human-like intelligence (the so-called Turing Test).
[k] See Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1985), p. 199: "The shell of a hen's egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is [...]; the hen makes the shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery." Fisher quotes this in Flatline Constructs on p. 161.
The hard shell of a hen's egg is composed of 95% calcium carbonate - the same mineral found in limestone and chalk. It contains no living cells, blood vessels or organic tissue. Something worth considering, I think, next time you have one for breakfast.
Ultimately, for Fisher, the famous question of the chicken and the egg - which came first? - is a non-question, for they are both parts of the same complex, intertwined system or circuit. Forget about the linear question of origins, chicken and egg constitute one another in a cybernetic loop.
