(Repeater Books, 2018) [a]
I started the blog because it seemed like a space in which to maintain
a kind of discourse that had all but died out, with what I think are
appalling cultural and political consequences. - k-punk (2005)
I.
According to Simon Reynolds, 'Mark Fisher's k-punk blogs were required reading for a generation' [b].
I suppose I belong to that generation: what some might refer to as the post-punk generation; born in the '60s; children of the '70s; graduating in the 1980s [c]. However, I must confess to having never read a word written by Fisher until relatively recently. This despite the fact that he and I were both in the philosophy department at Warwick as doctoral students in the 1990s, and shared many of the same obsessions and points of reference.
I suppose, post-Warwick, I had my own projects to keep me occupied. I certainly had nothing to do with the blogosphere until November 2012, when the Little Greek set up Torpedo the Ark and suggested I might enjoy publishing posts more than merely scribbling private notes in writing pads. She was right, of course; as the 2,700 or so posts published since that date testify.
Still, better late than never ... And having just bought a copy of k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016) - a big, fat book containing many of the posts from his seminal blog - I now hope to discover for myself the "elegance and reach of Fisher's writing, the evangelical urgency and caustic critique that seared through his rapid-fire communiques" [d].
I suspect the philosophically-informed posts will interest me more than the ones on pop music and film. I'm particularly interested to investigate how Fisher moves from being a Ccru-inspired accelerationist who exalted "the border-dissolving flows of capital and scorned socialism as a decrepit early 20th-century relic" [e] to becoming such an absolute opponent of neoliberalism and a pioneer of acid communism.
This post, however, is merely setting the stage for such an investigation and future posts will engage more fully with Fisher in his k-punk alias. For when I say the k-punk book is big and fat, I mean exactly that; if you include the index, it's 750 pages long and so, obviously, I can't be expected to perform the kind of close reading that I recently subjected Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) to.
It took me four days to read through the less than ninety pages of this book and write a five-thousand-word, three-part post [click here]. At that rate, it would take me over a month to work line-by-line through K-punk and, frankly, as much as Fisher is a fascinating writer, I don't have that level of interest, stamina, or dedication (certainly not when the sun is shining).
What's more, it would be disrespectful to Fisher to pretend that I could provide a definitive overview or, worse, place his thinking in a nutshell. So, all I'll do - for now at least - is simply share some thoughts on the foreword by Simon Reynolds and the introduction by the book's editor, Darren Ambrose. But I'll publish future posts discussing Fisher's writings in due course.
II.
I can only hope that, when I'm dead, I have a friend like Reynolds to say something kind and insightful about me and my work. Clearly, the latter misses his friend and the chance to converse with him on a wide range of subjects:
"There are many days when I wonder what Mark would say about this or that [...] the clarity he could bring to almost anything [...] I miss Mark's mind. It's a lonely feeling." (7)
I was pleased to be reminded that Fisher's worldview - certainly in the days when he belonged to the band D-Generation - was shaped by punk and a love-hate relationship with Englishness. That makes it easier for me to feel affection for Fisher. As does the fact that he so effectively dissolved the distinction between popular culture and high art, as well as that between philosophy, politics and literature:
"Often, and most crucially, Mark wrote about many - sometimes all - of these things at the same time. Making connections across far-flung fields, zooming in for vivid attention to aesthetic particulars and zooming out again to the widest possible scope [...]" (2)
I'm not quite comfortable with the idea that he had a total vision and that his ideas were heading somewhere; that a "gigantic edifice of thought was in the process of construction" (3), but we can let Fisher's modernist ambitions pass for the moment, even if it's a crucial point of difference between the two of us: Fisher the grand architect and systematiser; me a believer in the ruins and advocate of chaos.
He and I may share a certain writing style - "rigorous and deeply informed" (3), but non-academic - but whereas the "urgency in Mark's prose came from his faith that words really could change things" (3), I have no such faith (as a nihilist, I have little time for progressive optimism).
And whilst Fisher wants to make "everything feel more meaningful, supercharged with significance" (3), I want to void everything of meaning and hollow out all substance and significance.
In other words, despite a certain degree of affection, I wouldn't say Fisher and I were comrades-in-arms. And, despite some uncanny similarities, I wouldn't say we were brothers under the skin. I think he and I would have been, at best, respectful frenemies had we ever known one another [g].
That said, I very much look forward to reading his k-punk posts to see if they're as provocatively brilliant and as fizzing with fervour as Reynolds insists. I'll try to read them in a good spirit, although as Reynolds points out, there's always an undercurrent of competition between writers and "severity towards 'the opposition' is the mark of seriousness, a sign that something is at stake and that differences are worth fighting over" (5) [h].
III.
I think my ambivalence toward Fisher is probably already pretty clear.
On the one hand, I admire the fact that he was not - and never wanted to be - "a conventional academic writer, theorist or critic" (9); that his writing was, as Darren Ambrose says, "too abrasive, polemical, lucid, unsentimental, personal, insightful and compelling for that" (9).
