Domestication Lost Overnight: Fun and Games with Killing Joke

Poster advertising the Killing Joke album  

Fire Dances (1983)

 

Get out my way - we go / Take back those ways you know 

Fun and games come out to play / Fun and games for unknown days [1]

 

I.

 

I've said it before and I'll doubtless say it again: Isn't it amazing how certain songs from one's youth continue to resonate in one's imagination? [1] 

 

Thus it was that, while reading for a possible future post discussing The Wild Boys (1971) in relation to Lord of the Flies (1954) [2], I couldn't help recalling the Killing Joke song 'Fun and Games' [3]. 

 

Like the above novels, this track also plays with ideas to do with feral youth and the breakdown of civilisation and I thought it might be amusing to write something about its lyrical content [4] in advance of the forthcoming Burroughs-Golding study as a kind of punk teaser.

 

 

II. 

 

Essentially, the lyrics to 'Fun and Games' - which can be found on genius.com - provide a brief exploration of subcultural atavism. But, interestingly - because the song establishes a moonlit setting - we are encouraged also to consider ideas to do with nocturnal liminality.

 

Atavism is an interesting term whose meaning within biology is fairly straightforward and fixed: the reappearance of an ancestral characteristic (or genetic trait) in an individual organism after several generations of absence; i.e., it's an evolutionary throwback caused by mutation - think of a baby born with a vestigial tail.    

 

But atavism is also used by those working in the social sciences, where it refers to the tendency for a people in times of social upheaval to revert to the ways of thinking and acting of a former (more primitive) age. And that's what excites Jaz Coleman and the other members of Killing Joke; the possibility that a people might discover its ancestral past and wilfully reject modernity.   

 

The album Fire Dances (1983), on which 'Fun and Games' features, is a call for the becoming-pagan of disaffected youth in the UK via a series of fun and games that lead participants from social enslavement and conventional models of maturity to anarchic autonomy and the cruel innocence of childhood. 

 

Killing Joke are not advocating merely for a lifestyle choice: one is being challenged to make a total commitment; to take back those ways long abandoned and step outside the gate. Whether this necessitates fleeing to Iceland or unto the ends of the earth, is debatable. 

 

III. 

 

The opening lines of 'Fun and Games' immediately establish a liminal setting: 

 

Twilight open and you're on your own 

Moon is shining, you want fun and games

 

Twilight represents a threshold state, mirroring the boundary between the rational, white-faced daytime self and the untamed, dark-bodied self that comes out to play at the witching hour and dances round bonfires, etc. 

 

During those hours that do not quite belong to one day or the other - the intermediate time when dreams seem real and reality but a dream - standard routines, social conventions, and normal expectations are all suspended. Bakhtin referred to this suspension or overturning of the established order through song, dance, comedy, and chaos as the carnivalesque. 

 

Now, while that sounds joyous and liberating, one should be aware that the carnivalesque has a dark and violent underbelly. For when you do away with law and order you don't just get harmless fun and games, you also open the way to savage and destructive desires - including the desire for torture and human sacrifice. 

 

Finally, it's interesting that the song indicates that one is very much alone at this time: awake, while the rest of the world sleeps blissfully in its bed. Such isolation enables introspection. And introspection often involves hearing the voice of a demon whispering inside your head that says: Let's play wild - volatile!

   

 

IV. 

The second verse of 'Fun and Games' is interesting in that it reveals that playmates - a word privileged by Arthur Askey and Hugh Hefner alike - belong to both sexes: All the boys and girls join together in the streets and have the same wild look in their eyes (domestication lost overnight).  

 

And the reason this interests is because it starkly contrasts with The Wild Boys and Lord of the Flies, both of which are concerned only with young males. There are no girls on Golding's unnamed island and, in Burroughs's novel, the Wild Boys are an armed group of militant homosexuals intent on destroying heteronormative civilisation [5]. 

 

As for Killing Joke, well, whilst 'Fun and Games' seems to accord boys and girls an equal right to play, sexual politics remains one of the most underdeveloped areas of their work. Indeed, we have to wait nearly three decades until the song 'Pole Shift' explicitly makes the connection between the overthrow of civilisation and libidinal liberation. 

 

In other words, it is only in 2012 that they finally set out their vision of a future wherein "the taboos of today are tomorrow's delights" and bourgeois sexual morality is swept away in "one great orgasm by the light of day" [6]. 

 

 

V. 

 

The third and final verse of 'Fun and Games' elevates the game from localised juvenile delinquency to an apocalyptic generational coup:  

 

Games get bigger all the time 

Because the playpen's falling - stakes are high 

And the child will conquer - step by step [7]

  

Literally speaking, a playpen is simply a small, portable enclosure with high sides made of mesh, plastic, or wood that keeps a child safe and contained so caregivers can get on with other tasks without constantly having to provide supervision.

 

But, here, it refers metaphorically to the restrictive institutions of childhood - such as the family unit, the nursery, the school ... Its falling thus suggests wider societal collapse. When the architectural boundaries of adult supervision crumble, the games lose their benign, recreational status and transform into existential events (stakes are high).

 

The declaration that the child will conquer subverts the traditional teleology of maturation. Instead of growing up to inherit the adult world, youth take over - step by step - through atavistic force. 

 

This mirrors the tragic climax of Lord of the Flies, where Jack and his followers smash the democratic rules established by Ralph and Piggy. However, whereas Golding introduces an adult authority figure (the naval officer) at the final moment to halt the slaughter, the Killing Joke lyrics offer no such restoration of order. 

 

Thus, in a sense, 'Fun and Games' is closer in spirit to The Wild Boys, which also ends with a dreamlike (or, if you prefer, nightmarish) vision of the traditional world collapsing as untamed youth achieves its global victory and the downfall of adult civilization. 

 

 

VI. 

  

The relentless, almost incantatory repetition of the refrain fun and games come out to play at the conclusion of the song strips these phrases of their innocent connotation. By juxtaposing the terminology of childhood with the vocabulary of political (and psychological) instability, the song is a strangely compelling hymn to youth gone wild.  

 

Killing Joke are, if you like, a punk version of Golding's choir boys - happy to paint their faces and summon their own atavistic demons during nocturnal rituals around the fire. Golding - like Freud [8] - might view this with despair but Jaz Coleman and his fellow discontents think this in terms of liberation. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from 'Fun and Games', written by Killing Joke (Jaz Coleman, Paul Ferguson, Paul Raven, and Geordie Walker). See note [3] below for more details. 

