Fanged Noumena: Amuse-bouche

 

Urbanomic / Sequence Press (2011) 

 

'Nick Land's writings inhabit a disordered anarchitecture, 

a space traversed by rat and wolf vectors, conjuring a 

schizophrenic metaphysics.' [a]

 

 

I. 

 

What the above quote warns is that Land's work isn't exactly an easy read, nor something one can just dip in and out of on a Sunday afternoon. 

 

In fact, one is tempted to say of his philosophy what Bertrand Russell famously said of Heidegger's: "extremely obscure and highly eccentric in its terminology" - an irresponsible running riot of language [b].  

 

Of course, that's no reason to dismiss or downplay the importance of Land's thinking - and, for some of us, the excitement and allure of the work lie precisely in its libidinal occultism or what Ray Brassier later termed mad black Deleuzianism [c].  

 

 

II.

 

Published in 2011, Fanged Noumena is an anthology of writings from the twenty-year period 1987 - 2007. Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, it covers various philosophical and aesthetic obsessions and, with a cover featuring a coloured etching by Jake and Dinos Chapman [d], it has since acquired cult status. 

 

Although I was one of the first to buy the book [e], it has taken me until now to finally learn how to engage with it. Even so, there remains a good deal of material which I still don't know how to approach. That's not due, I hope, to a lack of intelligence on my part, but rather a lack of patience to think through qwernomics, or try and make sense of a Ziigothic X-Coda [f]. 

 

Life's too short, as Larry David would say. 

 

 

III. 

 

Before discussing Land's writings in the later posts in this series, I'd like to first examine the Editor's Introduction and briefly sketch a portrait of Land, a much mythologised and much demonised - some would say hugely overrated - figure. 

 

By paying particular attention to his time at Warwick and involvement with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), I'm hoping to gain a better understanding of the manner in which the texts gathered in Fanged Noumena went from being complex but fairly standard works to almost impossible to read by the late 1990s. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Mackay and Brassier - both graduate students in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s - rightly emphasise that Land's work "folds genre in on itself, splicing disparate sources" (1) in order to create a "dense, frequently bewildering vortex of hallucinatory conjunctions" (1-2). 

 

They intend for the volume to infect a new generation of readers interested in furthering the collapse of orthodox metaphysics into psychotic cosmogony and accelerating the "obsolescence of humankind" (2). 

 

It's philosophy, Jim - but not of a kind that Bertie Russell would recognise, nor one that many of Land's more orthodox colleagues approved of. Rooted in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bataille - i.e., renegade thinkers who "mocked and disparaged academicism" (2) - Fanged Noumena is a violent assault upon conventional wisdom.

 

In brief, Land was a type of punk philosopher - albeit one closer in spirit to the darkly humorous nihilism of the Sex Pistols than the social worker ethos of The Clash [g]. I suspect that is why, although he and I were never close, I always enjoyed my few brief meetings with him to discuss the progress of my own research project at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s [h].      

 

However, once Land resigned his position at Warwick (in 1998), "academic orthodoxy quickly and quietly sealed the breach inflicted in its side by his ferocious but short-lived assault, so that within the first few years of the new century, he had become an apocryphal character, more or less forgotten in philosophical circles" (4). 

 

And yet, his writings continued to inspire a small number of people; "particularly among artists and writers" (4).  

 

 

V. 

 

This is key: Land's libidinal re-materialisation of critique "reconfigures questioning as exploration, whose orienting vector runs from the known towards the unknown, rather than from the unknown to the known" (15). 

 

What that means is Land looks to venture outside the gate, rather than enclose the outside - which for Land is a fully material realm - within the framework of knowledge. Thus, there's nothing to learn by studying Land's philosophy - and much to lose (including your mental health and professional career).  

  

 

VI. 

  

Some readers will, not unreasonably, already be wondering if Land's assault on "reason, truth, and history" (21) isn't predestined for a "collapse into romantic irrationalism" (20). 

 

Mackay and Brassier think not. Conceding that his work is not entirely free of elements that are both romantic and irrational, they also argue that it resists easy reduction to such, thanks in no small part to his nomadic numbering practices (or schizonumerics) and his appeal to an alien (or machinic) intelligence that plays out within human culture but is "unattributable to human agency" (22).

 

Land may be unreasonable and irrational, but he's not crazy. And certainly not stupid.  

 

 

VII. 

 

As well as everything else, Land is a political philosopher - albeit one who dismisses politics in the traditional sense as "the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind" [i]. 

 

Like Marx, Land is obsessed with capitalism; particularly "the most extreme possibilities of techno-capital" (26) which he wishes to accelerate beyond all internal limits (whatever the consequences for man and planet). It's here that his thinking becomes increasingly fictional and speculative (or hyperstitious) in character and he leaves behind the "established norms of academic discourse" (26).   

 

Things become deterritorialised, delirious, and deathly (or thanatropic). Rejecting Deleuze's vitalism, Land radicalises Freud's death drive and posits death as the zero-degree of an absolute deterritorialisation and the primary productive matrix:   

 

"Thus, remodelling the schizoanalytic programme in line with his own militant and fervidly anti-vitalist objectives, Land violently repudiates A Thousand Plateaus' sage warnings against the dangers of a 'too sudden destratification' [...] To Land's eyes, A Thousand Plateaus' newfound caution [...] is a lamentable step backwards from Anti-Oedipus' most audacious innovations, and fatally lays open the latter's unequivocal declaration of war on the strata to the classic compromise-formations and policing of desire that they had previously so effectively challenged." (30) 

 

Land is the exterminating angel called for by Deleuze and Guattari, but he's not quite as they imagined him and he has no interest in preserving organic existence.   

