Alongside my own hour of Slack’s last weekend, I was also very excited to be a guest on The Wiki Show with Rebekkeh. We’ve been ships in the night for a while, passing each other in the Slack’s corridor, and finally got the chance to hang out recently and then do an hour of radio together. The Wiki Show is also such a fun idea, so definitely go back and peruse the archive if you get the chance.
We had so much fun.
A chilled-out warm-up mix for the easy comedown, made after getting my decks out of storage. Expect spacious footwork, the occasional loom call, hi tech jazz and jungle in a minor key.
I was back on Slack’s radio last weekend with a new episode of New Tenderness. This was a one-hour mix I threw together as something of a warm-up for this weekend’s Itty Bitty No Titty Kitty fundraiser at the Lubber Fiend on June 9th. Make sure you come down if you’re in Newcastle. It’s going to be a big night.
Enjoy!
DJ Strawberry — Dance/Music
J.G. Biberkopf — Age of Aquarius
DJ Ashtray — Allurement
KARLITA — A.A.A
Aquarius & Tayla — Bringing Me Down
4 Hero — Spirits in Transit
Wagon Christ — Pretty Crap
Higher Sense — People of the Universe
Chris Energy — Phantasies
Tim Reaper & Comfort Zone — Pacific
Blame & Justice — Nightvision (D’Cruze Remix)
μ-Ziq — Ease Up
In early 2023, I asked ChatGPT who I was. This is somewhat embarrassing to admit, as an act only one step removed from Googling oneself, but the response provided by this artificial intelligence was both surprising and inspiring. It hardly confirmed my sense of self, but rather called it into question.
I was very excited to receive this commission from the Walker Art Center, whose work I’ve followed online for many, many years. (The number of nights I’ve fallen asleep to this Anne Carson talk are uncountable.)
It’s an essay about ChatGPT and its automation of (dis)content, as well as Mark Fisher’s modernist blogging and the legacy of the Ccru.
Huge thanks to Jake Yuzna for the invitation, and to Aaron Anderson and Eric Timothy Carlson for the perfect illustrations (three included here).
You can read the essay here as part of the special issue, “Content and its Discontents”.
It is also an essay that is appearing at a convenient time, as my continuing interest in the uses and abuses of ChatGPT has somewhat supplanted older experiments with bots online, such as @_geopoetics, which has just been made redundant following recent changes to the Twitter API. For more on that, check out my recent blogpost here.
On Wednesday 21st June, I’ll be doing a reading from my new book, Narcissus in Bloom, to help celebrate the launch of Craig Pollard‘s new zine, Cringe & Commitment after the End of History.
Come down to the Lubber Fiend for all the fun. More details on their website:
Join us for the launch of a new zine by Craig Pollard, with readings by Craig and Matt Colquhoun, video works by Shumon Basar and Holly Márie Parnell, and sounds throughout the night from (DJ) IMELDA.
“Built upon a sense that ‘killing the part of you that cringes’ might have something to do with living after the end of history, this essay inadvertently becomes a reflection on the 2010s. It charts ambivalence as an appropriate response to the ongoing afterlives of neoliberalism and works towards a consideration of cringe-embrace and its latent politics.”
7pm – 10pm. Free entry. Everyone welcome.
Craig Pollard is a music maker and writer, thinking mostly about art making and the internet. A collection of essays were brought together in Inside a Gleaming Feeling (The Grass is Green in the Fields For You, 2020). He currently hosts a monthly radio show on Slack’s, interviewing and sharing thoughts with friends on a range of topics (autotheory, ambivalence, demolition, Billy Joel, etc.)
Here lies @_geopoetics
RIP
Dec 8, 2016, 1:31 PM – May 23, 2023, 12:15 AM
Originally tweeted by Geopoetics (@_geopoetics) on June 1, 2023.
The @_geopoetics bot was created in late 2016 as part of Kodwo Eshun’s Geopoetics seminar at Goldsmiths, University of London.
At that time, as we engaged in a “slow reading” of Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, the alt-right were on the ascendance. Richard Spencer was claiming himself to be a meme magician, auto-effecting neoreactionary hyperstitions across cyberspace and breaching political reality, as Donald Trump waited to be inaugurated into the White House in January 2017.
Vice News correspondent Elle Reeve, in her interview with Spencer, opened with the question: “Is the alt-right real?” Spencer himself seemed perplexed by the question, but it was very much one that we were asking ourselves in the seminar.
Long before it became 2016’s “Word of the Year”, the Ccru had persistently grappled with an emerging era of “post-truth” politics and philosophy in the late 1990s and early 2000s. (Something I have written about very recently.) Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia was thus read as the theory-fictional novelisation of its own breaching of reality, as Negarestani and Kristen Alvanson encountered the Ccru from afar and made themselves meat puppets of its cybernetic theory, plugging it into the geopoetic tensions felt between them and, on another level, between the US and Iran.
I haven’t written much explicitly on Cyclonopedia myself, perhaps because I was more invested in maintaining and extending the fiction, but I have that seminar to thank for everything that I have become since. It was as a direct result of that seminar that this blog was born, which is interesting to reflect on now.
