Notes on Mark Fisher's Flatline Constructs (2025): Chapter Three

Zer0 Books (2025) [a] 

Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk 

Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

 

I. 

 

I've heard it said that Mark Fisher doesn't actually bring anything new to the table; that he merely assembles ideas from several other thinkers. But that's unfair and, I think, inaccurate. Yet even if it were true - so what? 

 

One of the reasons I admire Fisher - apart from his intelligence and refusal to be bound by conventional academic concerns and references - is because he and I share the same technique as writers; we both cut up dead bodies of text and stitch stolen ideas together in a Gothic manner à la Dr Frankenstein.  

 

Fisher's genius - like mine - is being able to provide the electric spark or lightning flash of inspiration which makes the assembled piece of intertextual theory-fiction breathe with new life [b]. It may not make him an original [c] thinker, but the process yields fascinating results, demands skill and hard work, and marks him - like me - as an artist and alchemist [d].

 

Anyway, let us now proceed with our reading of Fisher's Flatline Constructs - Chapter Three: Xerox and Xenogenesis: Mechanical Reproduction and Gothic Propagation ... I'll try not to "pause and be philosophical" too often, "because from a philosophical standpoint it's dreary", I know [e].   

 

 

II. 

 

The central topic of this chapter is the deterritorialisation of sexual reproduction. 

 

Baudrillard chooses to imagine a posthuman future in terms of cloning and the triumph of sameness "across all levels of culture - sexual, political, aesthetic" (143), amounting to a complete denial of difference (including death). This, however, is not something Baudrillard welcomes, as his controversial term for it - the final solution - indicates [f]. 

 

Deleuze and Guattari, meanwhile, prefer to take a more Gothic line and "oppose all reproduction (sexual or otherwise) to a model of 'contagion' [...] which takes its cue from vampirism, lycanthropy and disease" (141). In other words, anorganic propagation - which bypasses the need for mum and dad and replaces old school methods of breeding with inhuman and alien models - is a key feature of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and they seem to be in favour of it. 

 

For Fisher too, contagion is the preferred option because it is messy, unpredictable, and viral - the ultimate model for how a counter-culture spreads through a population like a virus. 

 

However, before any impressionable young readers decide to forswear all conventional sexual activity and remain childless, I would like to remind them that Deleuze was happily married to the same woman for almost forty years and that they had two children together, conceived - as far as I know - in the old-fashioned manner.

 

As more than one commentator has noted, there's a stark contrast between Deleuze's relatively conventional middle-class life in Paris as an academic intellectual and his philosophical writings with Guattari on non-normative experiences and revolutionary ways to escape oppressive systems and institutions. 

 

And Fisher, of course, was also married with a young son at the time of his death, in 2017. So one assumes he either dropped the views expressed in Flatline Constructs, or was never actually advocating for the literal elimination of biological reproduction and the family unit. That he was, rather, just exploring theoretical and fictional ideas and offering an analysis of how non-living objects, structures and systems replicate [g]. 

 

Back in the day, when Nick Land was exerting his influence over the philosophy department at Warwick via the CCRU, Fisher's writing delighted in using transgressive ideas and provocative terminology - such as alien xenogenesis - to snap readers out of their complacency. But his philosophical preference for contagion over filiation needs to be viewed as an aesthetic and political metaphor for how culture, desire, and anti-capitalist resistance might best replicate. Later choices made in his personal life, therefore, do not necessarily contradict or invalidate his earlier ideas.

 

Then again, treating theory-fiction as just a metaphor - or isolating a thinker's biography from their text - feels a bit feeble. Arguably, it does a disservice to the very philosophical tradition Fisher was operating in and to say he didn't literally mean what he wrote erects a conventional, comforting binary that his own work sought to dissolve. 

 

When viewed from this less generous perspective, the tension between Fisher's philosophy and his domestic life cannot be neatly explained away. It represents a genuine, lived contradiction of the kind that in my punk days I would have been extremely intolerant and unforgiving of. 