 

 

VIII.

 

For Land and his disciples, cyberpunk - or, encoded in their own jargon, k-punk - wasn't just a literary subgenre, it was a "textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future" (33). In other words, it provided a model for their own theory-fictions and hyperstitions [j].

 

I remember that one of the books I was persuaded I simply must read after entering the philosophy department at Warwick in 1994, was William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). A seminal and quintessential cyberpunk text, it remains second only to George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) on my list of most boring novels I have ever had to slog through.

 

My negative reaction to this book was only matched by my aversion to the headache-inducing jungle beat of darkcore and a preference for the Schwarzenegger movie Twins (1988) over The Terminator (1984). Together, these aesthetico-intellectual shortcomings were probably enough to ensure I would never be considered a suitable candidate for Nick's inner circle or invited to participate in the CCRU ...     

 

  

IX. 

   

"The inception of the amorphous and short-lived Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) - established at Warwick University in 1995, shortly before Land's departure from academia, but immediately disowned as an undesirable parasite by the institution to which it was precariously affixed [...] - marks yet another important phase-transition in Land's work." (39)

 

And the key term of this phase-transition: geotraumatics - a concept via which Land makes an "audacious attempt [...] to characterise all terrestrial existence, including human culture, as a relay of primal cosmic trauma" (39).   

 

Pop-reggae specialists UB40 were worried that the earth might die screaming, but Land is here to tell us that, actually, it was born 4.5 billion years ago in absolute fucking agony. 

 

The retraction of its molten outer surface and its "subsequent segregation into a burning iron core" (39-40) is described by Land as "the aboriginal trauma whose scars are inscribed, encrypted, throughout terrestrial matter, instituting a register of unconscious pain coextensive with the domain of stratified materiality" (40) beyond anything that Freud - or even Deleuze and Guattari - ever imagined.     

 

For Land, all structure is repressive and everything - from the smallest cell to the largest terrestrial body - is seeking a release from its organisation: "Nothing short of the complete liquidation of biological order and the dissolution of physical structure can suffice to discharge the aboriginal trauma that mars terrestrial existence." (41)

 

Some will see this as a radical furthering of pessimism; others - like Brassier - will speak of nihilism unbound. Either way, it's a pretty challenging and uncompromising way of thinking - and entirely logical. It's also one of the reasons that I still find myself attracted to Land, despite our many differences. 

 

Like Sid Vicious, he just never saw a red light, only green, and no one can accuse Land of not having taken his mad, bad and dangerous project "as far as he possibly could" (53).     

 

 

X. 

 

Critics - and he has many (particularly on the miserabilist left) - will say that Land's philosophy was always going to terminate in neoreaction and/or a "puerile capitulation to neo-liberal 'realism' shrouded in mysticism" (51). 

 

Everything in his writings that "falls outside the parameters of disciplinary knowledge can and will be effectively dismissed by those who police the latter" (54) 

 

But as Mackay and Brassier conclude:

 

"The challenge of Land's work cannot be circumvented by construing the moral dismay it (often deliberately) provokes as proof of its erroneous nature, or by exploiting the inadequacies in Land's positive construction as an excuse to evade the corrosive critical implications of his thought." (53)

 

Land's thought-experiments have made crucial contributions to "the diagnosis of the cosmic, biological, evolutionary, and cultural genealogy and nature of the human" (53). And, more than this, he has given us the tools - and weapons - with which to launch future assaults "against the Human Security System" (54), should we choose (or dare) to do so.  

  

  

Notes

 

[a] Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, 'Editor's Introduction' to Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007 (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), p. 1. Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post between round brackets.   

 

[b] Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West: A Historical Survey of Western Philosophy in its Social and Political Setting, ed. Paul Foulkes (Macdonald, 1959), p. 303. 

 

[c] Mackay and Brassier explain what's meant by this in their 'Editor's Introduction' to Fanged Noumena: "Land seized upon Deleuze-Guattari's transcendental materialism [...] and subjected it to ruthless cybernetic streamlining, excising all vestiges of Bergsonian vitalism to reveal a deviant and explicitly thanatropic mechanism." (5)

      Despite this, it's important to remember that at the core of Land's thought "are the works of Immanuel Kant" (6) - something which is, I think, often overlooked or not understood by those readers who think everything starts with Nietzsche or only come for the Lovecraft.   

 

[d] The cover image by Jake and Dinos Chapman is from Disasters of War IV (2001); a hand-coloured etching with watercolour (24.5 x 34.5 cm).

 

[e] The book was originally published in a 1000 numbered copies; mine is 278. 

 

[f] Critics suggest that even Land didn't really know what he was trying to say - or, if he did, didn't mean it - but that seems unfair and mistaken. Nevertheless, it's amusing to note Land's initial response to Mackay's request to republish his old writings: 

      "'It's another life; I have nothing to say about it - I don’t even remember writing half of those things … I don't want to get into retrospectively condemning my ancient work - I think it's best to gently back off. It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead amphetamine god.'"

      See Robin Mackay, 'Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism', (2013): click here.  

 

[g] For readers who want a more detailed explanation of the difference between the Sex Pistols and The Clash (and why my allegiance is to the former rather than the latter), see the post dated 2 August 2018: click here.   