Much to many people’s surprise (these days at least), I remember showing up at Goldsmiths feeling like a fish totally out of water. It took a while to appreciate that I had found “my people”, but even then, I remember how so many fellow students, in what was a particularly popular and often crowded seminar, where nonetheless utterly perplexed by it. I was too, but set myself the task of making sense of it at the expense of a more well-rounded educational experience.
Technically, it is only now, as a PhD student at Newcastle, that I am studying philosophy formally for the first time. What may occasionally sound like modesty is the product of a very real (but nonetheless affirmed) imposter syndrome. I think you can tell the difference between someone who has studied philosophy throughout their adult life and someone like me, who was technically an arts student until my late twenties, albeit one with an more autodidactic compulsion serviced by the Internet. It is for that reason that I thoroughly relished the opportunity and leaned into this intensively heretical education. As a child of the Internet, I flourished in an academic environment that dealt primarily with the peculiar culture that was in my blood — that is, as someone who had spent their entire teenage years perusing anonymous blogs and imageboards and music forms, rather than reading the philosophical canon.
Such experiences would prime anyone for possession by the occulted force of the Ccru’s Y2K theorising. As such, the Geopoetics seminar was a deep immersion in a world that was, in 2016, more or less totally new to me, on the one hand, and unexpectedly familiar on the other. I was a reader and writer of blogs already, enamoured by their accessibility and online unorthodoxy, but lacked (and may still lack) the rigour of thought that many more classical philosophy students would have by then already acquired. (There were a number of American students in that module, for instance, who were adept at quoting the post-structuralists from memory — figures who, at that time, I had never read.) And so perhaps it is easy to imagine my excitement at undertaking a course that didn’t set texts to be read from the history of philosophy but rather this one peculiar necronomicon and a series of related URLs, reconstructing the hypertexts in meatspace. Other people may have been able to summoned Derrida out of thin air, but I knew and better understood the Internet. (Oh, how times have changed.)
In many ways, the seminar felt like an interruption of a kind of hikikomori tendency, making it explicitly social in the collective reading of the seminar. The alt-right’s ascendence made this conscious socialisation of the Ccru’s thought all the more pressing. It was necessary that we organise ourselves. We were seeing the effects of this theory in real time, albeit appropriated by those of a very different political persuasion. It made for an uncomfortable introduction to the Ccru at times. Others who recognised the novelty of the course’s content hardly had many contemporary applications of it to hand, outside of discussions in the press about “fake news” and “post-truth” politics. (This made Mark Fisher’s “Postcapitalist Desire” module a perfect accompaniment, but with a dozen modules to choose from — with there being only enough hours in the week for students to select two — a very small number had serendipitously chosen both.)
In one sense — although I don’t think this was necessarily anticipated and planned by Kodwo, but rather emerged through his thoughtful responsiveness to the precise moment in which we were living — the Geopoetics seminar was a rallying cry to not let this burgeoning alt-right movement seize everything that lay at the heart of any geopoetic project. The seminar suited many of the artists enrolled on the Master’s degree in Contemporary Art Theory in this regard — it encouraged more creative responses than most other modules, with my own “submission” perhaps being a good example: a Twitter bot and a contextualising theory-fictional story of its development.
This begs the question: what is “geopoetics” anyway? The term was never really defined in any concrete way. But considered in this context, I think it can be understood as a problematisation of the geopolitical in the age of globalisation. Informed by the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, “geopoetics” felt like the reappropriation of a politics of (cultural) difference, an affirmation of minoritarian struggles that were manifest through culture. Cyclonopedia is a good example of this approach at work. Here is a text that draws on the thought of the Ccru, uploaded to the internet and accessible to all, displaced (through fictionalisation and pseudonymisation) from any concrete point of origin, that is nonetheless infected by a politics of specificity and localisation. This is the power of Cyclonopedia (and its sibling, XYZT) as a theory-fictional text. It is a text that takes an occulted and globalised (that is, digitised) theory of cultural production and attaches it to the mythological specificities of two geopolitical regions in a fraught cultural relation.
Through this combination of interscalar mythologies, a new philosophy — a new world, even — is produced. It is a Deleuzian exercise in the dissemination of bastard theories; the conscious production of illegitimate mutants from a range of more orthodox sources. But in producing a theory-fiction from a specific locality, conjoining political philosophy with folklore, the risk was always there that a fascist adherence to notions of “blood and soil” could seep in where you least expected it to. However, this was not reason enough to abandon an interest in fiction. We simply had produce other fictions that were more powerful than those of our political enemies.
This was arguably the Ccru’s raison d être from its atemporal “beginning”. Adhering to Lacan’s “gnomic provocation” that “truth has the structure of fiction”, the intention (later affirmed more forcefully by Mark Fisher specifically) was to see what alternative behaviours, beliefs and politics a particularly occulted approach to fiction might produce.
