Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Three

 

Front cover of the Italian edition of Mark Fisher's 

Postcapitalist Desire (2021) [a]

 

 

I.

 

When Mark Fisher asks his students if they have heard of György Lukács and his ideas of reification and totality [b] he is met with a proverbial wall of silence.

 

And, to be fair, who in 2016 would reasonably be expected to be au fait with a long-dead Hungarian Marxist whose major work - History and Class Consciousness - had been published almost 100 years earlier in 1923? 

 

Especially when, according to Fisher's own theory, his students - along with the rest of us - have been completely subsumed by capitalist realism, making the work of thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School - which includes Lukács - feel completely alien and not just dated.   

  

Fisher, however, insists that the above book remains extremely valuable (113) - once one gets to grips with its difficult language (although he concedes that it's "infuriating to read" (112) due to its dense, unyielding Hegelianism). 

 

It is also, says Fisher - keen to parade his acid communist credentials by adopting hippie terminology [c] - an "extremely trippy" (113) book, by which I think he means that it's a work that appears to be written by someone who has taken powerful mind-altering drugs and likely to induce strange effects in the reader. 

 

For Fisher, Lukács describes a world that feels like a hallucination, yet is terrifyingly real; he shatters the illusion that forces us to see the manufactured, exploitative reality of capitalism as the natural condition of man. In other words, his work acts like a psychedelic agent, destabilising the common-sense of capitalist realism. 

 

Far out, man! 

 

 

II.  

 

The best way to understand what Lukács is driving at, argues Fisher, is to read his work in relation to a more recent essay by the feminist scholar Nancy Hartsock. 

 

In 'The Feminist Standpoint' [d], Hartsock performs an act of theoretical translation by taking Lukács's concept of class consciousness and applying it to the field of gender studies, developing in the process what we now know as standpoint theory [e].

 

If, for Lukács, the bourgeoisie cannot (and will not) see the true nature of capitalism because their class privilege depends on maintaining the illusion and only the proletariat has a structural interest in perceiving reality, then, for Hartsock men, as a sex, also view the world through an idealised lens that is blind to the shit that women have to accept and deal with. 

 

It is only the latter who, from their marginalised and subordinate position, are able to form not merely a different perspective, but see things as they really are.

 

In sum: Fisher wants to show his students that desire (and reality) look radically different depending on where you stand in the world. The dominant class mistakes its narrow view for universal truth, while the marginalised see both the illusion and the underlying machinery at work.  

 

That's the theory at least - one that would leave Nietzsche laughing his head off! [f]   

 

III. 

 

For Fisher, standpoint theory is a way to break from postmodern relativism and to ground truth back in material practice. A standpoint is so much more than merely a view or perspective, precisely because it is constructed in material practice and what Fisher calls group consciousness. 

 

And unlike the Titanic, group consciousness can actually be raised - and the higher it's raised, the better you'll feel about yourself. Why? Because you'll be freed from self-responsibility born of bourgeois individualism: 

 

"Once workers realise the problem is capital, not them [...] when women realise the problem is patriarchy, not them [...] then their consciousness has immediately shifted. You feel better! [...] You'll feel relief from the guilt and misery of having to take responsibility for your own life, which you shouldn't have to - despite everything neoliberal propaganda tells us." (119)

 

Obviously, I find this pretty objectionable - not as a liberal keen to defend personal agency, but as a Nietzschean for whom nothing is more contemptible than seeking relief from suffering via the construction of a feel-good philosophy founded upon herd morality [g]. 

 

I understand why it's so important for Fisher's critique of capitalist realism to deconstruct bourgeois individualism and the privatisation of misery, etc. But I find this blame-shifting to external systems problematic to say the least. Nietzsche would identify this anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal shift as simply another unfolding of the slave revolt in morals; something that ultimately results not in feeling better about yourself, but in hating others.