 

[h] I was doing my PhD in the philosophy department at Warwick between 1994 and 2000, and Land was assigned as my Graduate Progress Committee member during my first year. 

      I have to confess, however, that I had no real interest in what the CCRU were up to. My thinking on Nietzsche was far more influenced by Keith Ansell-Pearson's work than Nick's (Keith being my supervisor). That said, I did appreciate Nick's career advice, which encouraged me in the view that it was better to flip burgers from the back of a van than pursue a position in academia.    

 

[i] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 197. 

 

[j] See my post of 18 May 2026 in which I discuss the term (and concept) of hyperstition: click here. 

 

 

For the first post following this taster - on 'Nick Land and the New Amazons' (1 June 2026) - click here.

 

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: We Are Not Here to Entertain You

 

 'All cultures have understood that being a blogger 

is to be a tortured monkey in Hell ...' 

 

 

I. 

 

Having taken a short break from my engagement with Mark Fisher, I'm diving back into k-punk - his collected and unpublished writings (2004 - 2016), edited by Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018) - and all page references given here (in round brackets) refer to this work (while additional notes are indicated by letters in square brackets). 

 

Let's pick things up in part six with an early post published on his famous blog to do with Spinoza and neuropunk ...

 

 

II.   

 

According to Fisher, being a Spinozist is "both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world" (622):

 

"Easy, because it is simply a matter of acting in such a way as to produce joyful encounters. Hard, because the defaults of the Human Operating System are [...] set against this." (622)

 

The problem lies in the oversized human brain and its complexity; the fact that the reptilian and mammalian layers are covered with a thin, folded third layer that is responsible for the so-called higher functions. 

 

It's this hominid layer responsible for language and consciousness on the one hand, that causes us also to desire that which is harmful to us - addictive and destructive forms of behaviour. Were it not for our unique brains, then we might not have art - but we might also have been spared the "unremitting misery, hatred and violence that have characterised human history" (623).  

 

What can be done about this? Well, short of blowing our brains out à la Kurt Cobain, we can attempt to become-inhuman via a cybernetics of organic disassembly. Fisher is keen to be clear on this point: 

 

"You don't disassemble the human organism by replacing its parts with metal or silicon components. [...] What matters is the overall organisation of the parts. Do the parts operate as hierarchically organised and functionally-specified 'organs' within a cybernegatively construed interiority or do they operate as deterritorialised potentials pulling from/towards the Outside?" (623)

 

The latter - as everybody now knows - is what Deleuze and Guattari (following Artaud) designate as the Body without Organs; a concept that Spinoza would have loved. 

 

Anyway, the point is this: becoming-inhuman via the building of a BwO is in our best interests if we want to be free and happy and escape our "enslavement to a vast immiserating machine" (622) that is the human brain. It's for this reason that Fisher is able to declare that "k-punk is also neuropunk: an intensive rewiring of humanity's neural circuits" (624).  

 

And you thought it was just a blog ... [a]

 

 

III. 

 

Like Fisher, I'm not keen on hostile and abusive narcissists who choose to "air their resentments, ill-thought bile, and tedious ego-defence opinionism" (628) in the comments sections of blogs. Although, unlike Fisher, I don't operate any kind of policy regarding who can say what on TTA, nor do I delete negative remarks. 

 

So, even when I am faced with "clinically deranged second-stringer stalker-obsessive autists with delusions of relevance" (630), I try to smile, stay calm, and move on. 

 

IV.  

 

Like Fisher - and this is probably a punk thing [b] - I despise hippies; their hedonic infantilism and its "pathetic legacy in New Age zen bullshit" (23). 

 

As fundamentally "a middle-class male phenomenon" (234), there was never really anything countercultural about the counterculture, nor sensual about its hazy-lazy aesthetic: 

 

"The hippies' sloppy, ill-fitting clothes, unkempt appearance and fuzzed-out psychedelic fascist drug talk displayed a disdain for sensuality characteristic of the Western master class." (235)

 

And like Fisher, I also despise the hippies' drug of choice: dope. 

 

In a k-punk post dated 03 December 2004, he writes:

 

"What is supposed to be good about dope? The problem with it is not just the resultant psychosis but the ACTUAL STATE it puts people into in the first place - chronically demotivated, lethargic, filled with [...] idiot porcine self-satisfaction ..." (632)

 

Dope, Fisher continues, reduces people to the status of unthinking zombified consumer dreamed of by late capitalism. 

 

Only those who are dissatisfied want to read and think; not those enslaved to the pleasure principle. It's politically expedient, therefore, to have effectively decriminalised the consumption of cannabis (even if, in the UK, laws technically remain in place controlling the possession, sale, and production).   

 

 

V.

 

Does all this - his refusal to enter into dialogue, his hatred of hippies, his opposition to dope-smoking - make Fisher an intolerant dogmatist? 

 

Probably. 

 

Indeed, he admits as much in a k-punk post dated 17 February 2005, dismissing those who defend or advocate for tolerance, debate, respect for otherness, etc., as bourgeois liberals.

 

Now, I have to admit, I was similarly fanatic when younger. But I don't recall ever actually declaring myself to be an out-and-out dogmatist committed to the view that there are Truths (with a capital T) and that there is such a thing as the Good (with a capital G). 

 

And by the time I was Fisher's age when he was writing this - thirty-six - I was a long way removed (philosophically and politically) from my position during my punk, pagan and eco-fascist days and no longer wished to kill the bothersome fly. 

