An Epitaph for the Avant-Garde: A Review of Stephen Alexander's 'No More Heroes' - By May Spear

No More Heroes (SA/2026)  

 

Editorial Note 

 

May Spear is a former contributing editor to the now defunct French literary magazine  Pourquoi es-tu un con aussi odieux? Her post published below is a revised version of a text originally submitted in the form of personal correspondence and can be read as a riposte to the post previously published by Mr. Jeff Francis: 'No More Heroes 5: Stephen Alexander - The Performative Punk Poseur' (22 July 2026).  

 

 

******************************************

 

 

Opening Remarks

 

Stephen Alexander's recent series of posts titled 'No More Heroes' (14-17 July 2026) offers a profound case study not just in personal disappointment, but in cultural exhaustion, centred on four main characters: the punk provocateur Malcolm McLaren; the Dionysian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; the priest of love D. H. Lawrence, and, finally, the comic assassin turned court jester Larry David. 

 

By examining the deeper theoretical architecture connecting these chosen figures, we can discern three underlying thematic currents that unify his analysis of des héros aux pieds d'argile ... 

 

 

1. Capitalist Realism and the Closure of the Outside 

 

The primary architectural pillar supporting Alexander's entire series is the diagnosis of spatial collapse - specifically, the systemic closure of any radical Outside from which to mount a critique. 

 

McLaren, for example, believed he was operating in a volatile, shockable mid-century landscape where cultural terrorism and the politics of desire could threaten the Establishment. In reality, his libidinal subversions merely prototyped a highly adaptive, flexible market format. 

 

Larry David, meanwhile, operates entirely within the hyper-insulated, hyper-monetised ecosystem of cultural elites. His rage is no longer authentic; it is a synthetic, domestic product pre-formatted by high-end production companies and packaged as low-risk partisan entertainment. 

 

Thus Alexander reveals a sobering truth: the contemporary iconoclast is a structural impossibility because capitalism has colonised the very space of transgression and resistance. McLaren's anti-fashion called punk was absorbed into the high street, while David's once outrageous comedy has become a regular feature on billion-dollar streaming platforms. 

 

 

2. The Illusion of Libidinal Liberation 

 

A profound philosophical continuity in the series is Alexander's deployment of Michel Foucault to dismantle the romantic myths of sexual and existential liberation from power. 

 

Both Malcolm McLaren and D. H. Lawrence are subjected to an identical post-structuralist autopsy: both fell victim to the repressive hypothesis, naively operating under the assumption that power functions solely through censorship, prohibition, and denial. 

 

Not for the first time on Torpedo the Ark, Alexander masterfully pairs these two figures to show how this philosophical error manifests across different eras. 

 

Lawrence transfigured sex into metaphysics, unaware that treating sex as the ultimate, hidden truth of human being is the exact mechanism by which modern power categorises and disciplines the subject. 

 

Decades later, McLaren repeated this exact mistake, naively assuming that flogging fetish-wear and bondage trousers on King's Road would provoke a state insurrection, failing to see that he was simply pioneering a frictionless new consumer market. 

 

By linking Lawrence's 'austere monarchy of sex' to McLaren's 'pseudo-academic earnestness', Alexander exposes the tragic irony of the sex-radical; by speaking of desire ad infinitum, they do not evade power; they simply map its coordinates. 

Today, in 2026 - when every identity is instantly tracked by digital algorithms, their 'liberation' and free expression simply provide free data and something new to be commercially exploited.  

 

 

3. The Hermeneutics of Failure and the Comedy of Decline

 

The deepest, most melancholic tier of Alexander's critique addresses the temporal vulnerability of the hero and the tragic reality that an artwork or a philosophy is entirely dependent on the physical, decaying body of its creator. 

 

This creates a fascinating thematic bridge between Friedrich Nietzsche and Larry David, both of whom suffer from a profound failure of narrative control. Alexander frames this through two distinct modalities of failure: the tragedy of biological over-ripeness and the comedy of decline.

 

Nietzsche’s failure to 'die at the right time' acts as a literal, physical catastrophe. His eleven-year vegetative decline stripped him of his authorial agency, transforming his body into a 'living museum exhibit' and leaving his raw notebooks open to the parasitic, proto-fascist splicing of his sister. The body's failure to expire corrupted the semantic integrity of the philosophy itself. 