 

[2] I discuss this phenomenon with reference to another Killing Joke track taken from the album Fire Dances and the concept of a reminiscence bump in a post titled 'Musical Memories' (30 Aug 2023). 

 

[3] 'Fun and Games' is on Fire Dances (E. G. Records, 1983) - the fourth studio album by Killing Joke and first to feature new bass player Paul Raven. It was critically well-received and reached number 29 in the UK Albums Chart.  

 

[4] Although I am not here going to discuss the music, it is certainly the case Paul Ferguson's tribal drum tracks, Raven's bass and Geordie's jagged guitar work provide the perfect sonic landscape for Jaz Coleman's call to come out and play.

 

[5] Golding excluded girls to focus exclusively on what we would now call toxic masculinity in relation to his own lifetime experiences, on the grounds that he simply didn't know enough about girls to feel qualified to write about them. 

      Burroughs, meanwhile, was openly and aggressively misogynistic, excluding female characters as a matter of principle - in his queer utopia, gay male liberation comes only after the complete erasure of any female presence. 

 

[6] Lyrics from the song 'Pole Shift', by Killing Joke (Jaz Coleman, Paul Ferguson, Geordie Walker, and Youth), the opening track on the album MMXII (Spinefarm Records, 2012) - their fourteenth studio album. The only other track I can think of that has a sexual edge (and some heavy breathing), is 'Lust Almighty', on Fire Dances (1983). 

[7] Lyrics from 'Fun and Games', written by Killing Joke. 

 

[8] For Freud, writing in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) there is a permanent antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of a civilisation that is founded upon a repression of those instincts. 

      He argues that this repression is not only necessary, but a good and vital thing; that humanity is better off domesticated in the name of love. Yes, a loss of instinctive freedom can cause a certain amount of suffering and lead to guilt, but it's a price worth paying in Freud's view. For to give free expression to wild and dangerous desires is to surrender to the 'death drive'.   

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Two

Repeater Books (2021) [a] 

Design by JohnnyBull.uk 

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I like about Fisher's work in the 1990s - I'm thinking here of his PhD thesis Flatline Constructs (1999) [b] - is that it offers a new conceptual terminology and synthesises ideas from philosophy, cybernetics, and science fiction into a theoretical framework designed to analyse contemporary culture. 

 

It feels so urgent and exciting because it has its finger on the digital pulse and rather than just speculate on the future, it attempts to actively generate it. 

 

I have to admit, therefore, that if I'd been an MA student at Goldsmiths in 2016 taking Fisher's 'Postcapitalist Desire' module, I would have been disappointed to discover we were going to be talking about Herbert Marcuse [c] and the countercultural bohemians of the 1960s and '70s [d] - i.e., a long-dead Marxist and a group of long-haired hippies.

 

For a thinker who once championed the cold, non-human vectors of Gothic Materialism, this trip down memory lane feels (initially at least) like a retreat ...

 

II. 

 

Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) is certainly a fun and deeply Romantic reimagining of Freud, but as I said in an earlier post in this series on Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire, it's not a book one can take entirely seriously. For even when framed within Marxist materialism its libidinal utopianism is simply too good to be true and, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, when it comes to the question of desire and society it falls short [e].

 

Fisher, however, likes the fact that Marcuse places "a high value on the importance of art" (80) and - perhaps more importantly - gives a real sense of what "life beyond capitalist domination could provide" (80); namely, a non-repressive civilisation where work transforms into play, scarcity is eliminated by technology, and culture is driven by pleasure, creativity, and freedom. 

 

It is as the feminist cultural critic Ellen Willis says, "'a social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude'" [f] - so what's not to love?

 

 

III. 

Instincts and drives: Fisher, like Marcuse, wishes to think desire in terms of the latter, not the former, which he rejects as a "quasi-biologistic naturalisation of currently existing desires" (81). Drives, on the other hand, have a more machinic ring - they are non-biological and can, at least in principle, be reformulated and redirected.

 

At this point, Fisher dives into Freud's great work of metapsychology Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), which tells the pessimistic (even tragic) tale of how repression is the foundation of civilisation: "And that's why a lot of Marxist revolutionaries simply reject Freud out of hand, because they say it's just conservative" (88-89). 

 

But Marcuse provides a reading of Freud (in terms of drives) that attempts to find a way out of the tragic impasse suggested by Civilisation and Its Discontents - and a way to finally exorcise the ghost of the murdered Father; "the agency of mortification" (91) and "the basic form of repressive authority within society" (91). 

 

It's not so much that we're not allowed to sleep with our mothers, it's more we're forced into performing unpleasant labour: "There's repression so that people work, so that people can be made to work." (92) This seems a question of sheer necessity - even if the dead dad is done and dusted and even when (thanks to technology) scarcity is no longer such a pressing issue. 

 

In sum: Fisher reads Marcuse as more than a Romantic - he's also "a kind of accelerationist!" (97). That is to say, a thinker who argues that postcapitalism must be built through and beyond capitalism and that by fully automating labour it will enable us to liberate human desire and create a civilisation based not on repression, but the pleasure principle. 

 

Post-work is a crucial aspect of postcapitalism for Fisher, as for Marcuse, as for "members of what you might call the 'bohemian class' [...] inspired by this notion that you can both work less and determine your own needs and satisfactions" (98). 

 

And this, of course, was the "basis of the so-called counterculture of the 1960s" (98) with which Ellen Willis - mentioned earlier - was involved ...

 

 

IV. 

 

For Fisher, there's "some kind of resonance" (99) between Marcuse and Willis - although the latter, writing in the late 1970s, is "already trying to explain what went wrong" (99) and why countercultural revolution in the name of Eros didn't work out as desired.      

 

For Fisher, Willis "overturns a lot of the stereotypes about what the counterculture was and what its unachieved ambitions were" (100). In other words, she helps him understand why he and so many other people still care about the Sixties (man):

 

"Why does it haunt us at the level of iconography and why do its cultural forms persist? I'd say it has something to do with the unrealised desires that were inherent in those forms [...]" (100)

 

The counterculture demanded a total revolution: the overthrow of capitalism, the demolition of the work ethic, and the dismantling of the nuclear family and what Fisher calls domestic realism (i.e., the idea that there's no alternative to the mummy-daddy-me matrix). 