 

Fisher would doubtless say I had become a cynical PoMo-puppet, lost in sceptico-relativism and thus unable to act with conviction or affirm the future with hope and uncurbed enthusiasm. But I'd rather be a grey vampire [c] than end up arguing in all sincerity that dogmatism is religion in the best sense - in that it allows for an unapologetic assertion of universal values - thereby inviting people to spit on me. 

 

 

VI.

 

Moving on ... I was amused to read this: "I'm of course delighted to have been shopped to the commissars of commonsense who compile Private Eye's 'Pseuds Corner'" (643).  

 

Because, like Fisher, I too was once assigned a place in the above: one of Ian Hislop's lackeys deciding to mock my 2007 lecture series titled Zoophilia at Treadwell's Bookshop and finding the paper on Eve's encounter with the serpent discussed in relation to transhuman futures and sexual congress with snakes particularly worthy of ridicule [d].

 

Fisher is spot-on, of course, to say that the function of 'Pseud's Corner' is "to punish writing that in some way overreaches itself, that gets ideas above its station or gets carried away" and that "the effect on any writer who internalises the critique is to be intimidated into colourless mediocrity" (643). 

 

Luckily, I never internalise anything, so that wasn't an issue for me - and I do hope Mark didn't take being called self-serious and pretentious too much to heart. 

 

 

VII.   

     

I've never been a big fan of Morrissey: I like some of his songs, but have never bought any of his records. But Fisher does a good job of making Morrissey sympathetic to me, if what he writes here is true: 

 

"Morrissey represented the desire for a proletarian bohemia at the moment when - after the Sixties, after glam, after punk and post-punk - that possibility was being closed down." (653)

 

Fisher calls this Wildean defiance and writes of how the aspiration to enter into bohemia "was always the wrong kind of ambition from the perspective of a certain working-class way of thinking" (654). 

 

Like Mark, I also know what it's like to have family members who regard writing as a hobby and put pressure on me to get a real job.

 

 

VIII.     

 

'Exiting the Vampire Castle' (2013) remains one of my favourite pieces by Fisher - perhaps because it was one of the first things by him that I read. But it's also a piece I have written about in an earlier post, so  readers who are interested can click here.

 

That, then, just leaves the unfinished introduction to Fisher's proposed new book - Acid Communism - to discuss; a text from 2016 that comprises part seven of k-punk ...

 

A friend of mine - who, as a matter of fact, likes Fisher's work more than I do - nevertheless admits that Capitalist Realism (2009) might be regarded (somewhat ungenerously) as Fredric Jameson for beginners. 

 

And one can't help wondering if Acid Communism wouldn't have been a far more readable, updated sequel to Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) ...

 

Fisher's unfinished introduction certainly lends itself to this view, as it opens with a long quote from Marcuse and Fisher regrets the "declining influence of his work in recent years" (674) - work which "vividly evokes, as an immediate prospect, a world totally transformed" (675). 

 

Fisher continues:

 

"It was no doubt this quality of his work that meant Marcuse was taken up so enthusiastically by elements of the Sixties counterculture. He had anticipated the counterculture's challenge to a world dominated by meaningless labour. The most politically significant figures in literature, he argued in One-Dimensional Man, were 'those who don't earn a living, at least not in the ordinary and normal way'. Such characters, and the forms of life with which they were associated, would come to the fore in the counterculture." (675) 

 

Critics will dismiss this as an outmoded Romanticism. But it's worth pointing out, as Fisher does point out, that "as much as Marcuse's work was in tune with the counterculture, his analysis also forecast its ultimate failure and incorporation" (675). 

 

He, Marcuse, wasn't naive or a starry-eyed dreamer - and neither is Fisher. Both see quite clearly the way in which even the most radical art can be quickly and effectively neutralised:

 

"A major theme of One-Dimensional Man was the neutralisation of the aesthetic challenge. Marcuse worried about the popularisation of the avant-garde, not out of elitist anxieties that the democratisation of culture would corrupt the purity of art, but because the absorption of art into the administered spaces of capitalist commerce would gloss over its incompatibility with capitalist culture. He had already seen capitalist culture convert the gangster, the beatnik and the vamp from 'images of another way of life' into 'freaks or types of the same life'." (675)

 

So, let's return to Marcuse - and let's return to the Sixties! Of the two, it's perhaps the later which is the most surprising move after all that Fisher once wrote about hippies and the counterculture (see section IV above). But, says Fisher, Marcuse allows us to see why the Sixties continue to exert a crucial influence on the present:

 

"In recent years, the Sixties have come to seem at once like a deep past so exotic and distant that we cannot imagine living in it, and a moment more vivid than now - a time when people really lived, when things really happened. Yet the decade haunts not because of some unrecoverable and unrepeatable confluence of factors, but because the potentials it materialised and began to democratise - the prospect of a life freed from drudgery - has to be continually suppressed." (675)    

 

It's not so much that Fisher is now encouraging us to trust the hippies after all, rather, he's attempting to re-narrate the past [e] and salvage the utopianism of the 1960s counterculture and divorce psychedelic consciousness from both New Age escapism and capitalist commodification. 

 

As we saw earlier (section II), Fisher wants to rewire the collective consciousness in such a manner that misery and depression no longer seem part and parcel of the human condition - that we have the right to demand joy (be that Spinozan or bohemian in nature). 

