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.   

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: On the East Midlands Accent Vs the Oxford Voice

Ay up, me duck! Three famous East Midlanders: 

Jason Williamson, D. H. Lawrence, and Mark Fisher  

 

 

Thanks to books such as Capitalist Realism (2009) and his influential k-punk blog (2003-16), Mark Fisher remains a prominent voice in cultural criticism and political theory. 

 

However, born in Leicester and raised in Loughborough as he was, that voice comes with a distinctive East Midlands twang; an accent which, by his own admission, lacks "urban glamour, lilting lyricism or rustic romanticism" and is "one of the most unloved in the UK" [a]. 

 

I'm not sure that's entirely fair or accurate - as a Lawrence scholar, I've been to Eastwood on numerous occasions and have always found the local accent (and use of terms drawn from dialect) rather lovely on the ear. However, Fisher insists that the East Midlands accent is "heard so rarely in popular media that it isn't recognised enough even to be disdained" (361). 

 

I can believe also that within snobby academic circles where the Oxford Voice [b] prevails, he was regarded as having some sort of speech impediment and advised to "suppress the lazy Leicestershire consonants and articulate [his] speech in something closer to so-called received pronunciation" (361). 

Something which, with a certain degree of shame, he did - unlike vocalist with the post-punk duo Sleaford Mods Jason Williamson, who makes "no such accommodation to metropolitan manners" and remains "disgusted at those who speak in fake accents" (361). 

  

Interestingly, although the appeal to the local (and authentic) is "usually smug and reactionary" (361), Fisher argues that's not the case when it comes to the question of accent. Because the English ruling class speak "in more or less the same accent wherever they come from" (361) - The Oxford Voice - the determination to retain a regional accent is therefore "a challenge to the machineries of class subordination - a refusal to be marked as inferior" (361).

 

A bit like Lawrence rubbing his readers' noses in hardcore East Midlands dialect and profanity in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) - "'Tha'rt good cunt, though, aren't ter? Best bit o' cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha'rt willin'!'" [c] - Williamson obliges listeners to "adjust to his accent, idiolect and references" (362). 

 

Obscenities course through his rhymes as freely they do the speech of Oliver Mellors:

 

"If Williamson's anger often seems intransitive - his fuck offs are sheer explosions of exasperation, directed at no one in particular, or at everyone - it's underscored by a class consciousness painfully aware that there is nothing which could transform disaffection into political action." (363) 

 

I'll end this post with the same question that Fisher ends his piece: Who will make contact with the anger and frustration that Williamson (like Mellors before him) articulates - and who can convert such into a new political project? [d] 

 

    

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 361. Future page references will be given directly in the post. 

     Fisher's review of the Sleaford Mods' album Divide and Exit (2014) and singles collection Chubbed Up (2014) originally appeared in The Wire, Issue 362 (April 2014), p. 58. It can be read online by clicking here. 

 

[b] The 'Oxford Voice' is a term coined by D. H. Lawrence to satirise the upper-class English accent that is often known as RP. In a poem of that title found in Pansies (1929), Lawrence mocks it as "so seductively superior". It can be found in Vol. 1 of the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (2013), p. 376.  

      Stephen Fry reads Lawrence's verse - in his best Oxford Voice - on The Show People Podcast with ‪Andrew Keates‬, recorded live at The Two Brewers, Clapham, on 12 June 2025: click here. 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 177. This is Oliver Mellors addressing Connie. For a discussion of the use of dialect as erotico-elementary language in D. H. Lawrence, see the post published on 3 December 2020: click here. 

 

[d] This question seems particularly pertinent today of all days when local elections are being held across England, Scotland and Wales and the two traditional parties - Labour and the Conservatives - are both predicted to do badly, whilst Reform UK and the Green Party are set to make significant gains.     

 

  

Readers who are interested in this post might like to check out the East Midlands Voices project at Nottingham Trent University (headed by Professor Natalie Braber, who teaches linguistics in the School of Social Sciences): click here.  

 

Musical bonus: Sleaford Mods, 'Jobseeker': click here. Originally released as a single in 2013, it also features on the compilation album All That Glue (Rough Trade, 2020) and seems to have been a favourite of Fisher's. 

 

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: On Mark Fisher's Sense of Wonder

'Is it possible to reproduce, later in life, the impact that books, 

records and films have between the ages of fourteen and seventeen? 

The periods of my adult life that have been most miserable have been those 

in which I lost fidelity to what I discovered then ...' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Having now read the opening three parts of Mark Fisher's k-punk - his collected and unpublished writings from the period 2004 - 2016 - I have a pretty good idea of his taste in books, music, film and television, and if I were to compile a short index of his favourite authors, pop stars, and directors it would certainly include the following names: 

 

J. G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, William Burroughs, Ian Curtis (Joy Division), David Cronenberg, Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music), Fredric Jameson, Franz Kafka, Jacques Lacan, Nick Land, Dennis Potter, Simon Reynolds, Mark E. Smith (The Fall), Spinoza, and Slavoj Žižek.    