 

Still, it does help explain how he ends up preaching acid communism and reclaiming the domestic and social sphere from capitalist realism, rather than purely trying to escape it via machinic xenogenesis.

 

 

III. 

I'm pleased to see that Fisher recognises Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) as "in many ways, the founding text of the modern genres of science fiction and horror" (148) and central to which is the displacement of sexual reproduction:

 

"Victor Frankenstein's achievement in artificially synthesising the means of reproduction is presented, by Shelley, as the moment where alchemical ambition is vindicated by electro-libidinal science; there is no need to posit a supplementary, extra-material, or supernatural dimension - Nature can overcome itself." (149)  

 

This sentence nicely captures the genius of Shelley's novel and the dream of perfect (asexual) reproduction is one that "Baudrillard tracks to its latest manifestation in cloning and genetic engineering" (149) (even though Baudrillard does not, in fact, mention this work).   

 

Of course, as we all know, the story of Frankenstein and his creation does not end well; the latter takes its revenge - as all objects are wont to do; even brooms, as Goethe illustrates in his poem 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' [Der Zauberlehrling] (1797).     

 

However, as we noted earlier, Fisher thinks Baudrillard's work is a bit limited and old-fashioned in this area. He prefers to follow Deleuze and Guattari, for whom "there is something else involved here beyond a straightforward 'revenge' of an 'object'" (153). 

 

Fisher is interested in processes that go beyond reversibility and instead "require a whole reconfiguring of questions of temporality and causality under the sign of rhizomatics and a - strictly non-metaphorical - sorcery" (153).    

 

I'm not quite sure I understand what he means here, but I think it has something to do with the surplus value of code and what Nick Land called machinic desire - something which involves "'self-regenerating circuitry, cumulative interaction, auto-catalysis, self-reinforcing processes, escalation, schismogenesis, self-organisation, compressive series, deutero-learning, chain-reaction, vicious circles, and cybergenics'" (153) [h]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) ... 

 

Like many readers, I wondered when we would mention the latter novel: another rightly celebrated work which, as Marshall McLuhan points out, was one of the first to explore "'the curious ways in which machines were coming to resemble organisms'" (154) whilst at the same time the people who tended them "'were taking on the rigidity and thoughtless behaviourism of the machine'" (154) [i]. 

 

Before speaking of this book, however, Fisher wants to clarify where Baudrillard and Deleuze-Guattari part company. It's all to do with code - or, more precisely, the question of decoding. They agree that the dominant operating systems today run primarily on code rather than language, but it is Deleuze and Guattari who "follow the logic of code through to the point where it yields something other than banal reiteration of blind programme" (154).

 

In other words, Deleuze and Guattari "emphasise the way in which all code includes its own margin of decoding" (154) - Baudrillard allows for no such possibility (no such hope of escape). 

 

What's more, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that when two or more codes come into contact "strange, unheralded new assemblages can emerge" (154) - this is the surplus value of code and it results in rhizomatic relationships and drives becoming as a form of aparallel evolution. 

 

All these ideas are introduced by Deleuze and Guattari during a discussion of Erewhon and Butler's book is at the heart of the third chapter of Flatline Constructs to do with machinic replication which, it is important to remember, is not the same as mechanical reproduction (the latter referring only to "the mass reproduction of the same object by machines" (156) and not the propagation of machines themselves).  

 

Two other points it's important to note: (1) machines do not make other machines in their own image; machinic replication, in other words, is a heterogeneous form of production; (2) unlike Marx, "Butler does not believe that the agency ascribed to machines is a false reification [...] but that machines may indeed grow to possess [...] a 'diabolic' intelligence that will begin to [...] erode human power" (158).