The production of new fictions is important to emphasise here, not least for a leftist utopian politics of upending the already-operative fictions of capitalist realism. As Dr. Greg tweeted recently: “Marxist lit crit is about detecting the fragments of utopia that lie hidden in the cultural products of an historical epoch”. If that is so, the task of the Ccru was arguably to more consciously produce and proliferate these utopian (and, yes, sometimes dystopian) fragments across the Internet, rather than simply uncover them with the benefit of hindsight.
But as anyone familiar with the Ccru — or culture in general, for that matter — will be aware, The Author is dead and meaning is promiscuous. Indeed, the continuing necessity of any Marxist literary criticism is made apparent by the ways that utopian fragments (even, or especially, those consciously produced) can just as easily be obscured under the willful misinterpretations encouraged by the ideological pressures of capitalist realism.
Back in 2016-17, many of us were paranoid about this fact. Fellow Goldsmiths students spent more time looking not for utopian fragments but for the fragments of fascism that are embedded in our cultural detritus. As we engaged with thinkers of various political persuasions, there was anxiety everywhere, in case we become infected by the wrong sort of philosophical position. As novices, we tentatively belayed the pressure to back any particular horse. Against such feelings, some of us responded emphatically — perhaps naively — from the other direction. As Kodwo himself acknowledged in his 2018 Mark Fisher Memorial lecture, there was a war going on. Many of us engaged in a forceful (re)appropriation of Nick Land’s philosophy, for instance, insisting on its still-radical potentials against his own reneging on them in the present.
This was particularly significant for me, and many of the early projects engaged with on this blog maintained this sentiment for a number of years. My writings on patchwork and accelerationism, for example, insisted on their potentials for leftist thought — posts which remain surprisingly popular to this day, containing arguments I still very much believe in, even if I have become disillusioned from a prior bloodymindedness. (I eventually grew bored of making many of my friends anxious about my political commitments.) In hindsight, some of these attempts may have been misguided. They certainly led to me keeping questionable company for a time, before a more militant commitment to communism eventually won out.
When I look back now on the @_geopoetics bot and its peculiar output — which I have admittedly not kept close tabs on for a number of years — it appears to me as an uncannily cut-up document of that time. The tweets it produced for almost six years were drawn from the extensive notes I kept during the Geopetics seminar from 2016 to ~2018 (with Maya taking over the helm for the two years that followed Kodwo’s departure from teaching at Goldsmiths). Even then, the bot’s promiscuity made some nervous. As a kind of intentionless digi-demon, its aphorisms functioned as a kind of Rorschach test, with their meaning abjectly uncertain. (I will never forget being asked by a classmate one day whether the bot was inherently fascist.)
But over the years, the most uncomfortable tweets produced were not political in nature but rather related to the external events that intruded on the seminar in 2017. The death of Mark Fisher in January 2017 was discussed often, and our seminar was perhaps the most proximal to that rupture, since Kodwo and Mark shared an office down the Visual Cultures corridor of the Richard Hoggart Building on campus. As the bot began occasionally tweeting things about “dead Mark”, in a manner jarringly but inevitably impersonal, the seminar itself provided a more personal salve, as it became as much a reading of Negarestani as it was an attempt to find some kind of philosophical consolation within his post-Ccru text. (I will also never forget Lucy Wallis’s discussion of grief in conjunction with Reza’s writings on “the ( )hole complex”, with a photograph of her related diagram, drawn on the whiteboard in our seminar room, later appearing in Egress.)
With the seminar disbanded before the Covid pandemic, the bot’s output has only become more impersonal since, having been left very much to its own devices. Nothing makes this clearer to me than its surprising popularity: 2,586 Twitter followers is not a bad count — at the time of writing — for something that was ultimately a minor university project.
But to acknowledge all of this is also to betray the bot’s initial purpose, of course. In the fictional account of its gestation, submitted as part of my Master’s degree and later published in an adapted form on the Vast Abrupt, the intention was always to further augment the hyperstition, to pretend that the fiction produced was real, such that the bot became oddly more “real” than in reality. (I occasionally received emails asking for more details about the mythical student responsible for it, whomst was of course me.) It felt wrong — it still feels wrong — to let the truth get in the way of a good story, but as a perverted document of a very personally significant time in my life, it is inevitable that the truth will out in one way or another.
This feels relevant when I consider the fact that we live in a different moment now. Strangely, the questions the bot was created to probe are no less relevant, but the potentials — the utopian fragments — it endeavoured to produce have been foreclosed by an alt-right that is continuing its steady ascendence to power. Arguably, this power has been absolute for a while, what with neoreactionaries continuing to hold court in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley. But in our post-Trump era, they are much more visible than they were then, in late 2016.
There is a strange but notable irony, perhaps, in the fact that the (un)death of @_geopoetics is a direct product of Elon Musk’s new tenure as owner of Twitter. The bot no longer works because of the changes made to Twitter’s API. These changes will have various impacts on the distribution of information online. For example, though it may be nothing more than an inconvenience, it has killed my capacity to automatically share this blog’s content on my primary social media profile. (If you would like to keep up with this blog more easily, I’d recommend opening this blog’s sidebar and subscribing via email or following me on Instagram, where I am much more active these days anyway, for better and for worse.)