That means - to paraphrase Barthes - that whilst we share certain points of reference, his body is not my body and in order to enjoy his work I have to overcome a certain irritation and remain silent and polite when confronted by ideas and tastes which I do not share [2].  

 

 

II.  

 

I suppose everyone has favourite books, records, films and TV shows. 

 

But very few people are affected so profoundly as Fisher was affected by those books, records, films and TV shows that he encountered in his adolescence and which - woven deep into his consciousness - stayed with him throughout his life and gave shape and meaning to his own work.

 

As D. H. Lawrence writes of the nonconformist hymns that, despite their banality, meant so much to him, we might say of those post-punk songs that Fisher continued to adore at forty just as he had at fourteen; "there has been no crystallising out [...] no hardening into commonplace" [3] - they still filled him with an experience of joy and wonder (despite his now also possessing a sophisticated theoretical appreciation of their genius). 

 

That's why Fisher is more than simply an excellent critic; he has retained his sense of wonder. When the sense of wonder has gone out of a man, says Lawrence, he may still possess the most marvellous intelligence, but he is essentially dead inside. 

 

 

III. 

 

The fact that Fisher retained his experience of wonder - understood as an openness to that which lies beyond standard perception and cognition - explains also why he was so highly sensitive to the weird and the eerie [4].

 

Indeed, I would argue that Fisher's hauntological fascination for the past - particularly for lost futures - was also born of wonder, not mere nostalgia, and that while capitalist realism acts as a pervasive grey curtain of apathy, boredom and depression, a sense of wonder enables us to rip small holes in it (thus letting in a little speckled chaos).   

 

As mentioned earlier, I don't share all of Fisher's loves and hates - or even most of them; from the above index there are only two or three names that I would add to my own list of favourites and some in whom I have no interest at all. 

 

However, I do agree with him on the importance of continuing to read the books, play the records, and watch the films and TV shows that meant so much to us as youths, in order that 'worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of wonder implanted in the teenage soul' [5].       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Mark Fisher, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 -2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 24.  

 

[2] See the fragment titled 'J'aime, je n'aime pas' in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 116-117. 

      Readers who want to know my favourite novels, films, pop songs, and sitcoms should visit the TTA Index page and go to the posts listed under 'These Are a Few of My Favourite Things ...'   

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Hymns in a Man's Life', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 130-131.

 

[4] See Fisher's book The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016). And to read the first part of a two-part post on the book, click here.   

 

[5] I'm paraphrasing Goethe in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96). 

 

 

For two earlier posts in this TTA goes k-punk series, please click here and/or here.   

 

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: Book Meme

 

Mark Fisher and three of his intellectual heroes: 

Messrs. Kafka, Spinoza, and Ballard 

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

II.           

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IV.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

  

Notes

 

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

 

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

 

[c] Ibid., p. 57. 

 

 

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

 

 

CRA5 H26 (A Brief Note on Serendipity, Synchronicity, and Coincidence)

CRA5 H26 (SA/2026)

 

'I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash ...' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

How odd that after reading a k-punk post discussing J. G. Ballard's novel Crash (1973) - a post in which Fisher describes the work as deeply indebted to the imagery of Helmut Newton and "a perverse counterpart to Kant's kingdom of ends" [2] - I should go for a walk and immediately encounter the above vehicle ...

 

Some might say this is serendipitous; others may see it as evidence of synchronicity; personally, however, I think the term coincidence covers it. 

 

But it's worth perhaps briefly considering these three distinct concepts separated by ideas of agency, meaning, and causality ...

 

 

II.

   

Serendipity involves the random occurrence of fortunate or pleasant events; i.e., unintentionally coming across things or finding oneself in unexpected situations that have some kind of positive value. I suppose we might see it as an elevated form of good luck and as something that allows happy accidents to become opportunities. 

 

The term was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, inspired by the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip (1557). For philosophers, serendipity requires sagacity - i.e., the active intelligence to recognise the value of an unexpected finding. 

 

Synchronicity is a bit spookier and refers to an acausal connecting principle bridging internal and external events; i.e., human psychology and the material world. Jung, who coined the term, described events that are connected in this rather special way as meaningful coincidences. For those who love to grant significance and structure to the universe and believe that their dreams really can come true, synchronicity is not only explanatory but evidence that these things exist. 

 

Coincidence, meanwhile, is purely a statistical phenomenon with nothing spooky, meaningful, or necessarily fortunate about it. It's all about probability, baby! And the Law of Truly Large Numbers, which teaches that if enough independent variables interact over time, highly improbable intersections will occur purely by chance, carrying no inherent meaning or cosmic intent.

 

To put all that in a nutshell: while all three concepts involve intersecting timelines, serendipity requires you to be on the ball; synchronicity requires you to be prone to mysticism; and to understand the nature of coincidence requires an ability to do the math.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] J. G. Ballard, 'What I Believe', a prose poem originally published in the French magazine Science Fiction, Issue 1 (Jan 1984): click here to read on BJA Samuel's website.    

 

[2] Mark Fisher, 'let me be your fantasy', posted on his k-punk blog on 27/08/2006, and included in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 44-48. The line quoted from is on p. 47.