 

Larry David's failure is also one of timing, but it manifests as a slow slide into the comfy accommodations of elite compromise. Like Nietzsche hanging on the tree like a worm-filled apple, 79-year-old Larry David outlives his sharp, misanthropic 'social assassin' persona, declining into a petulant, partisan 'court jester' who blacklists friends to appease former First Ladies. 

 

In both instances, the iconoclast fails Zarathustra's ultimate test: the sovereign exit. Whether corrupted by physical decay and a controlling sister, or diluted by the softening comforts of extreme wealth, both thinkers failed to maintain narrative control over their own legacies. 

 

  

Conclusion 

 

Ultimately, Alexander's 'No More Heroes' cycle is a masterclass in compressed, evocative writing that sparks the kind of immediate cultural dialogue that more formal academic prose usually smothers under its own weight. 

 

By methodically exposing how his own primary influences were digested by the very structures they claimed to combat, Alexander has elevated the series of posts from simple expressions of personal disappointment into a unified work of philosophical mourning - an epitaph for the avant-garde. 

 

The 'No More Heroes' series leaves the reader with a haunting conclusion: in a 21st-century landscape governed by capitalist realism and digital algorithms, the iconoclast no longer exists as a dangerous agent of chaos. They exist, rather, as a pre-approved, highly profitable aesthetic category.

  

No More Heroes 5: Stephen Alexander - The Performative Punk Poser (A Guest Post by Jeff Francis)

No More Heroes 5 (Stephen Alexander)

(SA/2026) 

 

 

I received this by email: 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander, 

 

I have written a short post in the style and format favoured by Torpedo the Ark. Perhaps you might care to publish it as an addition to your 'No More Heroes' series (14-17 July 2026). I think it will amuse some of your readers; particularly those who, like me, found the series disappointing (to use your pet word of the moment). [1]  

 

Always happy for contributions from guest writers - even those that are cuntishly critical in character and come from authors unknown to me - here's the post (to which I've added one or two editorial notes).  

  

 

I. 

 

There is a famous early scene in The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991) when trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) first visits Dr. Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) in his prison cell. 

 

Rather rudely, he tells her that she looks like a rube with her good bag and cheap shoes. Well-scrubbed, and possessed of a little taste, but a hustling rube all the same; "not more than one generation from poor white trash".   

 

Momentarily taken aback by this, Starling eventually regains her composure and replies: 

 

"You see a lot, doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don't you - why don't you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you're afraid to." [2] 

 

 

II. 

 

I thought of this scene after reading Stephen Alexander's four-part series of posts titled 'No More Heroes' and I put the exact same challenge to him that Starling puts to Lecter. 

 

But I do so knowing that, like Lecter, Alexander cannot genuinely self-reflect. For his narcissism extends only to the surface, manifesting as a rigid ego-defense mechanism and a strange inability to integrate his shadow or look inwards. This is why, for all its superficial cleverness, his writing consistently lacks psychological insight and philosophical depth.

 

Consequently, I offer my own critical assessment of the 'No More Heroes' (NMH) series, exposing the internal contradictions, structural blind spots, and stylistic failings within these four specific case studies. 

 

My examination also reveals how Alexander - operating through a matrix of performative disillusionment and elite proximity - ironically positions himself as a candidate for the very heroism or critical authority he seeks to deconstruct.  

 

 

III.  

 

A close reading of the NMH series reveals two significant weaknesses that undermine its critical validity: 

 

Firstly, there is a methodological reliance on biography that elsewhere on his blog Alexander often condemns other writers for. He routinely substitutes a figure's personal, domestic, or existential choices for an interrogation of their actual ideas. 

 

Thus, for example, Nietzsche is judged not on the beauty and originality of his text, but on his failure to execute a clean, sovereign death (not for the first time on his blog we find Alexander fetishising the idea of suicide). Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a highly metaphorical work of philosophy and Alexander subjects it to an all-too-literal reading that is both crass and ungenerous. 