 

Rather surprisingly for a married man and father living in the quiet coastal town of Felixstowe, Fisher openly mourns that "domestic realism is even more powerful than capitalist realism in today's world" (101) and that the countercultural mission "to have done with the family [...] has almost entirely disappeared" (101). 

 

Admitting that the family as an empirical fact is under massive pressure, he insists that as a normative transcendental structure it remains powerful - one that he clearly believes must be overcome by alternative, communal modes of living and collective child-rearing [g].

 

 

V.

 

There is, I feel, a tragic paradox and hidden tension at the heart of Mark Fisher's life and work. It is not simply that he was a square peg in a round hole - a headless and homeless philosopher trapped by a mortgage and a boring teaching job - but that his profound commitment to communism and collective desire prevented him from acknowledging that the lost future he was chasing was ... his own.   

 

Rather than accepting himself as an exceptional individual, Fisher translates his depression into a class issue and mistakes it for a pathological symptom of capitalist realism; a fatal misdiagnosis and category error. To generalise from one's own starry singularity in this manner is, Nietzsche would argue, not only fallacious reasoning, but the hallmark of a herd moralist [h].

 

VI.

 

Fisher likes the old Situationist idea of it being perfectly reasonable to demand the impossible. It fascinates him how, at one time - in the 1960s and early '70s - it was realistic, for example, to propose abolishing the family and have everyone move into communes: "Obviously that was ridiculous. But it didn't seem ridiculous at the time!" (102)

 

What happened to this Promethean ambition to bring about a complete transformation of everyday life? Why did the Revolution fail? For Willis, there are several reasons, but for Fisher "the key thing she points to is impatience" (104). 

 

Those damn hippies were conceited and complacent enough to believe that they could replace the family overnight - in a generation at most! "But [communes] didn't have the persistence that families did. [...] So even relatively successful communes only lasted a few years." (105)  

 

If they had read their Nietzsche, they would have known that great change cannot be created at a single stroke; that if a change is to be of a profound nature, then the means to it must be administered in the smallest doses but unremittingly over long periods of time [i]. 

 

In other words, as Willis says, it takes patience - and the exercising of caution; not qualities one associates with privileged middle-class brats who are used to immediately getting their way and who know deep down that having dropped out, they can drop back in again whenever they choose to do so [j]. 

 

Also, just because these hippies claimed to hate their families, the fact is it's simply not that common. And even those who do hate their parents, usually still retain some attachment with them. Willis is right to point out that the family structure is not only powerful, but is ultimately one that meets real needs.      

  

Still, not wanting to end on a slightly sour note ... Fisher suggests to his students that they "reframe what was happening in the 1960s not as some Golden Era where everything was great and then all went wrong" (106), but as a stalled project that can yet be brought to fruition - with a little patience and by making alternative lifestyles accessible to more people (not just the young and relatively privileged).   

 

As I said in the opening section of this post, if I'd been in Fisher's class on 14 November 2016, I'd have left feeling a tad disappointed.  

 

Next week (next post): 'From Class Consciousness to Group Consciousness' (with György Lukács) ... 

 

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 text. 

 

[b] Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction was published by Zer0 Books in 2025. I have published five posts on this text on TTA, the first of which (discussing the Foreword by Adam Jones) can be accessed here. 

 

[c] Herbert Marcuse (1898 - 1979) was a prominent German-American philosopher of the Frankfurt School whose sharp critiques of capitalism, modern technology, and consumer culture made him a leading intellectual figure for the New Left in the 1960s. Key text: One Dimensional Man (1964).

 

[d] Even Matt Colquhoun admits that Fisher "surprised friends and fans alike by writing positively about the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s" in his late work. In his k-punk days, he had been scathing about the hippies and their hedonic infantilism, but in his acid communist phase he's effectively telling us all to mellow out. See Colquhoun's Introduction to Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire (2021), p. 1.

 

[e] See section III of 'Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One', Torpedo the Ark (19 June 2026), where I explain why this is so: click here.  

 

[f] Ellen Willis, 'The Family: Love It or Leave It', in Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 158. The line is quoted by Fisher on p. 101 of Postcapitalist Desire and he was great admirer of Willis (not least for her writings on pop culture). 

 

[g] Fisher insists that collective child-rearing has got to be better than child-rearing within the context of the nuclear family model. Indeed, even the traditional extended family is preferable to the latter, he says, though without getting too nostalgic for it. Basically, his argument is that if you have a bigger group of people involved in child-rearing, "the odds of it going badly wrong or of very specific neuroses being passed on are surely much less" (104), but provides no evidence for this, allowing me - with no evidence to the contrary - to simply disagree.

      For me, communal living is simply a form of neo-primitivism; it may have been the historical norm for our species, but I would have absolutely hated it as a child. Further, I suspect that stability and access to resources - including fresh air and open spaces, not just toys and technology - is key to successfully rearing happy children rather than the family structure per se.  

 

[h] I'm aware that this is a provocative and controversial interpretation and I'm more than happy to be shown why it's a crass misunderstanding of Fisher. 

      I'm willing, for example, to concede that his having a job, a mortgage, and a traditional family life does not invalidate his political critique of those institutions; that it may in fact prove his point that capitalism forces everyone - even acid communists - into these structures in order to survive (that there is no outside).

      On the other hand, I wish to make clear that my reading is Nietzschean in character not neoliberal and that Nietzsche's concept of the individual in terms of starry singularity is not the same as found within bourgeois ideology (which Nietzsche, like Fisher, also despised - if for different reasons).  

      Nietzsche criticised those exceptional individuals who on the basis of their own exceptionality called for universal emancipation and I'm saying Fisher does something similar; he thinks his desire for a life less ordinary is one shared by everyone who happens to belong to the same socio-economic class and that no one can be free and happy until all are free and happy. 

      If, for the neoliberal there is no alternative to capitalist realism, for Fisher there is ony one possible alternative - communist collectivism. He seems happy to ignore entirely Nietzsche's radical aristocratism and opts to suffer in solidarity with the masses and gradually become the roles he was forced to take on (teacher, husband, father) whatever the personal cost.       

 

[i] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche writing in Daybreak, Book V, § 534. 

 

[j] Willis, as Fisher reminds us, pointed out the important role played by wealth and privilege in the counterculture. Those who dropped out could, in most cases, afford to do so and "didn't have that base level of anxieties about the risks of leaving behind conservative structures" (106).  