 

Acid communism may be Fisher's attempt to heal and empower - to raise consciousness among the proletariat - but, unfortunately, it more often than not traps its adherents in a mindset of reaction and ressentiment and ends with fantasies of punishment: "I don't know if anyone ever has fantasies about this - I know I do - about getting very powerful people sent to jail." (127-128)

 

 

IV.

 

I don't want to give the impression that I don't agree with many of the things Fisher says, because, actually, I do. Or, at any rate, I sympathise with some of his points (ironically enough from a shared class standpoint). 

 

For example, I think he's right to say that capitalism always prevents awareness amongst people that they could "live differently and have more control over their own lives" (132). And I think his concern about the mobile phone is spot on; essentially, it's a device designed to endlessly distract and make you available to the imperatives of capitalism anywhere and at any time (134).

 

People think they need a phone "in order to communicate" (135) with other people; that is to say, they need to buy an expensive product in order to relate to (and function within) the world. Fifty years ago, no one would have believed this. But today, this is the "level of domination" at which capital has encroached "on people's minds" (135).   

 

As Fisher concludes: "Nobody makes you own a phone. And if you do own it, nobody makes you go on social media. And, of course, if you're on social media, then you are producing for capitalism." (135-136)  

 

Today, we produce ourselves and we curate our own subjectivity [h]. 

  

 

V.

 

Fisher ends the third of his lectures on postcapitalist desire by reading out a series of passages from Lukács, all of which he seems to agree with; all of which seem rather dated to me. 

 

His hope in reading them aloud is that it makes them clearer: "It's not that I think, having read those out quickly, we can go home happy." (145). 

 

And next week (next post) ... more on consciousness raising and the last days of the working class in a lecture titled 'Union Power and Soul Power'. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we're a long way from Flatline Constructs ... [i] 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This Italian edition of Fisher's text was trans. by Vincenzo Perna (Minimum Fax, 2022). I will, of course, be reading the original English work, ed. and with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books 2021). Page references will be given directly in the post. 

 

[b] György Lukács (1885 - 1971) was an influential political philosopher and literary critic whose concepts of reification and class consciousness shaped Western Marxism and inspired members of the Frankfurt School, including Marcuse. 

      By reification Lukács referred to the process in which social relations and institutions are transformed into abstract independent things that take on a life of their own, dominating individuals and preventing them from seeing the underlying realities of capitalism. By totality he refers to the methodological principle that frames society as a dynamic, historically evolving whole in which individual phenomena can only be understood through their relationship to the overarching social system. Interestingly, Lukács uses the latter to critique the former. Fisher thinks both concepts are crucial. 

 

[c] In his attempt to salvage the lost emancipatory desires of the 1960s and '70s counterculture, Fisher - rather embarrassingly - adopts the slang of the time. This strikes me as performative and, as indicated, a bit cringe and he deserves to be gently teased about it. 

      Further, by relying on words like trippy to discuss History and Class Consciousness, Fisher risks trivialising a deeply disciplined, militant text. Lukács was not advocating for a passive, drug-induced distortion of perception, but for a rigorous, collective, organisational awakening. I understand that Fisher views consciousness-raising as a fundamentally psychedelic act and that theory acts like a mind-altering drug, but, on occasions, his acid communism treats critical thinking as if it were all about the vibe.    

 

[d] See Nancy Hartsock, 'The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism', in The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (Westview Press, 1998), pp. 105-132.   

 

[e] Standpoint theory (also known as standpoint epistemology) is a philosophical and sociological framework arguing that an individual's social position shapes their understanding of the world. It posits that marginalised groups possess unique, valuable insights into societal power dynamics that dominant groups often miss. 

      Rather surprisingly for someone who has read Nietzsche, Fisher claims that he found standpoint theory mind-blowing when he first encountered it (again, note his irritating use of hippie terminology). This reaction feels somewhat naive. I would suggest that the idea that all knowledge is shaped by a specific viewpoint is what the German philosopher famously called perspectivism. 