 

Larry David, meanwhile, is dismissed because of a 2026 sketch show's production credits and rumors of a social snub involving the actress Cheryl Hines. Alexander downplays David's massive contribution to TV comedy and decades of excellent work in favour of sharing some real-time celebrity gossip.

 

By tying the validity of an idea to the purity or narrative perfection of the biography that produced it, Alexander commits a deeply conservative critical error; falling into the kind of fallacy that betrays the more radical methodology he invokes elsewhere. 

 

Secondly, in the NMH series Alexander sets up a kind of no-win matrix - a conceptual trap where failure is structurally predetermined, thereby rendering the entire analysis tautological. 

 

If an icon dies young or self-destructs, they are dismissed as a failure. If, however, they live long enough to navigate the complexities of ageing and shifting cultural landscapes, they are condemned as overripe worms (Nietzsche), sell-outs trapped in the past (McLaren), or compromised court jesters (David). As for Lawrence, well, apparently, he was an idealist and crypto-theologian all along whose sexual metaphysics are now simply laughable. 

 

Similarly, if their ideas are ignored, they are irrelevant. But if their ideas achieve cultural traction, they are dismissed as recuperated commodities. By building an analytical framework where every possible path leads to an accusation of compromise, Alexander ensures his own conclusions are entirely self-serving. 

 

The NMH series does not, therefore, analyse the mechanics of cultural transformation; it merely functions as a screen for the projection of his own psychic stagnation, wallowing in a predetermined and pessimistic narrative of inevitable defeat. It's a lose-lose scenario and I would never want to play a game of heads or tails with Alexander.   

 

 

IV. 

 

If the ultimate objective of the NMH series is to dismantle the very category of the hero archetype, it simultaneously (and ironically) functions as a performative showcase for its author. However, Alexander himself fails to convince as to why we should care in the slightest what he thinks about the four figures he pits himself against. 

 

Alexander adopts the pose of the detached provocateur, viewing the collapse of cultural standards with cynical amusement. Yet this cynicism functions as a profound form of intellectual evasion. By declaring that there is no Outside and that all resistance (be it political, philosophical or cultural in character) is not only futile but fake, Alexander neatly absolves himself of the responsibility to propose any constructive alternative. 

 

His stance is not at all edgy or transgressive; it is a comfortable, low-risk position that allows him to collect cultural capital by sneering at the failures of those who actually risked public exposure and artistic production. 

 

  

V. 

 

Throughout his writings, Alexander insists on his punk detachment from mainstream institutions. However, his own biographical fragments consistently betray a reliance on the very networks of privilege he critiques, revealing a profound splitting between his (overly inflated) public persona and his structural dependencies. 

 

For example, he explicitly boasts of his time spent as a spy placed within the press office of Charisma Records by his hero Malcolm McLaren, trading on insider access while simultaneously claiming a pure, underground status. 

 

Furthermore, his writing relies heavily on the cultural capital of the academic institutions he disdains - referencing Oxford podcasts and expensive Cambridge editions. 

 

He attacks Larry David for his proximity to the Hollywood liberal elite and his friendship with President Obama, yet Alexander's critical persona is largely parasitical upon the cultural output of the bourgeois institutions he holds in contempt and the individuals he now claims to find disappointing.  

 

 

VI. 

  

Finally, the ultimate contradiction in Alexander's blog project is his relationship to time and archiving. 

 

He ruthlessly attacks Malcolm McLaren for being 'trapped in his past like a spider in its own web' and borrows from Baudrillard (via Mark Fisher) to condemn the contemporary digital landscape as a desert of the real defined by endlessly recycled pasts and lost futures. 

 

Yet, what is Torpedo the Ark if not a meticulously maintained digital museum? The blog's sidebar contains a massive, self-canonising archive stretching back to 2012, categorised by a hyper-specific taxonomy of labels. 

 

Alexander is caught in precisely the same web (or loop) that he attacks McLaren for. He uses twentieth-century theoretical tools to endlessly recycle his own youthful experiences and encounters, transforming his digital platform into a highly curated, risk-free space that perfectly expresses a state of psychological arrest within a karaoke culture.

 

 

VII.