 

Acid communism was Fisher's term for the ultimate neuropunk experiment - "a provocation and a promise" (677) to blow minds and raise consciousness - although whether it would also result in red plenty, universal liberation and happiness all round is something I remain unconvinced of. 

 

And I'm really not about to start listening to The Beatles, FFS, or take up residence in some psychedelic shack alongside The Temptations [f].

  

 

Notes

 

[a] Fisher had high hopes for blogging (at its best) when he started k-punk: "What has begun to emerge on the most destratifying elements of the blogosphere is a depersonalising, desubjectifying network producing more joyful encounters in a positive feedback process ..." (624)

      I rather suspect, however, that were Fisher still with us he would say of me what he says of fellow blogger Marcello Carlin in this k-punk post of 13 August 2004: "a morbidly compelling example of how not to be a good Spinozist" (624); someone who engages with "their own frozen images" (624) rather than directly and sensitively with the world and displays a "pathetically resentful hunger for attention" (624). I don't feel I show enough loyalty to the Kollektive to appeal to someone like Fisher.    

      Although you never know, he may have found something to his liking on TTA, just as Fisher's critical view of Carlin radically changed over the following decade, transforming their relationship from public conflict into one of deep, mutual respect. 

 

[b] Johnny Rotten hated hippies for their complacency as he saw it. And Malcolm McLaren famously warns Helen in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) to never trust a hippie. 

 

[c] For Fisher, a grey vampire is an individual who attaches himself to passionate, creative people, only to slowly drain their energy by constantly equivocating and sneering. If outwardly they appear charming, humorous, and intelligent, they are all the time seeking to undermine, demoralise and curb enthusiasm. Forever promising they are about to produce a major piece of work themselves, their perpetual procrastination ensures they fail to ever finish anything of value or substance.

      See his k-punk post 'Break Through in Grey Lair' (16 August 2009), pp. 645-648, where he describes grey vampirism as a symptom of mental illness as well as characteristic of postmodern scepticism. He also posits a family resemblance between grey vampires and trolls, both of whom find a home in the Academy.

      Here, of course, I am adopting the term grey vampire ironically and self-deprecatingly. And whereas Fisher viewed the grey vampire as a deeply negative, energy-sapping symbol of late capitalism, my text uses it to defend a model of scepticism contra dogmatism.  

 

[d] Unfortunately, I cannot recall the number or date of the issue of Private Eye in which I featured in Pseud's Corner. However, Gary Lachman wrote of it in an article for the Independent (16 September 2007) and this can be read online here.

 

[e] According to Fisher: "The past has to be continually re-narrated, and the political point of reactionary narratives is to suppress the potentials which still await, ready to be re-awakened, in older moments." (676) 

      I suppose the point is there's much more to the Sixties than the simulated version we are presented with by the media; i.e., "the reduction of the decade to 'iconic' images, to 'classic' music and to nostalgic reminiscences" (676) which neutralise the real promise of the era. 

 

[f] Fisher refers us to The Beatles track 'Tomorrow Never Knows' on Revolver (1966) and to 'Psychedelic Shack' by The Temptations (from the album of the same name, 1970) and argues that in these songs and the counterculture that inspired them you can hear the promise of acid communism: a new humanity, a new way of thinking, a new way of loving; "music such as this was an active dreaming which arose out of real social and cultural compositions, and which fed back into potent new collectivities [...] which rejected both drudgery and traditional resentments" (689). 

      Again, I'm not convinced, but anyone who wants to tune in and drop out can click on the links supplied.    

 

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: Blogging With Mark Fisher

Johnny Bull's rather lovely cosmic portrait of Mark Fisher 

for the cover of k-punk (Repeater Books, 2018)

johnnybull.uk 

 

'Blogs continue to do things that can't be done 

anywhere else ...'

 

 

I. 

 

According to 2026 industry data [a], there are over 600 million blogs in the world. 

 

Most of these are either inactive or rarely updated, but even so, there are over 7.5 million new posts published daily and blogs - whatever their status - make up almost a third of all websites. 

 

Those who claim that blogging is an outmoded practice in the age of TikTok and podcasting are very much mistaken. 

 

However, blogging has evolved over the years and is no longer what it was back in 2003 when Mark Fisher began posting on k-punk, a blog which, as Darren Ambrose says, was eclectic in content, theoretically plural, and remarkably consistent in quality [b]. 

 

Thus it is that k-punk remains the antithesis of the commercial, algorithm-driven blogging that dominates the online landscape today. 

 

II. 

 

Fisher clarifies his motivation for blogging in a post dated 16 April 2005. 

 

He writes that k-punk provided the space "in which to maintain a kind of discourse that had started in the music press and the art schools" (19). By the end of the twentieth-century this discourse faced extinction; an event which Fisher warned would have "appalling cultural and political consequences" (19).

 

I have to admit, as someone never much smitten by the music press - and as someone rejected by Central Saint Martins - the gravity of this claim makes me smile. Was the death of Melody Maker truly such a catastrophe? [c]

 

 

III. 

 

At their best, says Fisher, blogs enable the sharing of ideas and passions outside of the mainstream media and provide new ways of accessing culture. 

In other words, they raise consciousness, as Fisher likes to say, which in turn "opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective perspective" (514) [d].

 

However, blogs can become black holes; generating "pathological behaviours and forms of subjectivity which not only generate misery and anger" but "waste time and energy, our most precious resources" (514).    