      However, if pushed, one might concede that Nietzsche's concept is shaped by his aesthetics, whereas standpoint theory is more political in character. And also, of course, for Nietzsche there is no truth as such - only competing interpretations; standpoint theory, rooted in Marxism, maintains a stubborn commitment to objective truth. It doesn't simply say everyone has their own truth, but that the oppressed have a truer view of reality than their oppressors - which is all very flattering and all very comforting, but false.  

 

[f] See note [e] above for why Nietzsche would find this amusing (philosophically naive and absurd). 

 

[g] Nietzsche being Nietzsche, he can't help taking things to the extreme in the opposite direction and actively affirming the necessity of misery and pain for the achievement of greatness. In an amusing note found in The Will to Power which provides sharp contrast with what Fisher desires, Nietzsche writes: 

      "To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures."

      See The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), Book IV, § 910, p. 481.   

 

[h] This is essentially Byung-Chul Han's argument in The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2015). This English translation by Erik Butler is based on the original German text titled Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 2010). I have written a two-part post on this work; part one of which (published 7 November 2021) can be accessed by clicking here.   

      As far as I'm aware, Fisher never directly cites Han's work. However, there is significant overlap between his analysis of neoliberal society and contemporary culture and that given us by the South Korean-German philosopher and because of this commentators frequently group their books together (although I'm not sure that's entirely appropriate or advantageous to either thinker). 

 

[i] Flatline Constructs was Fisher's PhD thesis submitted at the University of Warwick in 1999. It was published by Repeater Books in 2025, with a Foreword by Adam Jones. I think it's my favourite work by Fisher and I have written a series of posts on it: click here. 

      For me, there's a real pathos of distance between that work and the lectures in Postcapitalist Desire, although some of his followers insist that there is a strong, underlying level of intellectual (and structural) continuity. I'll let readers decide on that question.  

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Two

Repeater Books (2021) [a] 

Design by JohnnyBull.uk 

 

 

I. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

II. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III. 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IV. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

V.

 

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

 

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

 

VI.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

  

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

 

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

 

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

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references given in the post (in round brackets) refer to this text. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture One

Repeater Books (2021) [a]

Design by JohnnyBull.uk

 

 

I.

 

Arguing that modern nihilism is essentially the collapse of all values into exchange value and that the revolutionary struggle has become a war waged by lovers, my doctoral thesis Outside the Gate [b] might have been subtitled: towards a postcapitalist politics of desire.

 

And so, I was naturally interested to see what Mark Fisher's approach to this subject would be in a lecture series he began (but didn't finish) at Goldsmiths in 2016 [c].  

 

 

II. 

 

Desire is one of those words that remains a key concept in critical thinking and is used widely across several disciplines (though not always in quite the same way). More than a simple biological urge, it tends to be viewed as a complex socio-linguistic construct that shapes human subjectivity, drives consumer culture, and interacts with power structures.

 

Like Fisher, I took my understanding of the term from Deleuze and Guattari, who critiqued traditional psychoanalytic views by arguing that desire is not caused by lack, but is a productive revolutionary force that shapes reality and builds new connections - an interpretation also found in the work of D. H. Lawrence, who writes that desire is a "strange current of interchange" [d] flowing between all things and bringing them into touch.

 

By the time I'd submitted the above thesis in March 2000, however, I was already a bit tired of the term and sympathetic to Foucault's argument that - despite everything - it always carried with it the assumption that human desires are not only innate but innately positive and healthy and that society only ever represses, exploits, or distorts them. 

 

Foucault famously told Deleuze he couldn't bear the word desire and preferred to speak only of bodies and their pleasures, arguing that localised pleasures acted as sites of transgression that could resist the normalising power structures that create categories of desire and identities [e].  

 

However, as I've mentioned, I'm intrigued to see what Fisher makes of this concept in his final lectures; how he excavates forgotten forms of desire from out of the past and invokes new and futuristic forms of desire beyond capitalism. 