 

In conclusion: ultimately, the NMH series fails because it is fundamentally driven by ressentiment and the narcissism of disappointment. Alexander does not mourn the compromises of McLaren, Nietzsche, Lawrence, and David because of what it says about the structural state of modern culture; he mourns them because they failed to satisfy his archetypal demand for an unblemished hero. 

 

The entire four-part cycle is an exercise in projecting an impossibly pure, static ideal of heroism onto flawed, living subjects, and then throwing a performative tantrum when those subjects succumb to illness, ageing, or political contingency (or when they - as he says - let him down).  

 

By positioning himself as the final arbiter of who is or is not heroic, Alexander reveals that his ultimate loyalty is not to cultural greatness, but to the preservation of his own pristine, uncompromised, and thoroughly unproductive sense of intellectual superiority. [3] 

 

  

Notes (supplied by Stephen Alexander)

 

[1] Each post in the 'No More Heroes' series dealt with a different figure who has been hugely influential on Torpedo the Ark over the years: the first featured Malcolm McLaren (14 July 2026); the second Friedrich Nietzsche (15 July 2026); the third D. H. Lawrence (16 July 2026); and the fourth Larry David (17 July 2026). 

 

[2] This famous opening scene from The Silence of the Lambs can be watched on YouTube: click here. The lines of dialogue quoted begin at 4:35 and end at 5:36. 

 

[3] As this letter illustrates, Deleuze isn't the only one to receive mail from harsh critics containing a vicious mixture of aggression, accusation, and abuse. Almost every other day in my inbox there's something from some troll or other outlining the weaknesses of my arguments and my personal shortcomings; i.e., a sort of celebration of my supposedly sorry condition. 

      Indeed, I mentioned this in a post published back in August 2013 - click here - so this isn't the first time I've been told that I'm a performative ressentiment-ridden narcissist who exploits the work of others - including those I identify as opponents - from the safe space of a virtually private blog, and I don't suppose it will be the last. 

      I'll allow readers to decide if Francis has made a critically strong case, or if his remarks often miss the mark and that, actually, the NMH series is, as a friendlier correspondent emailed me to say, "a masterclass in compressed, evocative writing that sparks the kind of immediate cultural dialogue that more formal academic prose usually smothers under its own weight". The same correspondent concludes her email: 

 

"By methodically exposing how your own primary influences were digested by the very structures they claimed to combat, you have elevated the series of posts from simple expressions of personal disappointment into a unified work of philosophical mourning (what one is tempted to describe as an epitaph for the avant-garde). 

       The 'No More Heroes' series leaves the reader with a haunting conclusion: in a 21st-century landscape governed by capitalist realism and digital algorithms, the iconoclastic icon no longer exists as an agent of chaos. They exist, rather, as a pre-approved, highly profitable aesthetic category."

       

This will do for me - and let Mr. Francis put that in his pipe and smoke it!   

 

 

Musical bonus: The Stranglers, 'No More Heroes', single release from the album of the same title (United Artists, 1977). 

 

Afternote: there is now a follow up post to this one that acts as a kind of riposte, written by May Spear and titled 'Epitaph for the Avant-Garde' (23 July 2026).    

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire: Lecture Five

Mark Fisher Haunted by the Spectre of 

Jean-François Lyotard Until the Very Last 

(SA/2026)

 

I.

 

Torpedophiles who have been following this series of posts on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire (2021) [a] will recall my surprise (and disappointment) that in Lecture Four he didn't take the opportunity to dive deep into Anti-Oedipus (1972), even whilst admitting that Deleuze and Guattari were the spectres that continued to haunt his thinking. 

 

Well, it is even more surprising in light of Fisher's decision to concern himself more with socio-historical writings rather than French theoretical texts, to find that Lecture Five is centred on Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1974) - a notoriously difficult and intense work that even the author eventually came to regard as his evil or nasty book [livre méchant] due to its aggressive rejection of the rigid moral, political, and theoretical frameworks of the political left - specifically Marxism - in favour of a chaotic celebration of accelerated desire [b]. 

