K Punk

The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)

Mark Fisher, Darren Ambrose

• Publisher: Repeater Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781912248285
• eBook ISBN:
  9781912248292
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

Edited by Darren Ambrose and with a foreword by Simon Reynolds, this comprehensive collection brings together the work of acclaimed blogger, writer, political activist and lecturer Mark Fisher (aka k-punk). Covering the period 2004 – 2016, the collection will include some of the best writings from his seminal blog k-punk; a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews; his key writings on politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health and popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines; his final unfinished introduction to his planned work on "Acid Communism"; and a number of important interviews from the last decade.

PART ONE

METHODS OF DREAMING: BOOKS

book meme¹

k-punk | 28/06/2005

At least two people have asked me to do this, so here — at last — goes.

1) How many books do you own?

No way of knowing. Certainly can’t count them and have no reliable way of calculating.

2) What was the last book you bought?

The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, Mario Perniola.

3) What was the last book you read?

Read and finished: Michael Bracewell’s England is Mine — disappointing and frustrating. There are flashes of insight but the organisation of the book seems to change from chapter to chapter; at one moment the narrative is historical, the next it is thematic, and then regional. There is a sense of always just approaching the time when things are happening or just having missed it. Can’t help thinking that Bracewell will benefit from a more focused subject matter, which is why still I’m looking forward to his Roxy book, due out later this year. (And there’s way too much attention paid to Eng Lit: nothing will ever interest me in W.H. Boredom, for instance.)

Finishing: Houllebecq’s Atmomised. No wonder Žižek likes this one. Is there a better savaging of desolate hippie hedonism and its pathetic legacy in New Age zen bullshit?

4) Five books that mean a lot to me.

(I hate all those surveys of best films/books/LPs which have the Latest Thing at the top, so I have only allowed myself to select books that have meant something to me for at least a decade.)

Kafka: The Trial, The Castle

Is it possible to reproduce, later in life, the impact that books, records and films have between the ages of fourteen and seventeen? The periods of my adult life that have been most miserable have been those in which I lost fidelity to what I discovered then, in the pages of Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Burroughs, Beckett, Selby… Any of those could have been selected, but I choose Kafka, because of all of them, it is he who has been the most intimate and constant companion.

I actually encountered Kafka first in a Penguin compendium of The Novels of Franz Kafka that my parents, who knew very little about literature, bought me for Christmas because they thought “it looked like my kind of thing”. So it proved.

It’s difficult for me now to remember how I first received the text. Whether I initially enjoyed it or was frustrated by it I couldn’t say. Kafka, after all, is a writer who doesn’t waylay you. He invades subtly, slowly. I imagine that at the time I wanted and expected a more straightforward statement of existentialist alienation. Yet there was very little of that in Kafka. This was not a world of metaphysical grandstanding but a seedy, cramped burrow, whose ruling affect is not heroic alienation but creeping embarrassment. Physical force plays almost no role in Kafka’s fictions — it is the ever-present possibility of social shaming that is the motive force of his winding non-plots.

Remember the pitiful scenes in The Trial when K, looking for the court in an office block, knocks in turn on each door, making the pathetic excuse that he is a “house painter”? Kafka’s genius consists in banalising the absurdity of this: surprisingly, against all our expectations, it is indeed the case that K’s hearing is taking place in one of the apartments in the building. Of course it is. And why is he late? The more absurd K thinks things are, the more embarrassed he becomes for failing to understand “the ways” of the Court or of the Castle. The bureaucratic convolutions appear ridiculous and frustrating to him, but that is because he “has not understood” yet. Witness the comedy of the opening scenes of The Castle, which are less an anticipation of totalitarianism than of call centres, in which K is told that the telephones “function like musical instruments”. What kind of an idiot is he, if when he phones someone’s desk, he expects them to answer? Is he so wet behind the ears?

It’s not for nothing that Alan Bennett, the laureate of embarrassment, is an ardent admirer of Kafka. Both Bennett and Kafka understand that, no matter how absurd their rituals, pronunciations, clothes might appear to be, the ruling class are unembarrassable; that is not because there is a special code which only they understand — there is no code, precisely — but that whatever they do is alright, because it is THEM doing it. Conversely, if you are not of the “in-crowd”, nothing you can do could EVER be right; you are a priori guilty.