 

And so, let us then turn to Lecture One: What is Postcapitalism (7 November 2016) ...

 

 

III. 

 

Fisher boldly puts to his class of students the following idea (much promoted by neoliberalism): Protestors against capitalism don't really want what they say they want ...

 

"What they want is all the fruits of capitalism - and ultimately that's why capitalism will win. They may claim, ethically, that they want to live in a different world but libidinally, at the level of desire, they are committed to living within the current capitalist world." (39)

 

They want global equity and justice, but they want their iPhones more.

 

Obviously, Fisher as a left-wing accelerationist and acid communist - i.e., one who believes in the existence of postcapitalist desire - rejects this. He thinks it's possible to "retain some of the libidinal, technological infrastructure of capital" (41) while at the same time move beyond it.      

 

Unfortunately, I don't share his political optimism rooted in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1970s. 

 

My thinking remains rooted (some would say trapped) much more in the cynical and destructive nihilism of the Sex Pistols and I'm a little disappointed as well as surprised to see Fisher, who had "previously been scathing about the legacy of the counterculture" [f], beginning to trust the hippies after all and daydream about what might have been if only the fusion of the counterculture and radical politics had "been more successful" (42) and lasted longer than it did.  

 

I agree with Fisher that Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) prefigures the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, but it's only incredible in that it's not to be taken seriously. I referred to it several times in Outside the Gate, but even at the time I recognised its utopianism was, like all forms of utopianism - even those presenting themselves as framed within Marxist materialism - too good to be true.  

 

Fisher tells his students that Marcuse is "a kind of precursor of Deleuze and Guattari" (42), but I think that's a little misleading - even if qualified by the use of the words kind of. 

 

For whilst it's true that Deleuze and Guattari admired Marcuse's intentions, they fiercely criticised his work in L'Anti-Œdipe (1972), arguing that Eros and Civilization does not go anywhere near far enough - in fact, even Wilhelm Reich went much further when it came to radically thinking the question of desire and society. 

 

Marcuse - and Fisher must know all this - continues to frame desire through Freud's lens of repression (and lack); fails to break out the Oedipal triangle; and, finally, maintains a dualistic division between work and play, which Deleuze and Guattari wish to dissolve.  

 

IV.

 

And then there's the question of consciousness ... Something Fisher is looking to raise in order to challenge the "ambient political assumption" (43) of capitalist realism that there's no alternative to the free market [g]. 

 

When it comes to consciousness raising, Fisher says we can all learn from feminist activists and members of various civil rights movements; i.e., people who like to share experiences in support groups, insist that the personal is political, and examine how different forms of inequality and subordination intersect.  

 

Obviously, while raising awareness does not automatically fix things or bring about meaningful change, it is, arguably, the crucial first step toward challenging the status quo. 

 

However, as someone who has sat in on a number of seminars and meetings designed to politically enlighten, let me tell you, they can also be boring as fuck and waste huge amounts of time; they can also quickly become echo chambers in which pre-existing views and prejudices are reinforced.    

 

Fisher seems to be particularly concerned with class consciousness, which is understandable given his background. Born in 1968 in the East Midlands to working-class parents - his father was an engineering technician and his mother a cleaner - Fisher's perspective was fundamentally shaped by his childhood experiences and he would later argue that being working class involved a deeply internalised feeling of ontological inferiority [h].  

 

As an Essex boy also born in the 1960s to working-class parents - my father was a printer at the Bank of England and my mother a housewife who had part-time jobs cleaning - I absolutely understand what he means. My own political consciousness was raised when I was about six years old and my mother told me a story about how my father was once knocked off his bike as he cycled to work by one of the bosses in a big car who didn't even bother to stop; that told me all I needed to know about class.    

 

 

V.

 

The final lecture that Fisher gave - in week five (5 December 2016) - was a reading of Jean-François Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1974) and I'm looking forward to hearing what he says about a work that, in Fisher's own words, makes the particularly strong case that "there's no possible retreat from capitalism - there's no space of primitive outside to which we can return, we have to go all the way through capitalism" (45) now, like it or not.  