 

Fisher obliging his students to engage with Lyotard having just lectured them on 1970s American labour history and countercultural idealism the week before, is like being taught to swim by someone who lets you paddle for a bit in the shallows near the shoreline before throwing you in the deep, shark-infested waters.  

 

 

II.  

 

Fisher begins by reading aloud a passage from Libidinal Economy in which Lyotard (ironically) suggests that English industrial workers actually enjoyed their subordination and the destruction of their bodies by the capitalist machine: 

 

"the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they [...] enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion  [...] in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed on them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity [...] enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs [...]" [c]  

 

While this pissed off many of his Marxist contemporaries, it is something that D. H. Lawrence had seriously explored in his fiction many years earlier. In Women in Love (1920), for example, he writes of how Gerald Crich reorganises the mines owned by his ailing father in line with the latest technology and modern work practices:

 

"Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific method [...] the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible and heartbreaking in its mechanicalness.

      But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanised. And yet they accepted the new conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out of them. [...] There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed them. It was what they wanted [...] They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman system [...] Otherwise Gerald could never have done what he did." [d]  

 

That perfectly anticipates Lyotard and his politics of desire. It also explains why, personally, I didn't find anything terribly provocative in Lyotard's book back in the '90s (although a fair amount of material that simply perplexed or bored).     

    

 

III.  

 

The key takeaway from Lyotard is that there is no revolutionary outside to capitalism; no primitive societies or subversive regions. This, says Fisher, is the "relentless message" (182) of Libidinal Economy - it's a "scathing assault" (182) on those thinkers who believe otherwise and a slap in the face to those Leftists still romanticising May '68. 

 

Furthermore: Marxism itself (certainly in its Old Man guise) "is never done with the prosecution of the case against capital" (191). Consequently, the revolution is always deferred; there is no climax or consummation. Marxism is forever stuck at the level of critical foreplay.     

 

One might ask at this point why Fisher wants his students to consider Lyotard's nasty book - it seems to negate his own political project of acid communism. 

 

The answer is that Fisher uses Lyotard's pessimistic analysis - which is less a critique and more a diagnosis - to map the fatal flaw of the modern Left; i.e., its abandoning of the terrain of desire and its own retreat to a joyless, defensive moralism that is despised by the proletariat. 

 

Lyotard captures this with savage perfection in the following quoted by Fisher:  

 

"'You situate yourselves on [...] the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalised desires be totally ignored, forbidden [...] you are like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that!'" (204)

 

And, of course, the working class does suffer, but so too do they enjoy "'swallowing the shit of capital'" (203) - including its sausage pâtés - until fit to burst. 

 

Fisher sees the task of a postcapitalist politics of desire (acid communism) as countering this by building an alternative future that is ultimately more pleasurable than anything capital can offer; to oblige Marx to become the Little Girl at last ...   

  

 

IV. 

 

Bringing his lecture to a close, Fisher provides a convenient summary:

 

"I think, then, that the libidinal economy [...] is largely to do with [...] a kind of hatred of almost all existing left-wing models of what political transformation entails. [...] These [left-wing projects] are all inadequate and all for the same reason [...] in that they don't take the desire of the capitalised seriously. They reject it and [...] therefore keep re-inscribing moralism." (204)

 

It's not enough to understand Marx - you also need to understand the Marquis de Sade! Capitalism and desire are inseparable; capitalism is desire. Thus, we need to "throw aside a simple utilitarian model of desire" (205) - i.e., one in which we seek out pleasure and wish to avoid pain. To acknowledge that there's an intimate and complex relationship between these two things has a number of implications - not least for political theory. 

 

I have to say, I'm still not entirely sure how Fisher thinks his concept of acid communism shows the fly the way out of Lyotard's libidinal bottle. He accepts that desire is key and he doesn't moralise in the manner of many on the Left. But he rejects the idea that capitalism is totalising and absolute and insists there must be a tasty vegetarian alternative to capitalism's sausage pâtés (so to speak).

 

If only the collective consciousness of the People can be raised and expanded, so that new - psychedelic - desires can be produced and politically channelled ... And so we end up once more falling back on Fisher's favourite phrase - if only [e].      

 

 

V. 

 

 

Lecture V (5 December 2016) was to be the last that Fisher gave in his Postcapitalist Desire seminar series. 