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs (2025): Introduction and Chapter One

Zer0 Books (2025) [a]

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

'The more artificial you can make it, the greater the chance of its looking real.' [b]

                                                                                                 

  

I. 

 

As is only right and proper for an Introduction, Fisher sets out some of his key terms (my emphasis in bold):

 

"Gothic flatline: a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate, and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive." (14) 

 

This anorganic continuum, says Fisher, is the "province of the Gothic" (15). 

 

Just to clarify, he adds:

 

"The Gothic flatline designates a zone of radical immanence. And to theorise this flatline demands [...] the theorisation of immanence. This thesis calls that approach Gothic Materialism." (15)

 

Fisher also informs us of his major aim: to pursue cybernetics to its limits by asking 'What if we are as 'dead' as the machines?' "Much of what follows is an attempt to answer this question" (15) and reach the Gothic flatline. 

 

As might be apparent, Fisher is deeply indebted in his thinking to Deleuze and Guattari (and their reading of the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer). For Deleuze and Guattari, the Gothic refers us to nonorganic life and has nothing to do with anything "supernatural, ethereal or otherworldly" (15) [c]. 

 

That said, Fisher does rather want to sex up the idea of materialism by thinking it "in terms closer to Horror fiction than to theories of social relations" (15) and demonstrate how the anorganic "is not the dead matter of conventional mechanistic science; on the contrary it swarms with strange agencies" (16).

 

Now, without wishing to anticipate what Fisher says later in Flatline Constructs, I think it might be helpful to clarify this point by stressing that the anorganic (or nonorganic) is entirely different from the inorganic. Whilst the latter is - like a Monty Python parrot - completely devoid of life, the former is a vibrant, unorganised form of intensive life operating on a flatline. 

      

Unfortunately, things get complicated because techno-capitalism, argues Fisher, has collapsed these distinctions, rendering human subjects inorganic and machines anorganic and thus it is that we end up discussing "the gleaming products of technically sophisticated capitalism" (16) in the "ostensibly archaic terms familiar from Horror fiction: zombies, demons" (16), etc. 

 

 

II.

 

Finally, there are two other names who are central to Flatline Constructs: Freud and Baudrillard ...

 

Freud emerges in Fisher's study as "a somewhat ambivalent figure, sometimes an ally, sometimes a foe, of Gothic Materialism" (17). The problem is, although Freud flirts with the idea of the inanimate becoming active in his essay The Uncanny (1919), he ultimately dismisses it. 

 

As for Baudrillard (whose work at times parallels that of Deleuze and Guattari, but which is by no means compatible) [d], his interest in cyberpunk fiction and film combined with "his fascination with automata and simulacra, make him both the object of a Gothic Materialist theory, and a contributor to it" (18). 

 

Baudrillard matters for Fisher also because it is Baudrillard "who is most associated with the emergence of theory-fiction as a mode" (19), putting an end to theory and fiction as separate genres. In Flatline Constructs, Fisher wants to take Baudrillard's thinking in this area very seriously "and approach fictional texts, not simply as literary texts awaiting theoretical 'readings', but as themselves already intensely theoretical" (19) [e].  

 

 

III.  

 

Chapter One of Fisher's thesis "examines the nexus of postmodernism, cybernetics and the Gothic" (20) and is titled 'Screams, Screens, Flatlines'. It opens with an analysis of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) or as those who prefer novels to films know it, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick, 1968); a key cyberpunk text. 

 

The chapter also "aims to show ways in which Cybernetics has been haunted by the Gothic" (20) [f] and how the language of Horror is important for Deleuze and Guattari's cybernetic realism or what Fisher calls the hypernatural - a concept that is positioned "as an intensification of naturalism, and by opposition the supernatural" (20).  

 

Before examining these things in more detail, let me just confess that I have minimal interest in the kind of films and novels that fascinate Fisher. I've seen Blade Runner - and, to be honest, I found it a bit boring; but not half as boring as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), which sits alongside George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) as the book I most wish I'd never attempted to read.

 

So, while I'm curious about Fisher's work, I move in a very different cinematic and fictional universe. 

  

 

IV.

 

Dick-Gibson-Burroughs-Ballard-Cronenberg ... Fisher wants to envelop this literary-cinematic line along with a legion of other names - Lovecraft, Freud, Marx, Deleuze, Guattari, Worringer, McLuhan, Jameson, Baudrillard - into Gothic Materialism conceived as an alternative postmodernism.

 

He explains that the writers and filmmakers with whom he mostly enjoys interfacing are already haunted by Gothic Materialism. They are not postmodernists "who process reality through a textualist or linguistic grid, but theorists who understand 'postmodernity' as an essentially material phenomenon, describing its effects primarily in terms of the impact that new telecommercial configurations have on the human nervous system" (27). 

 

They (to a greater or lesser degree) understand that man is no longer alienated, but ecstatic - ecstasy being defined as a free-floating experience that arises "when the subject is jacked into late capitalism's network of cybernetic communications" (28) and retreat to a private space is no longer an option. 

 

This terminal lack of retreat breeds a distinct gothic dread; not a traditional psychological fear of castration or external penetration by technology, but a realization that we no longer possess any organic interiority. We have been turned radically inside out - everted into the circuit (a thought that might make even an android scream).    

 

Once jacked in this manner, it's naive to still posit a "transcendent and authentic human agent" (29) who might resist and overcome capital. In fact, rather than think of human subjects, better to speak of non-subjectified forms of individuation - i.e., individuals who have become one with their environment. And nobody helps us conceive of such posthuman individuals than some of the names listed above:

 

"Gothic Materialism locates in Baudrillard's ecstatic communication, Gibson's Cyberspace, Jameson's total flow and Cronenberg's Videodrome, the map of hypermediatised capitalism that is decoding privatised subjectivity." (31)

 

  

V. 

 

To recap: Gothic Materialism = cybernetic realism. 

 

And the key feature of all cybernetic systems is feedback - both positive and negative.   

Which is why criticism of the system and forms of resistance to it are futile; for both, as Baudrillard pointed out, can easily be fed back into a system that "doesn't work by suppression, or repression, but through participative processes" (40). 

 

For Fisher, the fact that there is a "convergence of cybernetics and sorcery on the Gothic Flatline" (43) appears to be a paralysing predicament to say the least. However, the flatline is where everything happens; "the site of primary process [...] not a line of death but rather a continuum enfolding [...] beyond both death and life" (43).

