Zer0 Books (2025) [a]
Cover design by Rebecca Wright / charcoalstudio.co.uk
Reimagined by Stephen Alexander (2026)
'The more artificial you can make it, the greater the chance of its looking real.' [b]
I.
As is only right and proper for an Introduction, Fisher sets out some of his key terms (my emphasis in bold):
"Gothic flatline: a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate, and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive." (14)
This anorganic continuum, says Fisher, is the "province of the Gothic" (15).
Just to clarify, he adds:
"The Gothic flatline designates a zone of radical immanence. And to theorise this flatline demands [...] the theorisation of immanence. This thesis calls that approach Gothic Materialism." (15)
Fisher also informs us of his major aim: to pursue cybernetics to its limits by asking 'What if we are as 'dead' as the machines?' "Much of what follows is an attempt to answer this question" (15) and reach the Gothic flatline.
As might be apparent, Fisher is deeply indebted in his thinking to Deleuze and Guattari (and their reading of the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer). For Deleuze and Guattari, the Gothic refers us to nonorganic life and has nothing to do with anything "supernatural, ethereal or otherworldly" (15) [c].
That said, Fisher does rather want to sex up the idea of materialism by thinking it "in terms closer to Horror fiction than to theories of social relations" (15) and demonstrate how the anorganic "is not the dead matter of conventional mechanistic science; on the contrary it swarms with strange agencies" (16).
Now, without wishing to anticipate what Fisher says later in Flatline Constructs, I think it might be helpful to clarify this point by stressing that the anorganic (or nonorganic) is entirely different from the inorganic. Whilst the latter is - like a Monty Python parrot - completely devoid of life, the former is a vibrant, unorganised form of intensive life operating on a flatline.
Unfortunately, things get complicated because techno-capitalism, argues Fisher, has collapsed these distinctions, rendering human subjects inorganic and machines anorganic and thus it is that we end up discussing "the gleaming products of technically sophisticated capitalism" (16) in the "ostensibly archaic terms familiar from Horror fiction: zombies, demons" (16), etc.
II.
Finally, there are two other names who are central to Flatline Constructs: Freud and Baudrillard ...
Freud emerges in Fisher's study as "a somewhat ambivalent figure, sometimes an ally, sometimes a foe, of Gothic Materialism" (17). The problem is, although Freud flirts with the idea of the inanimate becoming active in his essay The Uncanny (1919), he ultimately dismisses it.
As for Baudrillard (whose work at times parallels that of Deleuze and Guattari, but which is by no means compatible) [d], his interest in cyberpunk fiction and film combined with "his fascination with automata and simulacra, make him both the object of a Gothic Materialist theory, and a contributor to it" (18).
Baudrillard matters for Fisher also because it is Baudrillard "who is most associated with the emergence of theory-fiction as a mode" (19), putting an end to theory and fiction as separate genres. In Flatline Constructs, Fisher wants to take Baudrillard's thinking in this area very seriously "and approach fictional texts, not simply as literary texts awaiting theoretical 'readings', but as themselves already intensely theoretical" (19) [e].
III.
Chapter One of Fisher's thesis "examines the nexus of postmodernism, cybernetics and the Gothic" (20) and is titled 'Screams, Screens, Flatlines'. It opens with an analysis of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) or as those who prefer novels to films know it, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick, 1968); a key cyberpunk text.
The chapter also "aims to show ways in which Cybernetics has been haunted by the Gothic" (20) [f] and how the language of Horror is important for Deleuze and Guattari's cybernetic realism or what Fisher calls the hypernatural - a concept that is positioned "as an intensification of naturalism, and by opposition the supernatural" (20).
Before examining these things in more detail, let me just confess that I have minimal interest in the kind of films and novels that fascinate Fisher. I've seen Blade Runner - and, to be honest, I found it a bit boring; but not half as boring as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), which sits alongside George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) as the book I most wish I'd never attempted to read.
So, while I'm curious about Fisher's work, I move in a very different cinematic and fictional universe.
IV.
Dick-Gibson-Burroughs-Ballard-Cronenberg ... Fisher wants to envelop this literary-cinematic line along with a legion of other names - Lovecraft, Freud, Marx, Deleuze, Guattari, Worringer, McLuhan, Jameson, Baudrillard - into Gothic Materialism conceived as an alternative postmodernism.
He explains that the writers and filmmakers with whom he mostly enjoys interfacing are already haunted by Gothic Materialism. They are not postmodernists "who process reality through a textualist or linguistic grid, but theorists who understand 'postmodernity' as an essentially material phenomenon, describing its effects primarily in terms of the impact that new telecommercial configurations have on the human nervous system" (27).