 

That can be the fault of the person responsible for the blog. But often, says Fisher, it's due to those readers who like to leave comments of the kind that "reduce things to banal sociality" (558) [e].

 

 

IV. 

 

When I started Torpedo the Ark in 2013, I really can't remember the frame of mind I was in. But I certainly aimed to write in a gay manner; one that challenged and didn't merely reinforce received opinion. 

 

In other words, I wanted to develop a style that curdled genre distinctions and intensified the pleasure of the text by opening up the paradoxical and perverse aspects of language, free from the moral and dialectical imperative to always speak truthfully and coherently.  

 

Above all, I thought it crucial not to make miserable, but, rather, to give joy as an enterprise of health. It was an ethical and vital conception of writing influenced by figures including Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, and Deleuze.  

 

In 2003, however, Fisher was "quite badly depressed" (557) and started blogging "as a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD" (557) [f]. In an interview with Rowan Wilson (2010), he recalls:

 

"PhD work bullies one into the idea that you can't say anything about any subject until you've read every possible authority on it. But blogging seemed a more informal space, without that kind of pressure. Blogging was a way of tricking myself back into doing serious writing. I was able to con myself, thinking 'it doesn't matter, it's only a blog post, it's not an academic paper'. But now I take the blog rather more seriously than writing academic papers." (557)

 

I understand perfectly what he's saying here. My experience with TTA was to first think of the posts as merely windows on to a wider and more important body of work, only to then see that wider body of work assimilated into the blog, with the latter functioning as a kind of Borg cube. Now I assemble longer works from the fragments first posted on TTA.  

 

In conclusion, I would agree with Fisher; "blogs continue to do things that can't be done anywhere else" (558) [g]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See the article by Rebecca Tomasis, 'Latest blogging statistics and facts for 2026', on the Wix Blog (15 Dec 2025): click here.  

 

[b] Darren Ambrose, Editor's Introduction to Mark Fisher's k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 15. Future page references to this work will be placed directly in the post. 

      All in all, Ambrose does a good job editing Fisher's extensive writings and I understand the need to select posts on the basis of length and abstract them from their original context. However, I was disappointed that he chose to exclude a number of very early k-punk posts "by virtue of the fact that they seemed wildly out of step with Mark's overall theoretical and political development, and because they seemed to reflect a temporary enthusiasm for a dogmatic theoretical misanthropy he repudiated in his later writing and life" (15). 

      That, I think, is an editorial decision we might challenge and, one day, I would very much like to read these pieces and develop a radically different reading of Fisher; more cybergothic and less acid communist. One of the reasons I have come so late to Fisher is because I find his beatification by his followers a bit off-putting.      

 

[c] Clearly, for Fisher, it was; if only for the reason that his interest in theory was "almost entirely inspired by writers like Ian Penman and Simon Reynolds" (19). For Fisher, whilst blogging opened up new avenues, it also importantly "fulfilled many of the functions" (557) that the music press used to fulfil - encouraging young people to engage with ideas and be creative, etc.  

 

[d] It's a little surprising to see Fisher not only use the word living but italicise (and thereby emphasise) it. Usually, he's a fierce opponent of vitalism (even in its Deleuzian form) and in his early work - including his PhD thesis on Flatline Constructs (University of Warwick, 1999) - he even puts forward the (Nietzschean) idea that life is only a very rare and unusual way of being dead. 

      For an interesting reading of Fisher's gothic materialism addressing the question of mechanism and/or vitalism, see Em Colquhoun's post on Xenogothic (16 August 2018): click here.      

 

[e] What Fisher says in full is this: 

      "Blogging networks shift all the time; new blogs enter the network, older ones fall away; new networks constitute themselves. One of the most significant developments was the introduction of comments; a largely unfortunate change in my view. In the early day of blogs, if you wanted to respond to a post, you had to reply on your own blog, and if you didn't have a blog, you had to create one. Comments tend to reduce things to banal sociality, with all its many drawbacks." (558)

      I would be very interested to know what Simon Solomon thinks of this ... 

 

[f] To be fair, doing a PhD can be an intense experience (though I probably wouldn't use the term traumatic). 

      Doing a PhD in the philosophy department at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s, which is where and when Fisher did his (and where and when I did mine), was perhaps uniquely pressured as one was surrounded by supersmart individuals on all sides producing some astonishing work. I remember one young woman reduced to a nervous jelly on stage when presenting at a staff-graduate event - she ended up sitting under a desk! 

 

[g] For Fisher, blogging enabled him to keep a connection to the outside world, rediscover enthusiasm for a wide variety of things, and establish new friendships: "In short, and no exaggeration, it's made life worth living ..." (621). 

      I can't say that's been my experience with TTA and I'm not sure I think of writing as a survival mechanism; I see it more as what Fisher would have called back in the day a method of hyperstitional engineering. One doesn't write to feel good about oneself, or enthusiastic about the world, but to consummate nihilism (but always with a smile).     

 

 

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 More Politics (Sections I - VI)

Mark Fisher photographed in 2011 at 

Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona 

 

'Politics is the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind and it has never achieved anything 

except a deepened idiocy ... Quite naturally we are bored of it to the point of acute sickness.' 

                                                                                                                     - Nick Land (1992)

 

 

I. 

 

Having read the first fifty-odd pages of Mark Fisher's political writings collected in k-punk (2018) [a] and having commented on them in a previously published post - click here - I must confess I'm increasingly sympathetic to Nick Land's position stated above.