 

I'm not sure that is meant to be encouraging, but it sounds strangely positive to my ears - almost hinting at a kind of dark and secret utopianism. There may be no hope for humanity in a conventional sense - no god to save us or revolution to liberate us - but by flattening human identity into an immortal, self-assembling network of digital code and alien desire, the flatline offers a release from personal neurosis into a state of inhuman euphoria. 

 

Ultimately, the Gothic Flatline excites because it invites us to merge with a vast cosmic machine (at least I think that's what's on offer). 

 

It's a shame that The Matrix was released in the same year Fisher submitted his PhD (1999), as he might have found it a useful point of reference, even if Baudrillard was unimpressed by the film and thought it a fundamental misunderstanding of his work [g]. As it is, he relies heavily on Neuromancer, in which the term flatline is central.   

 

 

VI. 

 

As Adam Jones rightly said in his Foreword to Flatline Constructs, Fisher likes to promote the idea of a Gothic Marx; one who emphasised the vampiric character of capitalism:

 

"The modern world for Marx is peopled with the undead; it is indeed a Gothic world haunted by spectres and ruled by the mystical nature of capital." (44)

 

But - and this is important - as capitalism develops and mutates it "outstrips Marx's most horrified descriptions of it" (45), just as the Gothic "escapes codification as a generic, psychological or fantastic mode to become the most persuasive materialist account of the contemporary socioeconomic scene" (45). 

 

Fisher continues:

 

"For cyberpunk, Marx's most Gothic language has become his most realistic, whereas his organicist protestations against capital look like antique sentimentalities." (45)

 

Recognising this, Deleuze and Guattari's work "inherits and supplements Marx's Gothic vocabulary" (45), which is why they like to speak of vampires, werewolves, and the body without organs - although it should be noted that there's nothing horrific about the latter as open system full of possibilities; it's the organ-isation of the body into an organism or "homeostatically sealed and hierarchically arranged bio-container" (49) that should give us the shivers.  

 

 

VII. 

 

Of course, embodiment isn't everything; and it certainly doesn't underwrite subjectivity. 

 

As Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr discovers, a brain in a liquid-filled jar "can have the experience of subjectivity - all the memories and dreams that post-Freudian man thinks define him uniquely - so long as the right material conditions are simulated" (51) [h].     

 

Thus - and this is something which again I know some readers will have trouble accepting - the jar matters just as much as the brain inside. Identity needn't be something essential or even personal; it can be engineered just like a prosthetic leg. 

 

And if that's the case, then does it really matter if you are dealing with an old school human or a genetically engineered bio-synthetic humanoid (what they term replicants in Blade Runner)?

 

Fisher concludes section 1.4 of his opening chapter by pointing out that debates around the question of whether Deckard is or isn't a replicant miss the Gothic Materialist implications of the film:

 

"Since, in Blade Runner, the criteria for rating the human above the replicants [...] have now evaporated, Cartesian epistemological questions have been obsolesced by functional / operational criteria. Since you could be a replicant [...] it is already as if you were a replicant, a desiring-machine. Becoming-replicant is therefore not a matter of identifying oneself as a technical machine; it is not a question of identification at all, but of recognising all identity as construction." (54)  

 

I have to admit, that's a brilliant insight - and probably more relevant to the world we live in today than anything I wrote in my PhD.  

 

 

VIII.  

 

In the end, it all comes down to (an art of) lines: organic (naturalistic) lines and geometrical (mechanical) lines. And of course, the Gothic flatline ... These lines determine how we interact with our environment and, indeed, what kind of environment exists to interact with.  

 

In brief, we might think of organic lines as the ones that shape nature and the representation of nature in classical art. People who love these flowing, undulating lines - think rhythymic waves and rolling hills - are seduced by a relaxing, harmonious aesthetic and will probably imagine Mother Earth with exaggerated female curves à la the Venus of Willendorf.

 

Geometric lines, on the other hand, are rigid and right angled; they can be found in abstract art, modernist architecture and mathematics. Those who love the precision of these lines are seduced by a fascist aesthetic and wish to impose structure and order onto a chaotic world; they value logic and wish to impose systems, grids, or networks in order to exercise control.         

 

As for the Gothic flatline, well, as we have discussed, this is beyond the binary of the organic and geometric and dissolves the distinction between them. In other words, it flattens the biological and technological on to the same plane; things become entangled so it becomes impossible to say where biology ends and machinery begins. 

 

In other words, for Fisher and his cyberpunk chums, humans are no longer independent organic beings who simply use tools and machinery; rather, we are fully integrated parts of a massive techno-digital landscape: "In the move from Naturalism to hypernaturalism [or cybernetic realism] the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism [...] collapses." (60)

 

And there's no point in calling for either a neo-vitalism or a neo-thanatropism, as neither will provide a satisfactory description for the world today. What we need is a concept - or at least a term - that we can use to discuss what arrives on the flatline - and Gothic fiction gives it to us: undeath (which is, of course, synonymous with unlife).    

 

"Following Freud [...] we can think of unlife and undeath not as opposed to life - or death - but as designating a continuum which includes, but moves beyond, the so-called living." (62) [i] 

    

Notes

 

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

 

[b] Francis Bacon, in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 148. Quoted by Fisher in Flatline Constructs, p. 35. At the close of chapter one of Flatline Constructs, Fisher suggests that Bacon is the painter who best helps us visualise the world from a Gothic Materialist perspective.

 

[c] It's because Fisher wishes to disassociate his theory of Gothic Materialism from some of its existing cultural associations, that I find Graham Harman's description of Flatline Constructs as "a precious gift from the other world, where he [Fisher] now resides", so profoundly mistaken. If I were the publishers, I'd remove this remark from the front of the book. 

 

[d] One of the aims of Flatline Constructs, says Fisher, is to "play off Deleuze-Guattari and Baudrillard against each other" (18). 

 

[e] This is one of many points on which Fisher and I are in accord. In my own doctoral thesis completed at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s (and submitted just a few months after Fisher submitted his), I had a section of the Introduction titled 'On Dissolving the Genre Distinction Between Philosophy and Literature'. 

      See Outside the Gate: A Study of Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation as Mediated Via the Work of D. H. Lawrence (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. 