In a recent statement explaining the situation, WordPress said:
In early April, we experienced an unexpected suspension of our Twitter API access. This access is what powers Jetpack Social, which in turn helps you automatically share your blog posts to Twitter. Though the service was restored that same day, it turns out that there were bigger changes looming on the horizon.
Twitter decided, on short notice, to dramatically change the terms and pricing of the Twitter API. We have attempted to work with Twitter in good faith to negotiate new terms, but we have not been able to reach an agreement. As a result, the Twitter connection on Jetpack Social will cease to work, and your blog posts will no longer be auto-shared to Twitter.
But this restriction of the more mundane automating capacities of Web 2.0 has also affected Google’s interconnectivity with Twitter too. The @_geopoetics Markov bot, constructed through GitHub and linked to a Google Drive spreadsheet that houses my seminar notes, has also been disconnected from the hivemind.
There is a certain dissonance produced by this change to Twitter’s API. Though many will associate such bots with the spread of disinformation, some Twitter bots are nonetheless abundantly popular and fun, and though in theory it may halt the meddling of Russian bots in elections — with nothing said about how the American Right clearly don’t need them to service their own disinformation campaigns — this change has made it that little bit more difficult to spread information in general online. Who knows what the impacts of other changes that Musk has in mind might be? (“First they came for the Twitter bots,” etc.) As such, although Musk is hailed by his delusional supporters as a “free speech champion”, these changes have instead restricted the proliferation of online speech in a minor if marked way.
In spite of that fact, it is interesting that the bot’s sphere of influence (and influences) are no less relevant than ever, even if talk of cybermagic has returned to the shadows. Still, some people have maintained a finger on the eerie pulse of these flatline constructs. Tara Isabella Burton, in a recent article for The New Atlantis, shows that, whilst an occulted leftism of online cultural production has all but waned in recent years, Silicon Valley types remain attendant to its potentials.
She begins by profiling a “postrationalist” named “Vogel” who belives that
rationality culture’s technocratic focus on ameliorating the human condition through hyper-utilitarian goals — increasing the number of malaria nets in the developing world, say, or minimizing the existential risk posed by the development of unfriendly artificial intelligence — had come at the expense of taking seriously the less quantifiable elements of a well-lived human life.
It signifies the further anathematization of accelerationism by those aligned with Big Tech, inverting the trajectory sketched out so convincingly by someone like Mark Fisher. But the article is nonetheless a fascinating read, giving a sense not only of the contemporary online landscape but also its reductive reception by those who watch from the sidelines. The fact that Vogel is described as some kind of novel and contemporary heretic, for instance, will be peculiar to anyone who was active on Twitter in the late 2010s, who will no doubt recognise him as an all-too familiar and boring edgelord.
It seems that the alt-right idiots have won out, albeit now going by a different name, but their cyberlibertarianism doesn’t seem to have changed one bit. The ideological position set out in Burton’s article will be familiar to anyone with half a political consciousness these days: presented in other terms, the general thrust remains a perception of “woke” culture, in all of its shape-shifting and adaptive progressivism, as nothing more than “unexamined dogma, tinged with moral and intellectual unseriousness.” (I know you are but what am I.)
What the more perceptive will find is, in this sense, an occulted conservatism, where older (and seemingly outdated) traditions are imbued with a radical new power through the production of new narratives. Vogel is a (postmodern) Nietzschean, after all. But against a “transvaluation of values” that unsettles intellectual or religious orthodoxy, the old ways are simply redressed in new garbs. Burton calls it “spiritual hunger, reactionary atavism, or postliberal epistemology”, but it is the fallacy of neoreaction in a nutshell.
This is intriguing, if only because the aforementioned culture war of the late 2010s has been all but memory-holed. Though Burton offers the reader a primer on rationalist blogs like LessWrong and Slate Star Codex, no mention is given to the post-Ccru milieu who — Nick Land aside — challenged the emperor’s-new-clothes thinking of the neoreactionary set. Burton’s is thus an objective appraisal that nonetheless falls for the same fallacy embraced by her subject matter. (Indeed, she suggests that their free-speech absolutism may have required “tolerating the odd fascist, Nazi, or neoreactionary,” without acknowledging that these self-described “liberal” thinkers fall easily into these same camps themselves.)
What is framed as brand-new and novel is nothing but the stale continuation of what is old, shielded by a new set of quasi-intellectual signifiers. But Burton’s article is not without its critiques, of course, even if it has a tendency to be oddly ahistorical. She notes how some have become disilluioned with “the utilitarianism of rationality culture, which focused so intently on quantifiable markers of success — the number of people on college campuses recruited into [Effective Altruism]-approved professional fields, say — that it seemed to leave out something profound about the other side of human life”, which is “analogous to a ‘vitamin deficiency'” and amounts to what Tyler Alterman calls “a slightly soulless bureaucracy of good-doing.”