 

However, once I start reading a book, I'm like the proverbial dog with a bone ... And so, here are some more fragmented remarks on Fisher's political writings, as I once more pick out those things that either inspire or irritate; delight or disappoint ...   

 

 

II.  

 

For Fisher, Damien Hirst is the artist of capitalist realism par excellence. Thus, whilst he's "not interested in rehearsing [...] discussions of Hirst's merits as an artist" (444), he is interested in Hirst's "symptomatic status as a figure who embodies capital's penetration into all areas of culture" (444). 

 

Personally, I think it a little ridiculous to even mention Hirst in the same sentence as Andy Warhol, but Fisher claims that the former is, in fact, "the Warhol of capitalist realism" (444) albeit one who has "none of Warhol's blank charisma" (444) - or genius. 

 

Fisher writes:

 

"In place of Warhol's android awkwardness Hirst offers a blokish bonhomie. Warhol's studied banality has become the genuinely ultrabanal. Or, rather, the Hirst phenomenon typifies the way in which, in late-capitalist art and entertainment culture, the ultrabanal and the super-spectacular have become (con)fused." (444-445)  

 

For Fisher, Hirst's work lacks any ambiguity: it is what it is, no more, no less, and in its flat realism it "leaves no space for commentary" (445). His dead animals in formaldehyde "cannot be re-imagined, transfigured or changed" (445) - just like the political system and the culture which produced them. 

 

 

III. 

 

Torpedo the Ark wasn't a thing back in the summer of 2012, but, if it had been, I'm pretty sure that what Fisher says of the London Olympics is what I would have said: they were designed to be a massive distraction; "the antidote to all discontent" (449).  

 

Sit back, relax, forget all your worries, and enjoy the show - brought to you by McDonalds and Coca-Cola. 

 

Just to be clear: you can hate the greed and cynicism of the corporate sponsors and hate the media who broadcast the event with professional enthusiasm - or hysterical PR delirium as Fisher describes it - and still love the sport (though, in my case, I don't give a shit about sweaty athletes competing for medals and breaking records). 

 

Fisher nails exactly what's going on:

 

"The point of capital's sponsorship of cultural and sporting events is not only the banal one of accruing brand awareness. Its more important function is to make it seem that capital's involvement is a precondition for culture as such. [...] It is a pervasive reinforcement of capitalist realism." (450)

 

Amusingly, Mark isn't a fan either of the ArcelorMittal Orbit - that 376-ft sculpture and observation tower designed by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond and intended to be a lasting legacy of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. My mother described it as an eyesore, but Fisher says it's the perfect symbol of the inertia and sterility of capitalist realist culture.     

 

 

IV.

 

Capitalist realism is both a belief and an attitude: we believe that it is the only viable option (that there is no alternative); and we therefore resign ourselves to this with a mixture of defeatism and depression - politics is over, history has terminated, and now we're all in it together. 

 

Fisher thinks the only hope is to raise consciousness among the young; get them to see that there can be an alternative modernity (only don't confuse this with postmodernism, which, like Fredric Jameson, he hates and believes to be the cultural logic of late capitalism). 

 

The other thing to do is get the young to engage with mainstream forms and institutions (despite what the anarchists say); "the idea that mainstream culture is inherently coopted, and all we can do is withdraw from it, is deeply flawed" (466) [b]. That is perhaps the most liberal-sounding thing Fisher ever wrote, although, arguably, it is entirely consistent with his radical politics (later named acid communism).   

 

Where I do not agree with Fisher, however, is on the question of success and failure. In a revealing passage, he writes:

 

"There is too much toleration of failure [...] If I ever have to hear again that Samuel Beckett quote, 'Try again, fail again, fail better', I will go mad. Why do we even think in these terms? There is no honour in failure, though there is no shame in it if you have tried to succeed. Instead of that stupid slogan we should aim to learn from our mistakes in order to succeed next time. The odds might be stacked in such a way that we do keep losing, but the point is to increase our collective intelligence. That requires, if not a party structure of the old type, then at least some kind of system of coordination and some system of memory." (467)  

   

My goodness me! Anyone wishing to know how, where, and why k-punk differs from TTA might be advised to start with this passage ... 

 

First of all, no matter what Fisher seems to think, even if we can learn from our mistakes, we don't learn how to succeed in the future. At most, as Beckett indicates, we learn only how to fail better. For as much as we may wish to believe that endurance, struggle and sacrifice will eventually pay off, success is never an option: we are destined and doomed to fail; such is the tragic character of existence (it takes what Nietzsche calls a pessimism of strength to affirm this and find in it a source of dark comedy) [c].   

 

Secondly, unlike Mr Fisher, I do not think in terms of honour and shame and I would not wish to belong to the kind of collectivist culture which subscribes to this way of thinking (and judging); i.e., the kind of culture where breaches of social or religious norms that threaten to bring shame (or dishonour) upon a family or community often lead to ugly acts of violence.

 

Linking these notions to a system of coordination, memory, and collective intelligence sounds suspiciously like the imposition of a bureaucratic superego to me and one fears that even the most acidic form of communism would invariably result in increased surveillance, control, and conformity [d]. Prioritising the collective over the individual and thinking in terms of honour and shame obliges us to align with party goals and justifies the State using public humiliation to punish deviants and deter dissent [e].