[f] Fisher has the slightly irritating habit of capitalising words that don't require capitalisation. For the sake of consistency, I follow his lead and adopt his practice. If Gothic requires a big G, still there is no reason as far as I can see why cybernetics should come with a capital C. 

 

[g] In a k-punk post titled 'dis-identity politics' (25/04/2006), Fisher claims that he is "no fan of the Wachowskis' Matrix" - even if it did become a "massively propagated pulp mythos" which "suggested that what counts as 'real' is an eminently political question". 

      See k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 136. 

 

[h] I'm referencing The Man with Two Brains (dir. Carl Reiner, 1983), starring Steve Martin as Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, a pioneering neurosurgeon. 

      Whilst not mentioning this film - do CCRU members ever enjoy comedies? - Fisher does mention Gibson's novel Count Zero (1986) in which Josef Virek lives as a disembodied consciousness inside a life-support vat and notes that "if subjectivity can be experienced by a brain in a vat [...] what is interesting [...] is not the subjectivity but the vat" (47). 

        

[i] Without knowing anything of Fisher's work at the time, I explored similar ideas in a six-part series of talks at Treadwell's in 2006 entitled Thanatology. 

      See the first two essays - 'On Dissolving the Distinction Between Life and Death' and 'All Being is a Being Towards Death' - in The Treadwell's Papers, Vol. II, (Blind Cupid Books, 2010). Or click here for a thanatological fragment based on material in the first of these essays posted on TTA (27 Sept 2014).   

 

 

For a post discussing Adam Jones's Foreword to Fisher's Flatline Constructs (5 June 2026), please click here.  

 

 

Sijia Yao's Cosmopolitan Love and Utopian Vision: Or How to Have D. H. Lawrence Spinning in His Grave (Part 1: Sections I-V)

Sijia Yao: Cosmopolitan Love: 

Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang 

 (University of Michigan Press, 2023) [a]

 

 

I. 

 

One of the books reviewed in the latest edition of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (2025) is Sijia Yao's Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang (2023) [b]. 

 

Written by Li Zhimin, a Distinguished Professor of English at the School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University, it intrigued me enough that I decided I would read Yao's book for myself to discover if she really does misread Lawrence's project as much as indicated. 

 

For Lawrence - just to be absolutely clear at the outset - was not a utopian in the transcendent (and optimistic) sense that Yao argues and had no truck with cosmopolitanism if the latter is interpreted as a form of universal humanism. 

 

As for love, Lawrence absolutely rejects such when it is written with a capital 'L' and transformed into something grandiose and morally ideal; when it becomes diseased and insisted upon as the only thing that matters; when it becomes politicised and serves as a justification for violence, hatred, and authoritarianism. 

 

Even in his Chatterley writings, Lawrence prefers to speak of touch and tenderness rather than use the L-word and whilst he subscribes to a politics of desire, he ultimately thinks the transformation of society will require a new religious sensibility more than a sexual revolution and his democracy to come is, of course, an immanent utopia (now/here), existing in the bonds between people, not an ideal utopia (no/where) that "transgresses and transcends local, national, global, and even cosmic boundaries" (9).   

 

To his credit, Li does find flaws with Yao's study. But, unfortunately, he too seems to buy into the (Christian and Beatlesque) idea that all we need is love in order to "help the world become better" [c] and the human family achieve its collective maturity. 

 

 

II.    

 

As my knowledge of (and interest in) the Chinese-American author Eileen Chang is strictly limited, I'll not be commenting here on Yao's discussion of her work, nor the nature of the link made between Chang's writings and those of Lawrence, as all such comparisons are, if not exactly odious, then often questionable, even when adopting a third term methodology [d].   

 

Yao opens her Introduction to Cosmopolitan Love with the following line: "Love as a feeling is universal" (1) and normally that would be enough for me to immediately close a book. For even if this is factually correct from a bio-anthropological viewpoint, the expression of love is, of course, determined by language, history, culture, etc. (as I'm sure Yao knows; speaking immediately afterwards of Chinese love and Western love as distinct traditions). 

 

Nonsensical phrases casually dropped into the Introduction such as "it stirs one's spiritual being" (11) are also problematic and usually book-closing for me, but, in this case, I'm determined to press on and "pursue the true meaning" (11) of a text which promises to "restore [Lawrence's] literary glory" (14) and address the problems of today.  

 

 

III.

 

According to Yao, "in imagining how love breaks down preexisting orders and creates alternative utopian realities" (25) Lawrence divides love into four forms, "each corresponding to different phases of an ideal subject's maturity: parental, sexual, adulterous, and transcendental" (25-26). 

 

She then explains how she traces the subject progressing through these four separate phases, transforming their relationships in the process, as they move toward cosmoplitan love as she understands it. Thus the four phases also structure her book: beginning with chapter 1, in which the love of a child for its parents is transformed into sexual love for a non-familial other; a topic Yao discusses with reference to Freud's Oedipus complex and the question of incest. 

 

I'll take a brief look at this and the following two chapters - which illustrate how Lawrence used his model of eroticised philosophy to challenge nationalism and modernisation within a secular society - before then examining the fourth and final chapter in a little more detail, as this is the one I think will most interest (and infuriate), dealing as it does with Lawrence's creation of an "alternative language of divine love to render secular existence transcendentally meaningful" (29) and allowing lovers to enter a "mysterious dimension of utopia" (29).

 

 

IV. 

 

The argument of chapter one is essentially this: cosmopolitan love = good; incestuous desire = bad. And as the incest prohibition is "the foundation of cosmopolitan love" (32) - as well as that which also provides "the framework of all morality" (32) - it is also unquestionably in need of enforcement; human culture depends on it. 

 

This sounds very Freudian, but, actually, Yao wants to reverse certain aspects of Freud's thinking on this issue, arguing that whilst he wishes to see incest as "conforming to a universal Oedipal dynamic that originates from children" (33), Lawrence, in Sons and Lovers (1913), correctly identifies parents and the local culture as the "main drivers of incestuous desire" (33); an idea he later develops in his two books on the unconscious.     

 

I'm more than happy to be convinced by what Yao says here. It's certainly the case that, whilst influenced by Freud, Lawrence was no Freudian and vehemently rejected the psychoanalytic interpretation of his work. As Deleuze and Guattari recognise, Lawrence is fundamentally anti-Oedipus.    

 

 

V. 