But, on the other hand, I am far more sympathetic to the postmodernism that a great deal of his writing was "undertaken in vehement opposition to" (9) [i]. I prefer irony to sincerity and would wish to curb Fisher's enthusiasm and grand ambition to invent the future and reshape human experience. I mean, c'mon, Mark: wtf d'you think you are? (You're not the Messiah, you're just a very clever boy.)
I may say I wish to torpedo the ark, but I'm aware that I'm never going to be able to sink the bloody thing with just a few smart lines written in a short post; mostly, one blogs so as to be able to explore one's own obsessions and refine one's own writing style - as is recognised by Ambrose, with reference to Fisher:
"k-punk posts encapsulated an intellectual moment of reflection on the world: they are responsive, immediate, and provide an affectively charged perspective." (10)
But they're not going to bring about the Revolution or provide a path to Utopia. Ambrose like other fans and followers of Fisher may find in his work "reasons for continuing, against the odds, to hope for an alternative to the dystopian present" (11), but I'll be happy if the k-punk posts occasionally provide an amusing idea or turn of phrase.
A bit like Nietzsche's Will to Power, surely Fisher's blog remains first and foremost a space for thinking the thought from outside - nothing else. That is to say, thinking a type of thought that stands in contrast to the interiority of most philosophical reflection and the positivity of our scientific knowledge; a type of thought that we find not in mysticism, but in that hybrid genre known as theory-fiction.
As Ambrose writes, Fisher had a strong commitment to "fugitive discourses which have been legitimated by neither the official channels of the establishment [...] or traditional forms of publishing" (11). That, again, is something on which he and I are as one.
Fisher's loyalty may be to Spinoza and Kafka - mine to Nietzsche and Lawrence - but we agree that "it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split [...] The two should come together again" [i].
If anyone wants to find an alternative to capitalist realism, then let them read the above four authors; or let them read k-punk and/or Torpedo the Ark. You certainly won't find any traces of acid communism in the latter [j], but there's a delicious poison (or pharmakon) at work (i.e., the playful production of différance).
I said earlier that, after I'm dead, I only hope I have as loyal a friend as Reynolds to say something kind and insightful about me and my work. I hope also that TTA finds an editor as skilled and sensitive to the task in hand as Ambrose, who does a excellent job in assembling Fisher's writings.
His aim was to "provide as comprehensive a picture as possible of the blog [...] by selecting pieces that reflect both its eclectic content, its theoretical pluralism and most of all its remarkable consistency" (15) and, from what I've read so far, flicking through the hundreds of pages, I think he's achieved that.
Hopefully, Ambrose also manages to retain "a sense of their immediacy [and] informality" (15), despite the fact that the work has been extracted and abstracted from its original format and the very specific context of the blog. I guess I'm about to find out ...
Notes
[a] This work was edited by Darren Ambrose and has a Foreword by Simon Reynolds. All page references given in the post refer to this 2018 edition published by Repeater Books.
[b] This was the title of a piece written shortly after Fisher's suicide and published in The Guardian (18 Jan 2017): click here to read online; or here to listen to an audio version on YouTube.
[c] Whilst Fisher, born in July '68, was pure Gen X, I belong more to the tail end of the Boomers (or what some sociologists now call Generation Jones), having been born in 1963 (the same year as Simon Reynolds). This gives Fisher and myself slightly different perspectives and means whilst I experienced punk in real-time as a 14-year-old adolescent, Fisher came to it retrospectively via the hybrid forms of post-punk.
[d] Simon Reynolds, 'Mark Fisher's k-punk blogs were required reading for a generation', see link above.
[e] Ibid.
[f] As mentioned, Fisher and I remained complete strangers to one another at Warwick and whilst he was a core member of the Ccru, I couldn't make head-or-tail of the wilfully hermetic publication ***collapse, even though I once contributed some artwork to it and was on amiable terms with Nick Land, who oversaw my progress as a doctoral student in the philosophy department, under Keith Ansell-Pearson's supervision.
[g] I agree with Reynolds that "it is this negative capacity - the strength of will to discredit and discard" (5) that keeps culture and criticism alive; "not wishy-washy tolerance and anything goes positivity" (5). As a philosopher, nothing is more important than to access nihilation.
[h] Ambrose praises Fisher for his "exemplary antipathy and negativity towards PoMo hyper-ironic posturing" - see his introduction, k-punk (2018), p. 12.
[i] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 154.
[j] Acid Communism was the proposed title for a book Fisher was working on at the time of his death (by suicide) in 2017. According to the unfinished introduction, the promise of such a post-capitalist ideology was "a new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving" (p. 687) - that's not quite what's on offer on Torpedo the Ark ...
This is essentially just an introductory post to a new series of posts inspired by Fisher's writings during the period 2004 - 2016, to be published intermittently over the coming months (that's the plan at least).
Regular readers will be aware that I have previously discussed Fisher's three published works - Capitalist Realism (2009), Ghosts of My Life (2014), and The Weird and the Eerie (2016) - on Torpedo the Ark in multi-part posts.