 

Obviously, Fisher wouldn't want this to happen. But the language he uses in the passage above makes me more than a little uncomfortable ...    

 

 

V.

 

For me, Fisher is at his best when at his most outrageous; as he is in the piece entitled 'Suffering with a Smile' (2013), in which he describes how the division between life and work no longer exists and that even CEOs are servants of the Machine. 

 

Now workers are not only stretched to their physical limits, but obliged to smile and show how much they love their jobs:

 

"Being exploited is no longer enough. The nature of labour now is such that almost anyone, no matter how menial their position, is required to be seen (over)investing in their work. What we are forced into is not merely work, in the old sense of undertaking an activity we don't want to perform; no, now we are forced to act as if we want to work." (473)

 

And yet ... that's not quite right: "The subjugatory libidinal forces [...] don't want us to entirely conceal our misery. For what enjoyment is there to be had from exploiting a worker who actually delights in their work?" (473)

 

And so, in order to understand the sadistic game being played now in the world of work, one must consider the pornographic practice of bukkake:

 

"Here, men ejaculate in women's faces, and the women are required to act as if they enjoy it [...] What's being elicited from the women is an act of simulation. The humiliation is not adequate unless they are seen to be performing an enjoyment they don't actually feel. Paradoxically, however, the subjugation is only complete if there are some traces of resistance. A happy smile, ritualised submission; this is nothing unless signs of misery can also be detected in the eyes." (474)

 

That's a brilliant insight into the staging of desire and reminds one of how cruelty remains one of the oldest pleasures of mankind ...[f] 

 

   

VI. 

 

One of the ironies of punk was that although it protested against boredom, it was in fact born of such and derived much of its impetus and inspiration from the fact that everything in the mid-1970s seemed so bloody boring to many teenagers looking for emotional rages as TV Smith would have it [g].

 

Fisher understands that and regrets the manner in which smartphones have effectively eliminated boredom via constant distraction. Now, young people are anxious and depressed, but never bored. 

 

Amusingly, he writes that he almost feels nostalgic for the "dreary void of Sundays, the night hours after television stopped broadcasting, even the endless dragging minutes waiting in queues or for public transport" (485). The smartphone provides a vast array of features and applications offering instant, on-demand entertainment - who could ask for more?

 

Fisher, for one - and I'd second him here: "Boredom was ambivalent; it wasn't simply a negative feeling that one simply wanted rid of. For punk, the vacancy of boredom was a challenge, an injunction and an opportunity ..." (485)    

 

In neutralising boredom and dispersing our attention, capitalism has made everything boring! 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018). Please note that all page references to this text will be given directly in the post.

 

[b] In the article 'How to Kill a Zombie: Strategising the End of Neoliberalism' (2013), Fisher writes: "Neo-anarchist doctrine maintains that we should abandon mainstream media and parliament - but our abandoning it has only allowed for neoliberals to extend their power and influence." (478). 

      Similarly, Fisher argues that the anarchist emphasis on direct action "conceals a despair about the possibility of indirect action" (478), yet it is only via the latter that "the control of ideological narratives is achieved" (478).  

      And later, in 'Limbo is Over' - a k-punk post from April 2015 - Fisher even breaks ranks with his then hero Russell Brand and encourages people to get out and vote: "It's hard not to have some sympathy with Brand's disdain for voting [...] But the problem is that popular disengagement from parliamentary politics suits the right more than us." (490) I don't know if that's true, but I tend to share Sartre's position on this question and agree that whilst it might make sense to sometimes vote against, one should never vote for.   

 

[c] See my post on Beckett's phrase from Worstward Ho (1983) dated 11 June 2013: click here.    

 

[d] Fisher would obviously challenge this. Indeed, in 'How to Kill a Zombie' he does precisely that, writing that whilst he doesn't want a return to "old-school Leninism", he would like to see the left get a little more organised and "overcome certain habits of anti-Stalinist thinking" (479), so that it might impose an effective programme of change and take seriously the task of actively dismantling neoliberalism. 

      In other words - and Fisher is explicit about this - the task for those on the left is not merely to rethink questions of solidarity, but retrain in the art of class war. I'm afraid this is all a bit too militant for my tastes.   

 

[e] Readers will recall how, in the Soviet Union, prorabotka sessions were held in workplaces and universities; or how, in Maoist China, class enemies were forced to publicly confess misdeeds and wear derogatory signs, thereby creating a culture of self-censorship and fear, wherein individuals closely monitored their own actions to avoid being labelled a regime opponent.

 

[f] In Daybreak (I. 18), Nietzsche argues that cruelty should not be viewed as a perverse aberration, but, rather, as one of the "oldest festive joys of mankind". In his view, the ability to inflict or witness suffering was historically not only a source of deep delight, but also an act via which "the community refreshes itself and for once throws off the gloom of constant fear and caution". 

      I am using R. J. Hollingdale's translation in the 1982 Cambridge University Press edition of Nietzsche's book originally published in German as Morgenröthe - Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile (1881).    

 

[g] I'm referencing the song 'Bored Teenagers', written by TV Smith of punk group The Adverts (which featured as the b-side of their hit single 'Gary Gilmore's Eyes' (Anchor Records, 1977): click here to watch them play the track live on The Old Grey Whistle Test (BBC2, Feb 1978). 

      And here's another classic punk track on the theme of boredom - written by Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks and included on their Spiral Scratch EP (New Hormones, 1977): click here. 

 

 

This post continues here.