K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) - Mark Fisher, Darren Ambrose

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Foreword by Simon Reynolds

In 1994, I wrote a piece for Melody Maker about D-Generation, a concept-laden outfit from Manchester whose line-up included Mark

D-Generation were one of those groups that are grist for the mill of the music press, catnip to a certain kind of critic: the conceptual framing was piquant and provocative, the sound itself lagged slightly behind the spiel

Beyond those specifics, though, it’s the structure of the encounter itself that is revealing and prefiguring. Here’s a music journalist (in this case, me) hungrily on the look-out for a group with ideas, and, having found one (in this case, D-Generation), forming a symbiotic alliance with musicians who themselves think like critics. That’s how Mark would operate when he got to the other side of divide

In his fruitful relationships with Burial, the Caretaker, Junior Boys, and other artists, a mutually intensifying feedback loop between the music-theorist and the music-practitioner was set in motion

Mark Fisher was possibly the last of a disappearing breed: the music critic as prophet

Mark Fisher became the best music writer of his generation. But that is just one of his areas of achievement. Mark wrote brilliantly about the arts adjacent to popular music: television, science fiction, mainstream movies (particularly the pulp end of the spectrum

Mark wrote rivetingly about high culture too — visual arts, photography, literature, highbrow cinema. And he wrote penetratingly about politics, philosophy, mental health, the Internet and social media (the phenomenology of digital life — its peculiar affects of connected loneliness and distracted boredom).

The exciting thing about Mark’s writing — in his blog k-punk, in magazines like the Wire, FACT, Frieze, and New Humanist, and in his books for Zer0 and Repeater — was the feeling that he was on a journey: the ideas were going somewhere, a gigantic edifice of thought was in the process of construction. You sensed, with mounting awe, that Mark was building a system. There was a feeling too that while the work was rigorous and deeply informed, it was not academic, either in terms of its intended audience or as an exercise done purely for its own sake. The urgency in Mark’s prose came from his faith that words really could change things. His writing made everything feel more meaningful, supercharged with significance. Reading Mark was a rush. An addiction.

enigmatic entity known as Ccru

Cybernetic culture research unit

a rough equivalent to the old UK weekly music press reconstituted itself online

except for the getting paid aspect

In compensation for not being able to make a livelihood off your ravings and rantings, the blogging platform afforded extra powers: incredible speed of response, flexibility of format (you could blog extensive think-pieces or miniature thought-bombs), and the ability to illustrate the writing using images, audio, video

I found myself in a pleasantly disorienting situation: someone whom I’d influenced became someone who influenced me

Editor’s Introduction by Darren Ambrose

editor’s introduction

Whilst at Warwick he was one of the founding members of the Cybernetic culture research unit (Ccru), along with others such as Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman (Kode9), Robin Mackay and Luciana Parisi

I started blogging as a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD

The first two k-punk posts in this collection, “Why K?” and “Book Meme”, both written in 2005

One also finds across all of the work a consistent concentration on the themes of class and collectivism, precarity and insecurity, depression and mental illness, dogmatism and purpose, attempts to trace post-capitalist forms of desire, the need to expose egregious forms of reality management, efforts to express forms of collective memory, and a nostalgia for popular modernism, hauntology and lost futures

Introduction: Why K?

Ccru understood cyberpunk not as a (once trendy) literary genre, but as a distributive cultural tendency facilitated by new technologies

Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco, pranksters reproduced and distributed the section of The Atrocity Exhibition called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”,2 without the title and adorned with the Republican Party seal. “I’m told,” Ballard reports, “that it was accepted for what it resembled, a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think tank.”3

Coffee Bars and Internment Camps

Children of Men extrapolates rather than exaggerates. At a certain point, realism flips over into delirium. Bad dream logic takes hold as you go through the gates of the Refugee Camp at Bexhill. You pass through buildings that were once public utilities into an indeterminate space — Hell as a Temporary Autonomous Zone — in which laws, both juridical and metaphysical, are suspended. A carnival of brutality is underway