They (to a greater or lesser degree) understand that man is no longer alienated, but ecstatic - ecstasy being defined as a free-floating experience that arises "when the subject is jacked into late capitalism's network of cybernetic communications" (28) and retreat to a private space is no longer an option.
This terminal lack of retreat breeds a distinct gothic dread; not a traditional psychological fear of castration or external penetration by technology, but a realization that we no longer possess any organic interiority. We have been turned radically inside out - everted into the circuit (a thought that might make even an android scream).
Once jacked in this manner, it's naive to still posit a "transcendent and authentic human agent" (29) who might resist and overcome capital. In fact, rather than think of human subjects, better to speak of non-subjectified forms of individuation - i.e., individuals who have become one with their environment. And nobody helps us conceive of such posthuman individuals than some of the names listed above:
"Gothic Materialism locates in Baudrillard's ecstatic communication, Gibson's Cyberspace, Jameson's total flow and Cronenberg's Videodrome, the map of hypermediatised capitalism that is decoding privatised subjectivity." (31)
V.
To recap: Gothic Materialism = cybernetic realism.
And the key feature of all cybernetic systems is feedback - both positive and negative.
Which is why criticism of the system and forms of resistance to it are futile; for both, as Baudrillard pointed out, can easily be fed back into a system that "doesn't work by suppression, or repression, but through participative processes" (40).
For Fisher, the fact that there is a "convergence of cybernetics and sorcery on the Gothic Flatline" (43) appears to be a paralysing predicament to say the least. However, the flatline is where everything happens; "the site of primary process [...] not a line of death but rather a continuum enfolding [...] beyond both death and life" (43).
I'm not sure that is meant to be encouraging, but it sounds strangely positive to my ears - almost hinting at a kind of dark and secret utopianism. There may be no hope for humanity in a conventional sense - no god to save us or revolution to liberate us - but by flattening human identity into an immortal, self-assembling network of digital code and alien desire, the flatline offers a release from personal neurosis into a state of inhuman euphoria.
Ultimately, the Gothic Flatline excites because it invites us to merge with a vast cosmic machine (at least I think that's what's on offer).
It's a shame that The Matrix was released in the same year Fisher submitted his PhD (1999), as he might have found it a useful point of reference, even if Baudrillard was unimpressed by the film and thought it a fundamental misunderstanding of his work [g]. As it is, he relies heavily on Neuromancer, in which the term flatline is central.
VI.
As Adam Jones rightly said in his Foreword to Flatline Constructs, Fisher likes to promote the idea of a Gothic Marx; one who emphasised the vampiric character of capitalism:
"The modern world for Marx is peopled with the undead; it is indeed a Gothic world haunted by spectres and ruled by the mystical nature of capital." (44)
But - and this is important - as capitalism develops and mutates it "outstrips Marx's most horrified descriptions of it" (45), just as the Gothic "escapes codification as a generic, psychological or fantastic mode to become the most persuasive materialist account of the contemporary socioeconomic scene" (45).
Fisher continues:
"For cyberpunk, Marx's most Gothic language has become his most realistic, whereas his organicist protestations against capital look like antique sentimentalities." (45)
Recognising this, Deleuze and Guattari's work "inherits and supplements Marx's Gothic vocabulary" (45), which is why they like to speak of vampires, werewolves, and the body without organs - although it should be noted that there's nothing horrific about the latter as open system full of possibilities; it's the organ-isation of the body into an organism or "homeostatically sealed and hierarchically arranged bio-container" (49) that should give us the shivers.
VII.
Of course, embodiment isn't everything; and it certainly doesn't underwrite subjectivity.
As Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr discovers, a brain in a liquid-filled jar "can have the experience of subjectivity - all the memories and dreams that post-Freudian man thinks define him uniquely - so long as the right material conditions are simulated" (51) [h].
Thus - and this is something which again I know some readers will have trouble accepting - the jar matters just as much as the brain inside. Identity needn't be something essential or even personal; it can be engineered just like a prosthetic leg.
And if that's the case, then does it really matter if you are dealing with an old school human or a genetically engineered bio-synthetic humanoid (what they term replicants in Blade Runner)?
Fisher concludes section 1.4 of his opening chapter by pointing out that debates around the question of whether Deckard is or isn't a replicant miss the Gothic Materialist implications of the film:
"Since, in Blade Runner, the criteria for rating the human above the replicants [...] have now evaporated, Cartesian epistemological questions have been obsolesced by functional / operational criteria. Since you could be a replicant [...] it is already as if you were a replicant, a desiring-machine. Becoming-replicant is therefore not a matter of identifying oneself as a technical machine; it is not a question of identification at all, but of recognising all identity as construction." (54)
I have to admit, that's a brilliant insight - and probably more relevant to the world we live in today than anything I wrote in my PhD.