 

With reference to the latter point, it's amazing to recall that Butler was writing eighty years before Alan Turing and John McCarthy began to posit the idea of artificial intelligence [j]. Largely remembered as a brilliant (if iconoclastic) literary outsider, Butler's relative obscurity as a writer - outside of certain circles - is regrettable I think. He not only challenged Darwin, but provides those of us who wish to take a pop at Kant with ammo:

 

"'The Book of Machines' emerges [...] as a kind of counterblast to Kant's Critique of Teleological Judgement, in which the special status Kant gives to humanity - as the agent capable of consciousness, purposiveness, and moral action - is radically put into question." (158)

 

In sum, what Butler discovers "is the cybernetic diagonal cutting across the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism" (159) and, in so doing, he effectively collapses it. No wonder Deleuze and Guattari admire him so - and no wonder Fisher too is such a fan. Butler obliges us to see - and to admit - that the organic is "inextricable from the inorganic" (161) - just consider a hen's egg! [k]    

 

 

V. 

Readers will recall I mentioned sorcery above in section III and, as if by magic, Fisher returns to this idea in section 3.4 of Flatline Constructs ...

 

For Deleuze and Guattari, writing in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), sorcery is all about "the production of unanticipated consequences" (164) and the "engineering of the unexpected and the unprecedented; the art of avoiding the probable" (164). 

 

The becoming-animal of the human being is an act of sorcery; one that involves demonic alliance and processes of "swarming, teeming, seething and spreading" (165) - all terms familiar from horror fiction which Fisher is happy to incorporate into his Gothic Materialism, but what really interests him is the crucial question of "a non- or anti-sexual mode of propagation" (166) or nuptials against nature. 

 

For Deleuze and Guattari and for Fisher, sexual reproduction doesn't do the trick; it merely passes on characteristics in an arborescent manner; in other words, it's the "capturing of becoming into a hierarchically organised, pre-determined and punctual system" (167). 

 

It might produce offspring who have their father's nose and mother's eyes, but "the dualistic sexual machinery of bio-reproduction screens out heterogeneity by minimising diversity" (167). Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari don't want children, they want monsters, born not of the family unit but the demonic pact. 

 

I refer any newlyweds to section II above before deciding how this should best be (not interpreted, but) decrypted ... 

 

Fisher, meanwhile, suggests we study Neuromancer if we want to see an "exemplary working-out, in fiction, of the themes of mechanical reproduction and gothic propagation" (169). He describes this novel as a sorcerous narrative, which perhaps it is. But it's also one I find unreadable, so I think I'll close this post here, if I may, and initiate a discussion of Chapter 4 in a subsequent post.      

 

I would just say in closing, however, that Flatline Constructs has reminded me - in a good way - about just how out there some of the work produced in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s was - particularly from those affiliated with the (never officially sanctioned) CCRU. 

 

More conventional members of the department viewed this material with increasing consternation, and embarrassment, particularly as it veered away from traditional scholarship toward experimental, occult, and sci-fi infused theory-fiction, but, thirty years later, I am increasingly drawn to it and regret the fact that, at the time, I didn't allow my own research to be infected by a little more Gothic Materialism and a little more madness.   

 

  

Notes

 

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

 

[b] My understanding of Frankenstein's monster as pieced together from body parts taken from numerous stolen corpses and reanimated by the use of electricity, owes more to the movies than Shelley's novel of 1818. In the original text, Frankenstein discovers the secret principle of life and it's this that allows him to painstakingly develop a method to vitalise inanimate matter, though the actual process is left rather vague. Nevertheless, the good doctor does assemble body parts, so I think my comparison stands. 

 

[c] Along with authenticity, originality is one of the concepts I despise the most: I don't care if my posts on Torpedo the Ark lack originality. And besides, as Oliver Goldsmith once wrote in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), we can "pardon the want of originality, in consideration of the exquisite talent with which the borrowed materials are wrought up into the new form".

      Or, as Roland Barthes would argue, the post-as-text is not expressive of an author's unique being. It's explainable only through other words drawn from a pre-given, internalised dictionary. Every new post is therefore, in some sense, already a copy of a copy of a copy whose origin is forever lost and meaning infinitely deferred. To put that another way, if, as I do, you accept the idea of intertextualité, then questions of authorship and originality go out of the window and Síomón Solomon is right to claim in his study, Hölderlin's Poltergeists (2020), that every piece of writing is already a translation at some level and the author, whilst masquerading as a unified subject, is actually a multiple assemblage - like Frankenstein's monster - who speaks with many tongues (some of which are forked). 