 

Chapter two - 'Sexual Love as Public Defiance' - argues that there's a radical politics of desire; one capable of not only liberating the subject (particularly the female subject), but challenging ideas surrounding class and race, debunking prejudice and social convention, etc.

 

So nothing very new - and it's as if Foucault never lived! 

 

Yao's reading of The Virgin and the Gipsy is untenable, naive, and cliché-ridden; a young woman, stifled by false morality and a corrupt social order, sets out on a quest to discover her "primal selfhood" (54), the climactic flood at the stories end symbolising the unleashing of her "primitive desire" (54) and sexual awakening.    

 

Yvette is a woman transformed - a woman empowered - a woman in love! Because this is not just an erotic tale in which a randy passing gipsy deflowers the vicar's daughter, it's a utopian love story and a subversive (anti-English, post-colonial) cultural expression. Oh, and it's a rejection of the patriarchy and sexually objectifying male gaze too.  

 

Yao concludes her second chapter thusly:

 

"If the critique of incestuous love described in chapter 1 represents the struggle to break the shackles of an oppressive and immoral family culture, the affirmation of sexual love finds a way to reach a realm of freedom that is briefly achieved through a utopian moment that coincides with the cosmopolitan transcendence of national boundaries." (68) 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This 172 page text is available to purchase in hardback and paperback formats from the usual outlets, but is also freely available online as an open access book, thereby generously allowing anyone to read, download, or share it: click here to access via JSTOR. All page numbers given in this post refer to this work. 

      The author, Sijia Yao, is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at Soka University of America (a private liberal arts college based in California).      

 

[b] See 'Sijia Yao, Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang, reviewed by Li Zhimin', in the JDHLS, Volume 7, Number 2 (2025), ed. Jane Costin (published by the D. H. Lawrence Society, Eastwood, Notts.), pp. 202-206.  

 

[c] Li Zhimin, ibid., p. 205. 

      The good professor goes on to explain that when love triumphs, "people from different interest groups would be more ready to recognise each other's family values" (205-06) and live according to the rule of law within a rational political framework. Humanity, Maturity, and Family (HMF): these are the (Kantian) key terms and fundamental values of his own utopian vision; see chapter 12 of his book written in collaboration with Daniel Braun, China Being Led and Leading: A Literary and Cultural Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), pp. 151-162.  

 

[d] See the section on comparative methodology in the Introduction to Cosmopolitan Love, pp. 19-25.   

 

 

This post continues in part two (sections VI-X): click here.  

Euphoria Contra Ecstasy

Killing Joke: Euphoria (2015)  

Screenshot from the official video

And then the clouds break / A ray of sunlight, gloria!  

As if a promise / Some strange kind of euphoria [1]

 

 

I. 

 

When I was young, one of the key words in my vocabulary was the Ancient Greek term ἔκστασις (ékstasis), which refers to a psycho-spiritual sense of release; the ecstatic individual is one who has found a way to literally step outside of their own self and become part of something greater (some might characterise this as the nowness of the moment; some might speak of God).  

 

Ecstasy, therefore, is an altered - some would insist higher - state of consciousness and many who have experienced it speak of an intensely pleasurable experience, whether resulting from sexual activity, drug use, or religious devotion [2]. The desire for a temporary loss of self and loss of control is, it seems, rooted in a fundamental human instinct - one which Freud memorably termed der Todestrieb [3].     

 

And it's at this point I'd like to say something about another Ancient Greek term - εὐφορία - or, as we write it in English, euphoria  ...

 

 

II.  

  

It's because I think Freud is right to identify a death drive and because I believe the wilful desire to experience ecstasy is rooted in this drive (and is thus, from a Nietzschean perspective, décadent), that I now avoid speaking of ékstasis and favour euphoria, which, I would argue, is an expression of man's most vital self.   

 

In other words, euphoria is a sense of physical wellbeing that encourages us to stay true to the earth, whilst ecstasy, involving as it does an element of transcendence and a stepping out of reality, is a dangerous first step on the path to heaven; euphoria is tied to Dionysian joy [4], but ecstasy terminates in the kind of religious rapture [5] longed for by Christians and other afterworldsmen [6].  

 

 

III. 

By way of providing an example, let us turn to two contrasting scenes in D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915) ...  

 

In the first of these, we witness the heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen dancing naked in her bedroom and this, I would say, is a scene of euphoria; one that celebrates the fertile female body in all its gravid beauty:

 

"Big with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen [...]

      [...] She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss [7] [...] she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness [8].   

 

In the second scene, which comes in the following chapter (VII), we are told how her husband, Will, is driven to the point of ecstasy by Lincoln Cathedral:

 

"When he saw the cathedral in the distance [...] his heart leapt. It was the sign in heaven, it was the Spirit hovering like a dove [...] He turned his glowing, ecstatic face to her, his mouth opened with a strange, ecstatic grin." [9]    

 

It's not that Will is an objectophile - though he clearly has certain tendencies in that direction - his real desire is to escape mortal existence and become one with the Infinite in timeless ecstasy. No wonder Anna "resented his transports and ecstasies" [10] and longs to leave the cathedral and be back under the open sky.

 

And no wonder she turns to the gargolyes, which save her "from being swept forward headlong in the tide of passion that leaps on into the Infinite" [11] and help her to bring Will back down to earth with a bump.  

 

In brief: Anna's Dionysian euphoria triumphs over Will's Christian ecstasy ...

 

He still loves Lincoln Cathedral, but, after Anna has effectively disillusioned him by mocking his desire to consummate his love, even Will recognises there is life outside the church; that there are birds singing in the garden; flowers growing in the fields. 

 

And these things induce a sense of joy and wellbeing that was free and careless and "at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral" [12]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

And on a cold and grey November morn, when all the autumn leaves have fallen and "I can hear the magpies laugh" [13], all it takes is a momentary break in the clouds and a ray of sunlight and I too feel strangely euphoric ...     

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the Killing Joke single 'Euphoria', released from the album Pylon (Spinefarm Records / Universal Music Group, 2015): click here to play. The melodic character and almost choral quality of this track reminds me of the songs on Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (E.G. Records / Virgin Records, 1986), which is certainly one of my favourite Killing Joke albums.  

      

[2] I'm not suggesting these are the only ways to induce ecstasy; other methods might include physical activities such as yoga, dancing, or working out at the gym. Others find quiet meditation in which they concentrate on their breathing does the trick.