VIII.
In the end, it all comes down to (an art of) lines: organic (naturalistic) lines and geometrical (mechanical) lines. And of course, the Gothic flatline ... These lines determine how we interact with our environment and, indeed, what kind of environment exists to interact with.
In brief, we might think of organic lines as the ones that shape nature and the representation of nature in classical art. People who love these flowing, undulating lines - think rhythymic waves and rolling hills - are seduced by a relaxing, harmonious aesthetic and will probably imagine Mother Earth with exaggerated female curves à la the Venus of Willendorf.
Geometric lines, on the other hand, are rigid and right angled; they can be found in abstract art, modernist architecture and mathematics. Those who love the precision of these lines are seduced by a fascist aesthetic and wish to impose structure and order onto a chaotic world; they value logic and wish to impose systems, grids, or networks in order to exercise control.
As for the Gothic flatline, well, as we have discussed, this is beyond the binary of the organic and geometric and dissolves the distinction between them. In other words, it flattens the biological and technological on to the same plane; things become entangled so it becomes impossible to say where biology ends and machinery begins.
In other words, for Fisher and his cyberpunk chums, humans are no longer independent organic beings who simply use tools and machinery; rather, we are fully integrated parts of a massive techno-digital landscape: "In the move from Naturalism to hypernaturalism [or cybernetic realism] the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism [...] collapses." (60)
And there's no point in calling for either a neo-vitalism or a neo-thanatropism, as neither will provide a satisfactory description for the world today. What we need is a concept - or at least a term - that we can use to discuss what arrives on the flatline - and Gothic fiction gives it to us: undeath (which is, of course, synonymous with unlife).
"Following Freud [...] we can think of unlife and undeath not as opposed to life - or death - but as designating a continuum which includes, but moves beyond, the so-called living." (62) [i]
Notes
[a] All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition of Flatline Constructs.
[b] Francis Bacon, in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 148. Quoted by Fisher in Flatline Constructs, p. 35. At the close of chapter one of Flatline Constructs, Fisher suggests that Bacon is the painter who best helps us visualise the world from a Gothic Materialist perspective.
[c] It's because Fisher wishes to disassociate his theory of Gothic Materialism from some of its existing cultural associations, that I find Graham Harman's description of Flatline Constructs as "a precious gift from the other world, where he [Fisher] now resides", so profoundly mistaken. If I were the publishers, I'd remove this remark from the front of the book.
[d] One of the aims of Flatline Constructs, says Fisher, is to "play off Deleuze-Guattari and Baudrillard against each other" (18).
[e] This is one of many points on which Fisher and I are in accord. In my own doctoral thesis completed at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s (and submitted just a few months after Fisher submitted his), I had a section of the Introduction titled 'On Dissolving the Genre Distinction Between Philosophy and Literature'.
See Outside the Gate: A Study of Nietzsche's Project of Revaluation as Mediated Via the Work of D. H. Lawrence (University of Warwick, 2000): click here.
[f] Fisher has the slightly irritating habit of capitalising words that don't require capitalisation. For the sake of consistency, I follow his lead and adopt his practice. If Gothic requires a big G, still there is no reason as far as I can see why cybernetics should come with a capital C.
[g] In a k-punk post titled 'dis-identity politics' (25/04/2006), Fisher claims that he is "no fan of the Wachowskis' Matrix" - even if it did become a "massively propagated pulp mythos" which "suggested that what counts as 'real' is an eminently political question".
See k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 136.
[h] I'm referencing The Man with Two Brains (dir. Carl Reiner, 1983), starring Steve Martin as Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, a pioneering neurosurgeon.
Whilst not mentioning this film - do CCRU members ever enjoy comedies? - Fisher does mention Gibson's novel Count Zero (1986) in which Josef Virek lives as a disembodied consciousness inside a life-support vat and notes that "if subjectivity can be experienced by a brain in a vat [...] what is interesting [...] is not the subjectivity but the vat" (47).
[i] Without knowing anything of Fisher's work at the time, I explored similar ideas in a six-part series of talks at Treadwell's in 2006 entitled Thanatology.
See the first two essays - 'On Dissolving the Distinction Between Life and Death' and 'All Being is a Being Towards Death' - in The Treadwell's Papers, Vol. II, (Blind Cupid Books, 2010). Or click here for a thanatological fragment based on material in the first of these essays posted on TTA (27 Sept 2014).
For a post discussing Adam Jones's Foreword to Fisher's Flatline Constructs (5 June 2026), please click here.