No Romance Without Finance

It is possible to see the work of the late Stuart Hall in this light: as an attempt to bring to leftist politics the messages that culture was trying to impart to it. If this project was something of a tragic failure, it was a consequence, not of the shortcomings in Hall’s approach, but of the intransigence of the old left, its deafness to the desires and anxieties being expressed in culture. Ever since Hall fell under the spell of Miles Davis in the 1950s, he dreamed of somehow commensurating the libidinal modernity he encountered in popular music with the progressive political project of the organised left

To understand this failure from another angle, let’s consider for a moment the work of the late music and cultural critic Ellen Willis. In her 1979 essay, “The Family: Love It Or Leave It”5, Willis observed that the counterculture’s desire to replace the family with a system of collective child-rearing would have entailed “a social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude”.

There’s probably no better account of the Sixties’ counterculture’s retreat from Promethean ambition into self-destruction, resignation and pragmatism than Willis’s collection of essays Beginning To See The Light.6 As Willis makes clear in her introduction to the collection, she frequently found herself at odds with what she experienced as the authoritarianism and statism of mainstream socialism.

The Future is Still Ours: Autonomy and Post-Capitalism

Adam Curtis’ recent documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace argued that discourses of self-organisation, which had formerly been associated with the counterculture, were now absorbed into dominant ideology

Practically all mainstream political discourse is suspicious of, and sceptical towards, the state, planning and the possibilities of organised political change. This feeds into the ideological framework that I have called capitalist realism: if systemic change can never happen, all we can do is make the best of capitalism

There’s no doubt that the right has been able to profit from identifying the left with an allegedly superseded “top-down” version of politics

The work of Phillip Blond, one of the architects of the “Big Society” concept, is saturated with the rhetoric of self-organisation. In the report “The Ownership State”, which he wrote for the ResPublica thinktank,2 Blond writes of “open systems” which “recognise that uncertainty and change render traditional command-and-control ineffective”. While Blond’s ideas have been seen by many as obfuscatory justifications for the neoliberal privatisation agenda, Blond himself positions them as critical of neoliberalism

Blond notes a paradox that I also discuss in Capitalist Realism: rather than eliminating bureaucracy, as it promised to, neoliberalism has led to its proliferation. Since public services can never function as “proper” markets, the imposition of the “market solution” in healthcare and education “generates a huge and costly bureaucracy of accountants, examiners, inspectors, assessors and auditors, all concerned with assuring quality and asserting control that hinder innovation and experiment and lock in high cost.”

Since the right is now prepared to talk in these terms, it is clear that networks and open systems are not enough in themselves to save us. Rather, as Gilles Deleuze argued in his crucial essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control”,3 networks are simply the mode in which power operates in the “control” societies that have superseded the old “disciplinary” structures.

Curtis is right that the principal way in which autonomist ideas have been neutralised is by using them against the very idea of political organisation

we must have the courage not to be nostalgic for this lost Fordist world of boring factory work

Even though the shift into so-called “cognitive” labour has been overstated — just because work involves talking doesn’t make it “cognitive”; the labour of a call centre worker mechanically repeating the same rote phrases all day is no more “cognitive” than that of someone on a production line — Antonio Negri is right that the liberation from repetitive industrial labour remains a victory

But what has to differentiate the left from the right is a commitment to the idea that liberation lies in the future, not the past. We have to believe that the currently collapsing neoliberal reality system is not the only possible modernity; that, on the contrary, it is a cybergothic form of barbarism, which uses the latest technology to reinforce the power of the oldest elites

Blond’s networked institutions may have a cybernetic sheen, but he argues that they must be situated in a social setting which is re-dedicated to “traditional values” coming from religion and the family. By strong contrast, we must celebrate the disintegration of these “values”, as the necessary precondition for new kinds of solidarity

Communist Realism

If You Get Too Burnt You Can’t Come Back Home

The great mystery of neoliberalism is to what extent its advocates “really” believed it. Was it ever anything more than a ruse to restore ruling-class power and wealth?