 

It's a shame that we never got to hear his thoughts on the subjects due for discussion in weeks six through fifteen - including accelerationism, cyberfeminism, and the work of Baudrillard - but there you go; the course was, as Matt Colquhoun puts it, "tragically interrupted" [i]. 

 

And it's kind of touching that, apparently, for the first few weeks after his suicide "students continued to use the seminar room during the module's scheduled Monday morning time slots to sit together and remember their lecturer" [j]. This mournful vigil eventually transformed into a self-organised reading group - a collective act that tells us something not insignificant about Fisher's impact. 

 

 

VI. 

 

Opening things up to his students, Fisher encourages them to share their thoughts on the course structure and content. He hopes that they will supply what is missing - namely, ideas drawn from the world of art and culture, suggesting that the role of aesthetics in political theory is often "underestimated by elements of the so-called Old Left" (50).    

 

He also hopes they'll interrogate the term postcapitalism, which he uses in preference to communism or socialism, words "tainted by association with past failed and oppressive projects" (50). Fisher argues that postcapitalism also implies victory:

 

"If you're talking about postcapitalism, it implies that there's something beyond capitalism. It also implies [...] a victory that will come through capitalism. It's not just opposed to capitalism - it's what will happen when capitalism has ended. It's not some entirely separate space [...] we're not required to imagine a sheer alterity, a pure outside." (50-51)

 

I have to say, I'm not sure about this: the prefix post doesn't always mean beyond or after when used in a cultural and/or philosophical context, does it? Take, for example, postmodernism - a term that implies neither a simple temporal progression nor a clear victory over modernism. It signifies a critical engagement with and a transformation of the root word rather than what comes after.

 

To be fair, Fisher recognises the somewhat complicated (even ambivalent) relationship between capitalism and postcapitalism; the fact that we might enjoy the pleasures and products it provides but still want something else, something more, something different. The fact is, capitalism and postcapitalism have overlapping timelines and the latter relies on the former in order to make its critique. 

 

Rather than think in terms of victory or progress, it would be better to view postcapitalism as capitalism coming to terms with its own ambiguities, limitations, and, indeed, radical possibilities - or does that make me capitalocentrist?    

 

 

VII.

 

In response to a question from a student, Fisher mentions his concept of acid communism and Matt Colquhoun is surely right to say that he uses his new lecture-seminar series "to workshop his next book" [k], which he defines here as psychedelic consciousness plus class consciousness; i.e. the becoming-hippie of Arthur Seaton.  

 

Again, as I think I've indicated, acid communism is not an idea I'm convinced by, though it's an interesting turn of phrase in which each term modifies the other and breaks them out of existing associations.   

   

I am more onside with Fisher when he says that one of the things most needed is a politics free from ressentiment. 

 

He suggests that solidarity might be crucial to the building of such. However, because solidarity is "tainted by association with Leninism" (61), he prefers the term fellowship - a more Lawrentian-sounding term, although - ironically - the word originally referred to a type of business consortium [l].  

 

 

VIII. 

 

At the end of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Mellors sends Connie a letter in which, amongst other things, he sets out his vision of a postcapitalist world, arguing that communal regeneration was possible once men and women realised that life and the pursuit of money are not one and the same thing:

 

"'If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend [...] if they could dance and hop and skip, and sing and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash [...] They ought to learn to be naked and handsome, and to sing in a mass and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on [...] Then they wouldn't need money. And that's the only way to solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness, without needing to spend.'" [m]

 

I thought of this when Fisher introduced the idea of folk politics to his class - a concept developed (but not shared) by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, which argues that radical politics should consist of "'localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism'" carried out by people "'content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations'" (62) [n].