 

[d] I am essentially self-plagiarising a post titled 'My Name is Victor Frankenstein' published on TTA on 6 March 2022: click here. Again, whilst I know that text recycling and double dipping annoys the Timmys of this world who think it unethical, I don't have an issue with it.  

 

[e] Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Doubleday, 1968), p. 146. For context, see Flatline Constructs, pp. 139-140, where the passage from which this line is taken is quoted in full.  

 

[f] I have discussed Baudrillard's work in this area in several posts on Torpedo the Ark, often in relation to the fictional writings of Michel Houellebecq. See, for example, 'Revenge of the Immortals' (22 April 2013) - click here - and/or 'Michel Houellebecq and Nellie Mackay on the Question of Cloning' (4 Sept 2022): click here. 

 

[g] Perhaps like Nietzsche, Fisher should have added a sort of disclaimer at the front of his thesis: "A book for thinking nothing else: it belongs to those for whom thinking is a delight, nothing else."

      See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed.Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), p. xxii. As Kaufmann explains in his Introduction, this line was written in a draft preface to a projected (but ultimately abandoned) work to be titled Der Wille zur Macht. 

      The original notebook entry is dated spring 1888 and can be found in the critical German edition of Nietzsche’s works - the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) - edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari; see Nachlass 14 [80]. It reads: Ein Buch zum Denken, nichts weiter: es gehört denen, welchen Denken Vergnügen macht, nichts weiter … 

 

[h] Fisher is quoting Land writing in 'Machinic Desire', Textual Practice, Vol. 7, Issue 3 (1993), pp. 471-482. The essay can also be found in Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 319-344. 

      Land's influence on Fisher's thinking in Flatline Constructs is significant and shouldn't be downplayed or overlooked - as it is by Adam Jones in his Foreword. Discussing Fisher's involvement with the CCRU, Jones chooses not to mention Land by name, referring to him simply as "a man who would go on to suffer a complete mental collapse, only to emerge as the philosopher of 'Neoreaction'" (Foreword, 5). That, I think, is quite outrageous. 

      As for non-metaphorical sorcery, a friend of mine who knows more about this kind of thing explains that for members of the CCRU this also referred to the idea that things can loop back from the future to physically alter the present. This hyperstitional notion was sometimes called Lemurian cultural acceleration. I will say more about sorcery in section V. 

 

[i] Fisher is quoting McLuhan writing in The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 99.  

 

[j] The term artificial intelligence (AI) was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955. He first introduced it to the public in a 1955 proposal for the legendary 1956 Dartmouth workshop. 

      Prior to that, British mathematician Alan Turing published 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' (1950) and proposed a method to determine if a machine can demonstrate human-like intelligence (the so-called Turing Test). 

 

[k] See Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1985), p. 199: "The shell of a hen's egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is [...]; the hen makes the shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery." Fisher quotes this in Flatline Constructs on p. 161. 

      The hard shell of a hen's egg is composed of 95% calcium carbonate - the same mineral found in limestone and chalk. It contains no living cells, blood vessels or organic tissue. Something worth considering, I think, next time you have one for breakfast.   

      Ultimately, for Fisher, the famous question of the chicken and the egg - which came first? - is a non-question, for they are both parts of the same complex, intertwined system or circuit. Forget about the linear question of origins, chicken and egg constitute one another in a cybernetic loop.  

 

 

Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons

Nick Land and Die Nacht der Amazonen [a]

'We are the Amazons. We are the killers of beasts and men. 

Wild ourselves, we inhabit the wild places. Freedom courses in our blood, 

and death whispers at the tip of our arrows. 

We fear nothing, fear runs from us. Try to stop us, and you will feel our rage.' [b]

                                                          

 

I. 

 

For a thinker who once dismissed politics as "the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind" [c], Land spends an awful amount of time addressing political issues and discussing modern philosophy in relation to capitalism. 