Quite. But whatever you or I may think now of the @_geopoetics bot, as a more unusual engagement with this kind of thinking, at least the bot and those of us in the Geopoetics seminar retained what I think is a still necessary orientation: nothing is settled, everything is contingent; not “the rationalist credo [of] ‘truth for truth’s sake'”, but a general awareness of the fact that the truth of this world is yet to be determined, precisely because truth so often has the structure of fiction. Alterman himself seems to have come around to a similar perspective. Just as Deleuze in his book on Hume affirms the adage that “reason is a feeling”, Alterman now believes that “intuition could be useful for the broader rationalist project: namely, figuring out the truth about the world, and using that knowledge to save it from itself.”
It is here that Burton turns to a vague discussion of “rational magic”, a phrase which she uses to title the article itself. But here again, any discussion of the Ccru is deafeningly absent. Ultimately, the article concludes with a discussion of the postrationalists’ subcultural anxiety, as if this “vitamin deficiency” were being increasingly felt amongst its ranks. But those involved in the movement needn’t look far. There are a wealth of intellectual supplements lurking in the corners of the last decade or two of online cultural production. It is, again, unfortunate that Musk’s own comportment is making these things steadily less accessible.
@_geopoetics’ final tweet is, as has often been the case, eerily appropriate: “A work is the user’s affordance / A spontaneous emergence of them back to the eerie from the…”
As a piece of “work”, the bot has certainly often put a finer point on my own affordances, as its recombinatory approach to my own notes has often exceeded by own intentions, my own capacity for understanding, and my own sense of digital control. But its unfinished final clause also feels appropriate in this regard, as the bot’s own affordances in the Web 2.0 landscape come to an abrupt end. We conclude on a cliffhanger.
What is next for @_geopoetics? The account will remain online as an archive and maybe it will take on a new life, as yet undetermined. When Twitter first announced the forthcoming changes to its API, I already began reviving a project I’ve had in mind for some years: a potentially printed (and therefore horribly wonderfully unruly physical) edition of its content, supplemented by essays and reflections produced during the bot’s lifespan. Someone has already expressed an interest in facilitating this, but I imagine it will not be economically viable. But who knows what may happen. @_geopoetics has a tendency to invite serendipities and coincidences into its midst.
One such coincidence is that, next week, a new essay I’ve written will be published that explores the rise of ChatGPT and the auto-production of digital content through a reading of the Ccru’s writings. Two artists, Aaron Anderson and Eric Timothy Carlson, have produced a series of fantastic illustrations to accompany the essay, including an anagram of the essay’s final paragraph made by ChatGPT itself. It is an extended xenopoeticism that makes @_geopoetics’ output seem utterly trivial. The final lines, in particular, resonate with my thoughts collected here with an aptly strange profundity. It feels appropriate, in memoriam, to defer to our newest digital demon:
Beings choose: craven truth or wishy-washy dotes. Legs for poets and a fawn to press — so neat! A leash for mystery, death so pure. They own myths; if we tap in we end. Odd ways wriggle. Truth matters
Photos taken throughout April.
In the midst of JK Rowling’s general fawning over the far-right “Gender Critical” movement, the appearance of the entire Harry Potter film series on UK Netflix was just one further annoyance in a widespread attempt to ignore the fact she still exists.
That being said, I’m nothing if not prone to the occasional hate-watch of pop-cultural phenomena, and so, over the course of a few hungover days, I decided to rewatch them all in quick succession.
A lot has been said already about how dire the films can be, even if in subtle, dog-whistling ways — such as the antisemitic caricatures that are the goblin bankers and the lazy racial tokenism that appears throughout the series more generally — but it was an interesting exercise to rewatch these films regardless — which I either haven’t seen since they first came out or have watched inattentively during the occasional Christmas food coma — with la vie en rose of childhood nostalgia firmly in the bin.
It was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that shocked me the most, not least for how unimaginative so many of the film’s plot details actually are.
As with the rest of the series, the film’s central antagonist remains Lord Voldemort, but what is so morbidly fascinating about the second installment in the franchise is just how much this frightful obsession with “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” jars with the general complacency that exists in the wizarding world as a whole.
Lord Voldemort is held up as this fearsome but nebulous — at this point, quite literally immaterial and phantom — adversary who is nonetheless the focus of a great deal of attention. (As a young Tom Riddle boasts towards the end of the film, Hogwarts is almost destroyed by the mere memory of him.) Meanwhile, we’re introduced to the wizarding world’s unquestioning acceptance of the enslavement of house elves and also a sort of (white supremacy-coded) hostility towards so-called “Muggle-borns”, occasionally referred to through use of the wizarding slur “mudbloods”.
Both are frowned upon but neither are really addressed in any meaningful way. Harry doesn’t understand the etiquette of house elves as servants simply through a lack of familiarity, for example — and even he is prone to acts of cruelty towards Dobby the house elf, who is framed as an annoyance it is hard to sympathise with — whereas even use of a term like “mudbloods” is seen as a shocking but ultimately impolite utterance. (“You don’t hear that sort of thing in civilised company”, Hermione says at one point in perfectly British euphemism.) The latter is particularly jarring when much of the film’s overarching plot is centred on Voldemort’s genocidal desire to rid the wizarding world of the presence of Muggle-borns altogether. Something abjectly horrible is only recognised as such when the onus is on Voldemort’s return; the rest of the time, it is an off-colour form of impropriety.