 

Following his suicide on 13 January 2017, the remaining ten weeks of the course could obviously not go ahead as planned. Which is a shame, 'cos it would have been fun to hear what he had to say about technofeminism and cyberfeminism in week ten and interesting to discover also his thoughts on Nick Land's 'Machinic Desire' in week eleven. 

 

But there you go - no more miserable Monday mornings for him - and just a (boring) sixteen track playlist for the rest of us ... [f]  

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater Books, 2021). All page references to this work will be given directly in the post.

 

[b] Originally published as Économie Libidinale in 1974, the work was translated into English by Iain Hamilton Grant and published by The Athlone Press (1993). 

      Lyotard wrote the book in an intentionally vulgar, violent, and quasi-pornographic style designed to outrage his Marxist contemporaries. Its most notorious provocation - which I examine in relation to the fiction of D. H. Lawrence in Section II - was the claim that the 19th-century proletariat derived a dark, masochistic pleasure from being physically consumed by the industrial machinery of capital. 

      Equally controversial was Lyotard's accelerationist insistence that all modern political systems (capitalist, socialist, or fascist) are ultimately fuelled by these exact same chaotic libidinal energies. 

 

[c] Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, quoted by Fisher in Postcapitalist Desire, p. 180.  

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 230-231. 

      Sir Clifford Chatterley reforms his coal mines in a similar fashion to Gerald Crich in Lawrence's final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). I discussed all this in my PhD thesis, Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000), completed in the philosophy department when Fisher and friends were raving about Lyotard and his Libidinal Economy but refused to engage with Lawrence's work, despite the fact that Lawrence had been named by Deleuze as one of the four great heirs to Spinoza and despite the fact that Nick Land was on my Graduate Progress Committee, so knew of what I was up to under the supervision of Keith Ansell-Pearson. I guess I simply wasn't cyberpunk enough for members of the CCRU.   

 

[e] See section VI of the post written on Lecture IV (published 28 June 2026) where I examine Fisher's overreliance on wishful thinking - If only things had gone differently in the '70s ... If only we could make X, Y, or Z happen in the future ... etc. - allowing his desires to heavily influence (if not actually determine) his political philosophy: click here. 

      His supporters will doubtless dispute this and refer to the concept of hyperstition - i.e., they'll insist that Fisher wasn't just engaging in wishful thinking, but attempting to produce real effects via theory-fictions that make themselves true; a speculative idea is introduced into culture, people believe it and change their material behaviour based on that belief, et voila! their actions physically construct a new (alternative) reality. 

       

[f] See Appendix Two: '"No More Miserable Monday Mornings" Tracklist' in Postcapitalist Desire, pp. 217-220.  

      Matt Colquhoun explains that the title refers to a post on k-punk (18 July 2015) and that the sixteen songs listed provide a "mode of consciousness-raising" (218) and have a tonic effect: 

      "Taken as a whole, [the playlist] auto-affects the brain into a state of joyful indignation [...] the freedoms these songs promise remain soulful, and this emboldened soul rattles the subjugated body out of its contemporary complacency" (219). 

        Unfortunately, for me, it's going to take more than a mix of pop, reggae, and disco to buy into Fisher's revolution; let's just say he has much broader taste in music than I do (and I would sooner stuff my ears with beeswax than listen to the sound of the Sleaford Mods).   

 

 

To read the four other posts in this series on Mark Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire published on Torpedo the Ark, please click here. 

 

  

Earth Calling the Sophia Space Agency - An Alternative View by Jennifer Davis Taylor

Jennifer Davis Taylor and Melpomeni Kermanidou 

(Project Leader of the Sophia Space Agency)

 

 

Never let it be said that Torpedo the Ark doesn't encourage alternative perspectives ... 

 

Here's a thoughtful response submitted by Jennifer Davis Taylor - an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and creative practitioner who was present at the Sophia Space Agency audio event at Kings Place that I wrote about in a recent post: click here. 

She writes:  

 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander, 

 

Like you, I attended the launch of Melpomeni Kermanidou's debut album released under the name of the Sophia Space Agency, but I noticed entirely different things about both the staging and the spatial audio playback.