 

And although he was never a traditional leftist even in his early writings, it's amusing to note just how deeply rooted in Marxist analysis, postcolonial theory, radical feminism, and femdom fantasy his thinking was in the late-1980s.   

 

 

II. 

 

In his essay 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest' (1988), Land is at pains to argue that the Sage of Königsberg's philosophy cunningly disguised the violent, exclusionary realities of free-market capitalism, such as racism, by hiding them behind abstract, universal moral ideals:  

 

"Kant was able to remain bourgeois without overtly promoting racism only because he also remained an idealist, or in other words a Christian [...] and identified universality with ideality rather than with power." [d] 

 

Western modernity may portray itself as enlightened and speak of freedom and equality, but it's structurally dependent on class and racial hierarchies in order to exploit labour and foreign resources. Liberals want to reap the benefits of the bourgeois order, but they want to do so without feeling morally compromised by its more brutal aspects and Kant provides them with a way to wriggle off the hook and evade their guilt.      

 

That makes Kant not just a crypto-theologian, but also an apologist for capitalism; someone who enables the liberal elite to preach universal human rights whilst, at the same time, build a global economic system that is radically inhuman and which will eventually do away with mankind altogether.   

 

 

III. 

 

Not that Land objects to the death of man, of course. 

 

In fact, he wishes to accelerate the forces that capitalism itself unleashes by dissolving all borders and boundaries, all structures and identities (particularly national structures and identities). Ultimately, Nick's objection to the bourgeois order is that it never goes far or fast enough toward its own external limit. 

 

Similarly, his objection to old school socialism is that it isn't revolutionary enough; being as it is all too male, pale, and stale it doesn't offer the unrestrained programme born of the "theoretical and libidinal dissolution of national totality" (77) that he longs for. 

 

And so, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, at the end of 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest', Land turns to militant feminists, such as Monique Wittig, for support ...   

 

 

IV.

 

Wittig - a French philosopher and lesbian theorist - is also known for her fictional writings, including the hugely influential novel Les Guérillères (1969) [e].  

 

This term, a neologism, is sometimes translated into English as 'warrior women', but Land has a penchant for the idea of new Amazons, who, in his view, are alone capable of destroying the patriarchal and nationalistic structures that act as brakes on global capitalism, finally unleashing the market's unrestricted flow of desire.

 

Land writes:

 

"The only resolutely revolutionary politics is feminist in orientation [...] It is because women are the historical realisation of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communicative function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they are invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands." (78)

 

Whilst praising Luce Irigaray's meticulous analysis of patriarchal power, Land says the political solutions she suggests "are often feebly nostalgic, sentimental, and pacifistic" (78). It is only Wittig who has "adequately grasped the inescapably military task faced by any serious revolutionary feminism" (79). 

 

Land argues that liberating women from an ethno-geographical identity will result in a revolutionary subversion of the state.  He dismisses liberal feminism and reformism as co-opted mechanisms that simply give women access to wealth while leaving the brutal patriarchal-capitalist system intact.

 

But Land also insists that uprooting the patriarchal endogamy requires a fierce willingness to fight the modern state and he posits feminist violence as crucial. His new Amazons, as schizonomadic agents of feminist chaos, will end the bourgeois order (or Human Security System) not with love and kisses, but bullets and bombs. 

  

He finds it dispiriting that women have historically shown "enormous reluctance [...] to prosecute their struggle with sufficient ruthlessness and aggression [...] feminism is often particularly fastidious in this respect, even reverting to absurd mystical and Ghandian [sic] ideologies" (79).  

 

Land calls this reluctance idealistic recoil and insists that terror and atrocity are "the very motor" (79) of politics and that a "revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell" (79). 

 

This is what Land terms a harsh truth ... 

 

He ends by relating this call to "escalate the cycle of violence without limit" (79) in the name of overthrowing "the contemporary world order " (80), back to Kant, whose philosophy remains for Land at the heart of the problem:

 

"With the abolition [...] of Kantian thought - a sordid cowardice will be washed away [...] But the only conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst." (80) [f] 

 

 

V.

 

So, what are we to make of all this? 