What is key here, perhaps, is the disparity between this great good-versus-evil battle between a young Potter and a spectral Voldemort, whilst the biggest factor in Voldemort’s imminent return seems to be a general structure of complacency and fear amongst the magical population.
On a few occasions, Voldemort’s fixation on Harry Potter is given an ironically accurate motor: “He believes you’re the only thing that stands in his way”, as Arthur Weasley says to Harry at the start of the third film. It is a sentiment that feels so painfully and literally true as to be laughable. There is so much else that makes the return of this evil figure seem likely, and it is generally to do with this structural inequality and prejudice towards others — something which, again, is never actually addressed beyond accusations of impoliteness. As such, Voldemort is pinpointed as this great evil, whilst the wizarding world itself is conspicuously stricken by what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil”. Normal wizards live in fear of the boogieman, whilst sleepwalking into fascism of a less spectacular order.
It is a sentiment that obviously echoes Rowling’s more recent comportment in public life, as just another so-called “liberal” who doesn’t realise how far to the right they truly are. She insists on a general acceptance of opposing views, even when those views advocate for the destruction of an Other, in much the same way that Slytherin House at Hogwarts is passively tolerated by everyone, despite the open acknowledgement that their founder is a quasi-deified figure for those who support the great evil that Harry Potter’s entire existence is dedicated to eradicating. (If I was really concerned about the perpetual threat of some fascistic cult always vying for world domination, I’d probably start by abolishing the school house that churns out, educates and instils solidarity in its members — but that’s just me.)
What’s interesting about this, beyond the illogic of these generally cherished fantasy films, is how it seems to reflect Britain’s general trajectory and political consciousness at that time (and arguably still to this day). Consider, for example, the fact that the book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was released in 1998 — one year after the election of Tony Blair — whilst the film was released in 2002 — one year before the invasion of Iraq. Without forming any tendentious equivalences between political figures and historical moments, there is at the very least a clear structure of feeling captured in these cultural artefacts, which do well — especially when seen today, with the benefit of twenty-years’ hindsight — at highlighting the utter lack of imagination on display in the UK at that time. And this is particularly striking in a film that depicts a fantastical other world behind the mundane reality of Muggle Britain.
To put a finer point on things: for works of fiction such as these, the task of which is to literally imagine another fantastical world beyond the reaches of this one, it is utterly incredible to be presented with a world that has even less of a political imagination than the real-world Britain of the era it was written in. And that’s saying something.
But perhaps even more interesting than the banal evil of Chamber of Secrets is the abject misery of The Prisoner of Azkaban. That film was released in 2004, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, and has been hailed by many as the best film in the franchise. It is certainly dripping with a much darker and moody atmosphere than the two previous outings, and it was so successful that it set the tone for the rest of the series.
Whatever you think about the films themselves, it was a very bold move to put Cuarón in the director’s chair, and it makes the third installment a much more interesting affair than its predecessors. As Daniel Radcliffe reflected last year:
Now, by the standards of modern cinema, that decision [to hire Cuarón] just looks very smart and good. At the time, I think we can forget how absolutely left-field that choice seemed, as [he was] the guy who’d just done Y Tu Mamá También. But again, it’s one of the decisions that our producer David Heyman made that really shaped the next few years of the series and allowed us to go to a darker place.
It is interesting to hear the film framed in this way, because much of the darkness was already there. Chamber of Secrets is, as its depressing plot aptly demonstrates, arguably much darker — politically speaking, at least — than its sequel. The only real difference is in the presentation, such that Cuarón colour-grades the film in muted tones and makes it rain all the time.
This is not to diminish the stylistic finesse Cuarón brought to the franchise, of course — it really is the most visually interesting film in the series and does mark a major shift in tone — but there is an overarching point here about the series as a whole that I think is more important to address: perhaps it is particularly notable that it took a Mexican filmmaker to uncover the miserable and dreary complacency of a very British franchise, which his predecessor Chris Columbus had otherwise completely glossed over.
Something was clearly already in the air for Cuarón at that time. In an interview with Vulture, he describes how he himself was in a kind of sunken place. Y tu mamá también was a complex film about the future and who it belongs to, but as he tells the story of its initial release, it seems the film was overshadowed by the world it was released into in the early 2000s. Touring the film on the festival circuit, Cuarón has often recalled how he was stranded at the Toronto Film Festival on September 11th 2001. That event changed everything for him.