Atwood: Cat’s Eye

A while back, Luke asked me what an example of “cold rationalist” literature would look like. Atwood, with her reputation for coldness, is an obvious answer, but in truth, more or less all literature is cold rationalist. Why? Because it allows us to see ourselves as chains of cause and effect and thereby, paradoxically, to attain the only measure of freedom available to us. (Even Wordsworth, who admired Spinoza, described poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”, i.e. not raw emotion expressed in some Dionysian ejaculation.)

Cat’s Eye isn’t my favourite Atwood novel — that would be the stark Surfacing — but it is the one that means most to me. I don’t even remember all of the plot; what I will never forget are Atwood’s horribly vivid descriptions of the pitiless Hobbesian cruelty of teenage “friendships”. They walk behind you so as they can criticise your shoes, the way you walk… They are worse than your worst enemies. The long days, the breakfast toast turning to cardboard in your mouth, the anxiety so sharp and constant that you forget it is there, no longer even register it.

Are your most formative years those of your early childhood or your early teens? Reading Cat’s Eye in my early twenties was a kind of autopsychoanalysis, a way out of the legacy of misanthropy, suppressed rage and cosmic sense of inadequacy that had been the legacy of my teenage years. Atwood’s icy analysis beautifully demonstrated that the humiliations of those teenage years were a structural effect of teenage relationships, not at all anything specific to me.

Spinoza: The Ethics

Spinoza changes everything, but gradually. There is no “road to Damascus” conversion to Spinozism, only a steady but implacable deletion of default assumptions. As with all the best philosophy, reading it is like running a Videodrome cassette: you think you are playing it, but it ends up playing you, effecting a gradual mutation of the way you think and perceive.

I’d been attracted to Spinoza as an undergraduate, but I only really read him at Warwick, under the influence of Deleuze. We spent over a year pouring over The Ethics in a reading group. Here was a philosophy that was at once forbiddingly abstract and immediately practical, pitched at both the largest conceivable cosmic scale and the minutiae of the psyche. The “impossible” bringing together of structural analysis and existentialism?

Ballard: The Atrocity Exhibition

If Spinoza and Kafka were slow-acting, Ballard’s impact was instant. He connected immediately with an unconscious saturated in media signal.

That was partly because I had in effect encountered Ballard long before I had actually read any of his work: in Joy Division (though more in Hannett’s sound than in many of the lyrics; the song “The Atrocity Exhibition”, with its anguished pleading, couldn’t be further from Ballard’s dispassionate sobriety), in Foxx and Ultravox, in Cabaret Voltaire, in Magazine.

The Drowned World is the best of his disaster novels, inundated London as a literalised surrealist landscape coolly surveyed by a latter-day Conrad, but it is The Atrocity Exhibition that is indispensable. Much more than the better-known Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition provided a conceptual and methodological repertoire for approaching the twentieth century assembled from the century’s own resources. It is austerely modernist, making little concession to either plot or character, more like a fictive sculpture than a story, an obsessively repeated series of patterns.

Yes, Ballard has been accepted into the review columns, become an elder statesman, but let’s not forget how different his background was from the standard Oxbridge man of letters. Ballard rescued Britain from Eng Lit, from “decent” humanist certainties and Sunday supplement sleepiness.

Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces

I’ve written before about the importance of this book to me. I read it when I had just finished university, no plans, the future collapsing into a grim attempt — bound to fail — to commensurate myself to the Thatcherite economic reality principle. Marcus’ vast web of connections opened up an escape route. It was a description of a transhistorical Event, a break-out embracing anabaptists, situationists, dadaists, surrealists, punks. Such an Event was the exact opposite of the Grand Spectacles of the Eighties, the scripted and organised Non events which played out on global television with Live Aid at their epicentre. It was fugitive, secret, even when — necessarily — massively collective. Lipstick Traces was sure that pop can only have any significance when it ceases to be “just music”, when it reverberates with a politics that has nothing to do with capitalist parliamentarianism and a philosophy that has nothing to do with the academy.

Lipstick Traces is itself best read as part of a textual rhizome which attempted to register, a decade or more on, the impact of punk. See also Vague magazine (if you are looking for one of the most powerful triggers for Ccru-style cyberpunk theory, check out Mark Downham’s pieces in Vague), Savage’s England’s Dreaming. (This set not really complete until Rip It Up of course.)