 

Well, if you're a Nick Land fanboy or happen to fantasise about dominant women, then I suppose you'll say he's speaking here with the voice of a "revolutionary and a feminist male who has shifted into hyperaccelerationist mode" and cheer him on as he sides with futural amazons fighting a guerrilla war that "displaces five thousand years of patriarchal endogamy and the rule of androcracies" [g].

  

But if, like me, you wrote your PhD on various post-Nietzschean forms of politics (including the politics of desire, cruelty, and evil), then you might have certain reservations about those who speak in favour of revolutionary violence and justify even the most atrocious acts and echo Deleuze and Guattari's call for caution at all times [h].  

It seems to me that Nietzsche was right to say that whilst revolutionary violence can be a source of stimulation via the resurrection of the "most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages" [i], it can do no more than this. For change of a truly profound nature, it requires something else. Not something noisier or more brutal in character, but, on the contrary, something that administers small doses of change "unremittingly over long periods of time" [j].  

 

In other words, the revaluation of all values involves patience. 

 

Unfortunately, that's probably not a Landian virtue and it might explain why Land fails to give his own philosophy a plausible political identity (although I'm sure he would say that was not something he ever wanted to do). 

 

It might also help to explain how it is Land goes from expressing a desire to escape from all fatherlands to promoting a neoreactionary philosophy based on corporate techno-feudalism and ends up living in Shanghai - which is ironic when one recalls that Nietzsche often characterised Kant as Chinese [k].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] While the Amazon shown here is an illustration for the 1937 programme for Die Nacht der Amazonen by Albert Reich, this is not to imply that Land would have been anything other than horrified by the open-air Nazi propaganda and variety event held annually in Munich during the period 1936-39. 

      It may have delighted thousands of German spectators with its mix of mythology, racial ideology, and near-naked showgirls dancing or parading on horseback, but I can't imagine it would have been Nick's cup of tea and, as we will see in this post, his Amazons are of a very different kind to those lusted after by the leaders of the Third Reich. 

 

[b] Anne Fortier, The Lost Sisterhood (Ballantine Books, 2014), p. 3. 

 

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

 

[d] Nick Land, 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), p. 72. 

      Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post between round brackets.

 

[e] Les Guérillères is today considered a pivotal text for feminist and lesbian thinkers around the world. It was first translated into English by David Le Vey in 1971 and published in a recent edition by the University of Illinois Press, 2007. Wittig clearly had an influence on Land - particularly the idea of Amazonian women leading a violent revolution. Also, for Land, heteronormative lifestyles are one of the major brakes on capital and so Wittig's lesbianism is valued in and of itself. 

 

[f] This invoking of new Amazons is similar to Nietzsche's calling upon a new breed of barbarians who come from the heights and combine spiritual superiority with an excess of physical well-being. See The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), IV. 899-900, pp. 478-479. 

 

[g] S. C. Hickman, 'Nick Land: Amazons and the Post-Capitalist World', The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and the Digital Arts (16 December 2016): click here. 

 

[h] In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write: "Staying stratified - organised, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever." See ATP, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 161. 

      Land of course violently repudiates Deleuze and Guattari's warnings against the dangers of going too far, too fast and the need to exercise caution. In Land's eyes, this 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 [D&G] had previously so effectively challenged". - Mackay and Brassier writing in their 'Editor's Introduction' to Nick Land's Fanged Noumena ... p. 30.

 

[i] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 463, p. 169. 

      Admittedly, this is Nietzsche writing in one of his calmer periods and one can find plenty of examples - even in the same work - of him offering support for grand politics and "the greatest and most terrible wars" - HAH, I. 8. 477, p. 176.  

 

[j] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), V. 534, p. 211.

 

[k] Nietzsche called Kant the 'Chinaman of Königsberg' because of the latter's rigid, dogmatic, bureaucratic moralism. See, for example, Beyond Good and Evil § 210 and The Anti-Christ § 11. 

 

 

For the first post in this series of posts on Nick Land's writings in Fanged Noumena (2011), please click here .   

 

 

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.