 

[3] Freud defines the death drive as the will possessed by organic life forms to return to an inanimate state. It is the opposing (although complementary) force to the life instinct, Eros, which drives self-preservation and reproduction. Both drives belong to the same libidinal economy. See his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). 

      Here, I will argue that whilst the desire to experience ecstasy is rooted in the death drive, euphoria is an expression of man's most vital self.   

 

[4] For Nietzsche, the story of Dionysus is form of thanksgiving and an affirmation of life; the promise that it will be eternally reborn (this in stark contrast to the figure of the Crucified, who counts as an objection to life and a curse upon it). 

 

[5] Rapture is derived from the Latin term raptus, meaning to seize and carry off; one is literally swept up with ecstasy and transported to another (better and more perfect) world. This is why certain evangelical Christians in the United States use this term as their great eschatological watchword. 

      For these religious fanatics, the Rapture is an end-times event when all Christian believers (including the resurrected dead) will rise in the clouds, to meet the Lord their God. Although this is a relatively recent theological development - first arising in the 1830s - the origin of the term can be traced back to the Bible which uses the Greek word ἁρπάζω (harpazo); see 1 Thessalonians, 4:13-18, where a gathering of the elect in Heaven is described after the Second Coming of Christ.     

 

[6] This term - Hinterweltler in the original German - is a coinage of Nietzsche's and refers to those lunatics who focus their hopes and values on a transcendental realm that one enters at death, thereby devaluing earthly life. 

     For Zarathustra, it was suffering and impotence which created the idea of an afterworld and whilst it may seem attractive to many, it is, he says, a humiliation to believe in such heavenly nonsense. He teaches men to listen rather to the voice of the healthy body and stay true to the earth. 

      See the section entitled 'Of the Afterworldsmen', in Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 58-61. 

 

[7] Although the term bliss was later appropriated by those who like to imagine the spiritual delights of heaven, it was originally an Old English word (with a Proto-Germanic root) simply meaning joy in the mundane sense. 

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 169-170. I discuss this scene - much loved by maiesiophiles everywhere - in the post 'On Dirty Dancing and the Virtue of Female Narcissism 2: The Case of Anna Brangwen' (30 July 2017) - click here - and again in a post titled 'Maiesiophilia' (8 Dec 2022): click here.   

       

[9] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow ... p. 186.  

 

[10] Ibid., p. 188. 

 

[11] Ibid., p. 189. I discuss this scene at greater length in the post titled 'Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargoyle on the Great Fire of Notre-Dame de Paris' (16 April 2019): click here.  

 

[12] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow ... p. 191.  

 

[13] Killing Joke, 'Euphoria' (2015), as cited in note 1 above.  

 

On the Politics of the Smile

 And Still You Wear That Happy Face ...

 (SA/2025) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Whilst totalitarian regimes do not enforce happiness and demand that citizens always smile per se, they do, nevertheless, require outward displays of satisfaction and conformity and often clamp down on any signs of discontent or unhappiness. 

 

Thus it is that one doesn't see many frowns on the faces of those depicted in state controlled propaganda and public emotion at mass events is carefully stage managed. 

 

And this is as true of Disneyland as it is of Nazi Germany; of corporate-media spectacles, such as the Olympics opening ceremony, as it is of a worker's parade in Pyongyang. 

 

Mickey Mouse, Joseph Goebbels, Danny Boyle, and the Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, all know how to put on a good a show and make the people smile. 

 

In other words, they all understand the importance of exploiting what Freud calls the pleasure principle [2] and transforming what should be a natural expression of joy [3] into a regulatory facial mechanism that signals the correct response to power.

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, the smile can still, I think, be a counterfascist gesture; for as Baudrillard reminds us, there is the possibility of a sudden reversal even in a single ironic smile, "just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master" [4].

 

This is not to imply we can laugh all our troubles away, but to suggest that the more hegemonic the system, the greater is its vulnerability to even the smallest of set-backs or acts of defiance. Any challenge, even at a micropolitical level, represents a failure and threatens to quickly go viral; a total system requires complete control and demands absolute complicity. 

 

Thus, smiling - perhaps more with the eyes than the mouth - is still an important ability to possess. If one smiles with a mix of cheerful insouciance and philosophical indifference to the circumstances in which one finds oneself [5], then, who knows, perhaps others might smile back ...             

  

 

Notes

 

[1] The title of this image is taken from the lyrics written by Jello Biafra and John Greenway for 'California Über Alles"' (1979), the debut single by American punk band Dead Kennedys. The background artwork is a detail taken from the sleeve for the single, designed by Winston Smith. 

      The main image (allegedly) shows a woman wearing a smile mask intended to fight depression, taken in Budapest, 1937. The theory behind the mask, designed to force the wearer's mouth into a smile using mechanical devices like wires or medical tape, was that if people looked happier then they would feel happier. Unfortunately, if such masks were ever actually used, they proved to be ineffective and did nothing to reduce the high number of suicides in the city at that time. 

 

[2] For Freud, the Lustprinzip is the instinctive seeking of pleasure (and the avoidance of pain) in order to satisfy biological and psychological needs. In his 1921 work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, he considered the possibility of something more primal and operating independently of a pleasure principle conceived in relation to the life instinct; something that he termed the death drive (Todestrieb).   

 

[3] Whilst it's true that in different cultures and societies smiling can convey emotions other other than joy and amusement - such as confusion and embarrassment, for example - there are no non-smiling peoples and evolutionary biologists have traced smiling back millions of years to our earliest ape ancestors.

      Interestingly, smiling may also be something that men do more than women and a common female complaint is being told to smile by male strangers, as this is seen as aggressive and controlling rather than born of concern for their happiness.     

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser (University of Michigan, 1994), p. 163.  

 

[5] It's important to note that I'm not asking for sincerity to be expressed in one's smile; nor do I want people to smile enthusiastically. I want them to smile in a manner similar to the Cheshire Cat, so that they become elusive and enigmatic (or imperceptible, as Deleuze and Guattari would say).  

 

 

Musical bonus: Nat King Cole 'Smile', recorded and released as a single in 1954, it can be found on the album Ballads of the Day (Capitol Records, 1956): click here. 

      Or for Jimmy Durante's version of 'Smile', originally found on his 1965 album Hello Young Lovers (Warner Bros.) and which famously features in the movie Joker (dir. Todd Phillips, 2019), click here.