5) Tag five people.

I can’t think of one other blog that hasn’t done this, so I’m stuck.

space, time, light, all the essentials — reflections on j.g. ballard season (bbc four)¹

k-punk | 08/10/2003

Like his admirer Jean Baudrillard,² Ballard has for a long time resembled a rogue AI, re-permutating the same few themes ad infinitum, occasionally adding a sprinkling of contemporary detail to freshen up a limited repertoire of fixations. Fixations, fixations. Appropriate, since, after all, Ballard’s obsession is… obsession.

In the BBC Four profile — nothing new here, the old man gamely and tirelessly going over his favourite riffs, once again — Ballard repeated one of his familiar, but still powerfully sobering observations. People often comment on how extreme his early life was, Ballard said. Yet, far from being extreme, that early life — beset by hunger, fear, war and the constant threat of death — is the default condition for most human beings on the planet, now and in every previous century. It is the comfortable life of the Western Suburbanite which is in every way the planetary exception.

Thus Home, BBC Four’s brilliant adaptation of Ballard’s short story “The Enormous Space”.³ Home is the kind of thing the BBC used to excel at: drama that was genuinely, unsettlingly weird without being insufferably, unwatchably experimental. Not that Home has much hope of appealing to popular taste stuck away on BBC Four, of course. A sign of the times.

Home revealed itself to be a perverse cousin of the suburban drop-out situation comedy, The Good Life or The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin spliced with Polanski’s Repulsion. (No surprise to see director Richard Curson-Smith name-checking Polanksi as an influence.) Anthony Sher was superbly, charmingly unhinged as Gerald Ballantyne, an accident victim who, instead of returning to work after his convalescence, decides to embark upon an experiment. “Decides” is no doubt too active a word; in every respect the typical Ballard character, Gerry discovers rather than initiates, finds himself drawn into a logic he is compelled to investigate. (In many ways a faithful Freudian, Ballard has no doubt that obsession always has/is a logic.)