      

For me, the theatre space was defined by its intimacy - just right for twenty or thirty people. We weren't overcrowded. I liked the proportions of the room and the ratio of space to people because I didn't feel unnerved by the energy around me. The stage was bathed in blue light. The three empty chairs, with ferns interspersed between them, gave me a sense of anticipation. The eye masks we were handed at the door heightened this feeling for me. It felt as if there might be a party game, with some slight unpredictability that would enhance the fun. 

      

What initially strikes me about your post, Stephen, is that you understood the event as a scene before experiencing it as a playback. That feels right. Meni's white dress and boots were not incidental decoration; they communicated that the event was a kind of carnivalesque space - theatrical and operating slightly outside the normal rules of social interaction. Her appearance gave us permission to expect the unexpected. She appeared to have dressed not only for the event but for the imaginative space the work itself asked us to enter: retro-futuristic, feminine, controlled, luminous, slightly alien. Because she appeared after the playback, her appearance also felt like a validation of our varied internal imaginative responses to the experimental soundscape. 

      

The contrast of her appearance with the two men on stage may well have been a failure of individual sartorial taste. However, accidental as it may have been, I also found it to be an effective foil. Meni was easily able to hold the visual and conceptual field of the event almost by herself. At the same time, the men's presentation demonstrated an asymmetry of cultural permission. Male authority is often allowed to arrive uncomposed, rumpled, ordinary, even careless. Female artistry in dress, because it is more expected, also has a kind of privilege in public. Women are allowed to carry atmosphere, beauty, and coherence, even though they are also often expected to enact that symbolic labour. 

      

That imbalance became part of the performance, whether anyone intended it or not. The stage picture quietly exposed who is permitted to appear as an expert without adornment, who needs to dress up to be received as one, and what that dressing up costs. Meni's costume was beautiful. However, it also leaned into her identity as a performance artist rather than only as a musical innovator. I was reminded of Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, whose technological inventions anticipated later developments in wireless communications. Even today, that far more significant contribution remains overshadowed by her glamorous persona. In this case, had Meni not performed sartorially, she might not have carried the evening so successfully. Could she have appeared in rumpled clothes and smeared makeup? Would that have drawn more attention to her genius? I suspect not. 

 

Further to this, I was also interested in your argument about spatial audio producing a kind of cathedral effect: immersive, beautiful, technically pristine, but finally perhaps too complete. That seems to me the strongest critical idea in the post. The problem is not that the music is beautiful, or even that it is overwhelming. The problem is what happens when a work leaves no remainder - no gap, no exterior, no accidental birdsong, no human roughness through which the listener can breathe. 

      

While I was experiencing it, however, I wasn't disturbed by the rules of the space or by the idealistic premise. Perhaps this was because the experience was finite for me. I didn't worry about its implications as a large collective movement or as a mass vehicle for a set of values. The producers admitted that this style of music does not lend itself easily to mass consumption. The technological setup for enjoying it is prohibitive and inconvenient. Therefore, I could contemplate beauty and accept transcendence as a gift that Ms Kermanidou and Martyn Ware were trying to offer, without feeling that I had to buy into their idealism wholesale. 

      

More troubling, for me, was the clash between the themes of the work - planetary destruction - and the medium itself, which relies on cyberstorage and power centres that may also be environmentally harmful. Even though I was struck by that potential irony, I also saw how the music fulfilled some classic roles of art: to be of its time, to generate new forms, and to make visible the contradictions of the present.       

 

It was a rich and enjoyable experience that gave me a lot to think about. I learned a lot. I took away questions that will help me to be a better thinker and artist.

 

 

Notes

 

Jennifer Davis Taylor appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. 

 

As stated, she is an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and creative practitioner who holds a PhD from The Warburg Institute (University of London) and specializes in seventeenth-century French art and literature, women's studies, and material culture. 

      

Her forthcoming book, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault (Peter Lang), reframes Perrault not merely as a fairy tale author but as a theorist of design whose collaborative studio practice staged radical allegories of female agency.

 

Readers are encouraged to visit the website: jenniferdavistaylor.com for further information. 

 

 

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.