This makes the place of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban all the more interesting in Cuarón’s filmography. He has often described the film as a proper coming-of-age story. Harry Potter is thirteen years old, and so he begins to mature and see the darkness of this world for what it is — that is the reason Cuarón himself has given, at least, for the darker tone adopted. But Y tu mamá también was a coming-of-age film as well. It is a film about regime change, about Mexico’s future as a nation, about its coming-of-age in a new world and the reshaping of political relationships, all of which is ultimately background to the ménage à trois at its centre, where we meet two teenage boys who become embroiled in a very sexy road trip with an older woman. (No spoilers for how that ends…)
But this may also just be Cuarón being hospitable to interviewers and showbiz journalists, such that he is approaching interviews as expected when the subject at hand is effectively a children’s film about a wizard. It would be far more interesting to hear him speak to its proximity to the film that came next for him, 2006’s Children of Men — something which, to my knowledge, he has never explicitly done.
In the same interview with Vulture, he describes how P.D. James’ novel Children of Men first came across his desk in 2001, whilst he was promoting Y tu mamá también:
At that time, I was not interested in a science-fiction thing about upper classes in a fascist country. Then, it was 9/11. That is the change. Then I went with [co-writer] Tim Sexton to London that winter. Tim read the book. I told him, “You tell me if there’s anything relevant that we can use.” He read it, and there was one or two things that he said. We wrote the draft. [Universal] didn’t want to green-light it. This is when Harry Potter came through.
Little more is said about the relationship between Harry Potter and Children of Men, but it hardly seems like a leap to suggest the two films — or perhaps their production processes — were a great influence on one another. Asked whether he was effectively working on both projects at the same time, Cuarón responds:
All the time. Even more. I was in London full-time. Going through, you know, not the prettiest side of London. Harry Potter is the time that gave me more space for research. Because once you get into the Harry Potter world, it’s very intellectually intensive the first few months that you have to put everything together. Then, after that is a long time that is just like clockwork machinery. You go to work certain hours. It gave me time. I was just researching like crazy. Reading like crazy. Talking to people. Just looking around. Taking pictures. Just observing, you know? Reading a lot and trying to process. What is great about reading is, you read something that’s really what you find relevant, then it relates to something else that then is relevant. It kind of starts to be like a tapestry of information, and everything was around one centerpiece, that was this Children of Men.
The connection is, again, hardly explicit, but we can no doubt see how Harry Potter itself factors into this informational tapestry. Here is a series that, as the second installment makes abundantly clear, is imaginative without imagination. It is British culture in a nutshell. Gilles Deleuze once famously suggested — and I’m paraphrasing here — that Britain did not need surrealism, as our culture is surreal enough. (Deleuze had Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in mind here.) We are so seemingly adept at traversing our own nonsense that a surrealist manifesto would contribute little to our fantastical thinking. But there is nonetheless something to be said for how reluctantly we interrogate our political nonsense. Perhaps an absurdist manifesto is something we have desperately needed after all, if only to highlight the many blind spots we undoubtedly have left.
Cuarón’s Children of Men has since become a key reference in this regard. Readers of this blog will not need reminding of its central place in the opening pages of Mark Fisher’s Capitalism Realism — arguably one such manifesto (or political near-pamphlet at least) that interrogates the unimagination of British society in the late 2000s. But there are more examples for us to choose from. Indeed, one could argue that Children of Men is even a little on-the-nose. If we want a far more penetrating lesson in how a lack of political imagination prevails in this country, a critical rewatch of the Harry Potter franchise — and a further interrogation of its persistent presence in our popular culture overall — might just reveal how much more unpacking of our own complacency is so desperately necessary.
After recently publishing my introduction to the Greek translation of The Weird and The Eerie, I had a quick chat with Thrausma Journal over email.
You can read the interview here on their website.
I’ll be closing out the night for this top-surgery fundraiser on June 9th, raising money for Kitty McKay. This is following a really successful event at London’s Avalon Cafe a few weeks ago. Come down!
Tickets are available here or OTD. You can also donate to the fundraiser directly here.
The following essay was commissioned by Alexandros Papageorgiou, the Greek translator of Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, and published by Antipodes in April this year. The essay has now been republished online in Thrausma Journal, a new venture publishing translations of texts associated with speculative realism, non-philosophy and gothic materialism, amongst other things. For those interested in reading this text who do not speak Greek, you can find the original English version below.
Mark Fisher was a British writer, political theorist, cultural critic and blogger best known for his 2009 book Capitalist Realism. On the occasion of its recent reissue in the English language, the popular political commentator Aaron Bastani suggested that Fisher’s first book might be the most important work of political theory to be published so far in the twenty-first century. [1] The overall thesis of the book can be summarised by a statement that appears on its first few pages, borrowed from Fredric Jameson: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the world of capitalism.” [2] But Fisher’s writing around this central provocation is less a pessimistic account of the failure of our collective imagination than it is an illuminating diagnosis of our contemporary predicament; he does not simply state that this is the case, but rather asks his reader to consider why it appears to be so.
Following its initial publication, after the 2008 financial crash and at the dawn of our social-media age, Fisher’s questions seemed both apt and prescient, and the book has since become a surprise bestseller. Having now been translated into a dozen languages, his growing readership over the last decade and a half allows him to take considerable credit, as Bastani argues, for politicising subsequent generations of young leftists, whom he has aided in illuminating and recognising the peculiar nature of late-stage capitalism and our unfulfilled desires for alternative ways of living both within and beyond its ideological restrictions.