The experiment, it turns out, has a simple premise. Gerry will stay indoors, indefinitely, living off the supplies of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword by Simon Reynolds
• Editor’s Introduction by Darren Ambrose
• Why K?
• Part One Methods of Dreaming: Books
• Book Meme
• Space, Time, Light, All the Essentials — Reflections on J.G. Ballard Season (BBC 4)
• Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan
• A Fairground’s Painted Swings
• What Are the Politics of Boredom? (Ballard 2003 Remix)
• Let Me Be Your Fantasy
• Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s “State of Emergency”
• The Assassination of J.G. Ballard
• A World of Dread and Fear
• Ripley’s Glam
• Methods of Dreaming
• Atwood’s Anti-Capitalism
• Toy Stories: Puppets, Dolls and Horror Stories
• Zer0 Books Statement
• Part Two Screens, Dreams and Spectres: Film and Television
• A Spoonful of Sugar
• She’s Not My Mother
• Stand Up, Nigel Barton
• Portmeirion: An Ideal for Living
• Golgothic Materialism
• This Movie Doesn’t Move Me
• Fear and Misery in the Third Reich ‘n’ Roll
• We Want It All
• Gothic Oedipus: Subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins
• When We Dream, Do We Dream We’re Joey?
• Notes on Cronenberg’s eXistenZ
• I Filmed It So I Didn’t Have to Remember It Myself
• Spectres of Marker and the Reality of the Third Way
• Dis-identity Politics
• “You Have Always Been the Caretaker”: The Spectral Spaces of the Overlook Hotel
• Coffee Bars and Internment Camps
• Rebel Without a Cause
• Robot Historian in the Ruins
• Review of Tyson
• “They Killed Their Mother”: Avatar as Ideological Symptom
• Precarity and Paternalism
• Return of the Gift: Richard Kelly’s The Box
• Contributing to Society
• “Just Relax and Enjoy It”: Geworfenheit on the BBC
• Star Wars Was a Sell-Out From the Start
• Gillian Wearing: Self Made
• Batman’s Political Right Turn
• Remember Who the Enemy Is
• Beyond Good and Evil: Breaking Bad
• Classless Broadcasting: Benefits Street
• Rooting for the Enemy: The Americans
• How to Let Go: The Leftovers, Broadchurch, and The Missing
• The Strange Death of British Satire
• Review: Terminator Genisys
• The House that Fame Built: Celebrity Big Brother
• Sympathy for the Androids: The Twisted Morality of Westworld
• Part Three Choose Your Weapons: Writing on Music
• The By Now Traditional Glasto Rant
• Art Pop, No, Really
• k-punk, or the Glampunk Art Pop Discontinuum
• Noise as Anti-Capital: As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade
• Lions After Slumber, or What is Sublimation Today?
• The Outside of Everything Now
• For Your Unpleasure: The Hauter-Couture of Goth
• It Doesn’t Matter If We All Die: The Cure’s Unholy Trinity
• Look at the Light
• Is Pop Undead?
• Memorex for the Kraken: The Fall’s Pulp Modernism
• Scritti’s Sweet Sickness
• Postmodernism as Pathology, Part 2
• Choose Your Weapons
• Variations on a Theme
• Running on Empty
• You Remind Me of Gold: Dialogue with Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and Francesco Tenaglia
• Militant Tendencies Feed Music
• Autonomy in the UK
• The Secret Sadness of the Twenty-First Century: James Blake’s Overgrown
• Review: David Bowie’s The Next Day
• The Man Who Has Everything: Drake’s Nothing Was the Same
• Break it Down: DJ Rashad’s Double Cup
• Start Your Nonsense! On eMMplekz and Dolly Dolly
• Review: Sleaford Mods’ Divide and Exit and Chubbed Up: The Singles Collection
• Test Dept: Where Leftist Idealism and Popular Modernism Collide
• No Romance Without Finance
• Part Four For Now, Our Desire is Nameless: Political Writings
• Don’t Vote, Don’t Encourage Them
• October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder
• What If They Had a Protest and Everyone Came
• Defeating the Hydra
• The Face of Terrorism Without a Face
• Conspicuous Force and Verminisation
• My Card: My Life: Comments on the AMEX Red Campaign
• The Great Bullingdon Club Swindle
• The Privatisation of Stress
• Kettle Logic
• Winter of Discontent 2.0: Notes on a Month of Militancy
• Football/Capitalist Realism/Utopia
• The Game Has Changed
• Creative Capitalism
• Reality Management
• UK Tabloid
• The Future is Still Ours: Autonomy and Post-Capitalism
• Aesthetic Poverty
• The Only Certainties are Death and Capital
• Why Mental Health is a Political Issue
• The London Hunger Games
• Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era
• Not Failing Better, but Fighting to Win
• The Happiness of Margaret Thatcher
• Suffering With a Smile
• How to Kill a Zombie: Strategising the End of Neoliberalism
• Getting Away With Murder
• No One is Bored, Everything is Boring
• A Time for Shadows
• Limbo is Over
• Communist Realism
• Pain Now
• Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming)
• For Now, Our Desire is Nameless
• Anti-Therapy
• Democracy is Joy
• Cybergothic vs. Steampunk
• Mannequin Challenge
• Part Five We Have to Invent the Future: Interviews
• They Can Be Different in the Future Too: Interviewed by Rowan Wilson for Ready Steady Book (2010)
• Capitalist Realism: Interviewed by Richard Capes (2011)
• Preoccupying: Interviewed by the Occupied Times (2012)
• We Need a Post-Capitalist Vision: Interviewed by AntiCapitalist Initiative (2012)
• “We Have to Invent the Future”: An Unseen Interview with Mark Fisher (2012)
• Hauntology, Nostalgia and Lost Futures: Interviewed by Valerio Mannucci and Valerio Mattioli for Nero (2014)
• Part Six We Are Not Here to Entertain You: Reflections
• One Year Later…
• Spinoza, k-punk, Neuropunk
• Why Dissensus?
• New Comments Policy
• Comments Policy (Latest)
• Chronic Demotivation
• How to Keep Oedipus Alive in Cyberspace
• We Dogmatists
• London Litened
• No Future 2012
• Ridicule Is Nothing to Be Scared Of (Slight Return)
• Break Through in Grey Lair
• Real Abstractions: The Application of Theory to the Modern World
• No I’ve Never Had a Job…
• Fear and Misery in Neoliberal Britain
• Exiting the Vampire Castle
• Good for Nothing
• Part Seven Acid Communism
• Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction)
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Repeater Books
• Copyright