 

Fisher also rejects folk politics - and I can see the problems. On the other hand, however, I worry about the revival of grand political narratives and those who think in terms of great events and the total transformation of society.  

 

It would seem to me that acid communism can only succeed if it learns how to be "content and constant in invisible activities" [o] and change is administered in what Nietzsche calls small doses over long periods of time. Rome wasn't toppled in a day. And: "The chicken does not break the shell out of animosity." [p]    

 

 

IX.

 

I had to smile at Fisher's confession that he doesn't know anything about economics - particularly as a friend of mine bought the book hoping to learn something new and insightful on this subject (which he teaches). 

 

I did try to pre-warn him that Fisher was basically a cultural theorist more interested in the impact of capitalism on mental health, the arts, and desire rather than the risk of inflation or what to do about the trade deficit. 

 

More interested in suggesting, for example, that The Beatles provide a great example of what a post-work society might look like:

  

"They didn't have to work. They'd made enough money, surely, by the early Sixties to just not work [q]. Then their most interesting, experimental stuff emerged [...] partly because they were freed from the pressure of having to worry about a salary [...]" (76). 

 

Fisher then asks his class: "Is that a silly example or not?" (76), which, perhaps from politeness, is a question left hanging (though I think we all know the answer).    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references given in the post (in round brackets) refer to this edition. 

 

[b] Stephen A. Hall, Outside the Gate: Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation Mediated via the Work of D. H. Lawrence (University of Warwick, 2000): click here. This thesis was supervised by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Michael Bell. A revised version was published in 2010 by Blind Cupid Press.  

 

[c] The course was supposed to last for fifteen weeks, but Fisher killed himself on Friday the 13th of January 2017, so the remaining ten weeks of the seminar did not go ahead as planned. The course syllabus (along with suggested reading) is included as Appendix One in Postcapitalist Desire (211-216).  

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's Two Years Before the Mast', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 109. 

 

[e] Deleuze, in turn, expressed his hatred of the term pleasure, which for him marked an interruption of the immanent process of desire. See 'Désir et plaisir', in Magazine littéraire, Issue 325 (October 1994), pp. 59-65. Note that this text was actually written in 1977 as a private letter from Deleuze to Foucault (via their mutual friend François Ewald).   

      An English translation of this text by Melissa McMahon can be accessed via the Monash University website: click here. It can also be found in Deleuze's Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975 - 1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 122-134.        

[f] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 1. 

 

[g] See Colquhoun's Introduction for an interesting discussion of Fisher and the idea of consciousness raising, pp. 15-17. 

 

[h] See the article 'Good For Nothing' in The Occupied Times (19 March 2014): click here. The piece can also be found in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 668-670 (the phrase 'ontological inferiority' is found on p. 669).

 

[i] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 29. 

 

[j] Matt Colquhoun, Appendix One, Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 211.   

 

[k] Matt Colquhoun, 'No More Miserable Monday Mornings', Introduction to Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire ... p. 9.

 

[l] Fellow derives from the Old English fēolaga, which translates literally to 'one who puts down money in a joint undertaking'. So a fellowship was originally a group of partners in property or business. It was only later that it took on the broader modern meaning of a community of people sharing common interests.  

 

[m] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 299-300. I discuss the contents of Mellors's letter in Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 258-261. 

 

[n] Fisher is quoting Srnicek and Williams writing in '#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics', in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Urbanomic, 2014), p. 354. 

      Just to be clear, the authors reject folk politics in favour of a model that is 'at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology' and which 'seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow'.   

 

[o] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Book V, § 534, p. 211.  

 

[p] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 305. 

 

[q] I don't think it's being overly pedantic to point out that, as a matter of fact, although by 1964 The Beatles were generating astronomical revenues, their personal wealth was limited and cash flow was restricted by poor early recording contracts, high British taxes, and manager Brian Epstein's initial handling of their business and publishing rights. 

      It was not until the following year that the four members of the band finally had millions of pounds in their personal bank accounts. 

       

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 .