For Now, Our Desire is Nameless

There Is No Desire for Capitalism

At the same time, desire is not some vitalistic energy which will spontaneously emerge once bodies are freed from institutions. Rather, desire is always the result of processes of libidinal engineering — and at the moment, our desire is manipulated by capital’s army of PR, branding and advertising specialists. The left needs to produce its own machineries of desire

Yet there is no desire for capitalism as such, just as culture is composed from libidinal materials that have no essential relation to capital — which is why capital has to distract, depress, and addict us in order to keep us captivated and subordinated.

Cybergothic vs. Steampunk

As Badiou makes clear, from the point of view of capital, the Iraq war and its consequences were not some blunder. They were an opportunity to trial a new form of (post)colonialism, in which states of conflict open up a temporary autonomous zone for capital accumulation, and plundering can continue without the irksome duties involved in setting up and running a state.

“We Have to Invent the Future”: An Unseen Interview with Mark Fisher (2012)

The state might be a precondition for the public, but it isn’t the same. People want public space, which is why Starbucks is popular because it offers a generic sociality. It is a form of anonymous, generic kind of space, and even things like the X Factor, why people like it is because people are publicly, collectively, communing in something. So it shows that even in these conditions, where ideologically everything is opposed to the public, there is still a desire for the public and all we are getting is degraded forms

Exiting the Vampire Castle

This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics.

“Left-wing” Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone.

The open savagery of these exchanges was accompanied by something more pervasive, and for that reason perhaps more debilitating: an atmosphere of snarky resentment. The most frequent object of this resentment is Owen Jones, and the attacks on Jones — the person most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the last few years — were one of the reasons I was so dejected

One of the things that broke me out of this depressive stupor was going to the People’s Assembly in Ipswich

the second half of the meeting saw working-class activists from all over Suffolk talking to each other, supporting one another, sharing experiences and strategies. Far from being another example of hierarchical leftism, the People’s Assembly was an example of how the vertical can be combined with the horizontal

The atmosphere was anti-racist and anti-sexist, but refreshingly free of the paralysing feeling of guilt and suspicion which hangs over left-wing twitter like an acrid, stifling fog.

Then there was Russell Brand. I’ve long been an admirer of Brand — one of the few big-name comedians on the current scene to come from a working-class background

The day before Brand’s now famous interview with Jeremy Paxman was broadcast on Newsnight, I had seen Brand’s stand-up show the Messiah Complex in Ipswich. The show was defiantly pro-immigrant, pro-communist, anti-homophobic, saturated with working-class intelligence and not afraid to show it, and queer in the way that popular culture used to be

The next night, it was clear that Brand’s appearance had produced a moment of splitting. For some of us, Brand’s forensic take-down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous

For the moralisers, the dominant story was to be about Brand’s personal conduct — specifically his sexism. In the febrile McCarthyite atmosphere fermented by the moralising left, remarks that could be construed as sexist mean that Brand is a sexist, which also meant that he is a misogynist. Cut and dried, finished, condemned

such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance

Brand’s intervention was not a bid for leadership; it was an inspiration, a call to arms. And I for one was inspired

one of the things that was clarified for me was the way in which, in recent years, so much of the self-styled “left” has suppressed the question of class

I’ve rarely talked — or been asked to talk — about class in public.

appeared, it was impossible not to see it everywhere in the response to the Brand affair

It is first of all necessary to identify the features of the discourses and the desires which have led us to this grim and demoralising pass, where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent — and not because we are terrorised by the right, but because we have allowed bourgeois modes of subjectivity to contaminate our movement

I think there are two libidinal-discursive configurations which have brought this situation about

Inside the Vampires’ Castle

The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn

it can look as if — and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought — that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements

The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have “identities” recognised by a bourgeois big Other.