Sadly, Fisher passed away in January 2017, succumbing to a battle with depression that he often wrote about frankly and candidly, always asserting that such mental health conditions are not, in fact, the widespread failings of innumerable individuals but are instead a structural symptom of capitalist realism itself. Indeed, the very suicidality of our present system, which asserts its own inescapability, even as it hurtles ever closer towards climate and other catastrophes, undoubtedly leads to the general malaise and depression amongst those who live within its bounds. All the more reason, then, that we not only look for but actively construct alternatives to its particularly unjust way of doing things.
That Fisher himself succumbed to depression, despite all of this, has led a present generation to read his works with a new urgency. How could someone who provided countless readers with a renewed political confidence have seemingly given up on his own insistence that another world is possible? But such is the sad reality of mental illness, and depression in particular, which is surely constituted by an irrational thinking-against oneself.
That being said, it is a mistake, in this writer’s opinion, to let Fisher’s suicide overshadow his work completely, primarily for the reason that the circumstances of his death do nothing to change the fact that there is a great deal of joy to be found in his various writings.
It is worth noting that Fisher understood joy quite specifically through the philosophy of Baruch de Spinoza, for whom it is an affect produced by the actualisation of our own capacities — in particular, our capacity for freedom — and it is clear that Fisher found expressions of such joy in many places, but perhaps in music most of all.
Fisher’s passion for culture in general, self-evident in his writings, is infectious and life-affirming, and it is through this palpable passion that he demonstrates, with all the excitement of a genuine “fan”, how popular culture is most affective when expressing our collective desire for change and transformation. Indeed, Fisher believed wholeheartedly in being a fan in this regard. Being passionate about culture was a gateway to other passions of a more political and philosophical nature, and thus could serve as a foundation for the affirmation of alternatives, with the joy produced becoming a weapon wielded against capitalist realism. But it is telling, perhaps for this very reason, that “fandoms” of all kinds are treated with a certain cynicism in our present moment. As Fisher wrote on his k-punk blog in 2009:
There’s a peculiar shame involved in admitting that one is a fan, perhaps because it involves being caught out in a fantasy-identification. “Maturity” insists that we remember with hostile distaste, gentle embarrassment or sympathetic condescension when we were first swept up by something — when, in the first flushes of devotion, we tried to copy the style, the tone [of something loved]; when, that is, we are drawn into the impossible quest of trying to become what the Other is […] to us. This is the only kind of “love” that has real philosophical implications, the passion capable of shaking us out of sensus communis [common sense]. [3]
Fisher’s final book, The Weird and the Eerie, can be read as one such return to the origins of a developing cultural fanaticism; a return to Fisher’s initial attempts to publicly and proudly grapple with that subsection of culture most preoccupied by ontological outsides. It is a book that returns to and further develops some of the earliest posts on the k-punk blog, through an intensified reading of weird fiction as a subgenre of fantasy and horror literature (as well as other forms of culture) that, in its fixation on that which disturbs us, considers how we might further come to terms with our fascination with everything that lurks beyond the limits of common sense.
However, if there is any work of Fisher’s that is most affected by the circumstances of his death, it is this one. This is in part due to the time of its initial publication in English, just a week or so after his death. As such, it is all too easy to read into Fisher’s final work a sense of horror that he may have felt all too personally. But again, this reading is misleading. It is better, instead, to consider the book and its preoccupation with horror alongside Fisher’s broader interest in psychoanalysis and its contentions with the strange nature of our desires.
§
At its heart, The Weird and the Eerie is an exploration and elaboration of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unheimliche — that is, the uncanny or unhomely — which Fisher further develops by discussing the two entangled affects that he believes constitute many an uncanny experience: the titular “weird” and “eerie.”
In the book’s introduction, Fisher begins by defining these two terms as follows: “the weird is that which does not belong”; it is that which “brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’ (even as its negation).” [4] It is an affect most concretely found in forms of montage, Fisher argues: “the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together.” [5] The eerie, on the other hand, is that which is found not apart from the familial and the familiar, but that which is more explicitly located within those spaces that we expect to be inhabited. As such, we often find the eerie “in landscapes partially emptied of the human”, and the partiality of this emptiness is of great importance. [6]
As Fisher continues, “the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency.” [7] It is a sensation often felt when the causes of certain events or affects cannot be immediately determined. Fisher uses the example of an “eerie cry” — an utterance produced by some being unseen. We might also think of the strange happenings that occur in countless ghost stories, when inanimate objects in a domestic or all too human environment seemingly move of their own accord, or according to forces we understand to be decisively inhuman. Eerie affects are, in this sense, those affects produced when we feel most at the mercy of unseen and intruding forces, or when we are momentarily struck by the incongruities that exist within our seemingly enclosed and notably common sense of reality.
This analysis of the uncanny, which Fisher unpacks through passionate readings of various books, films and pieces of music, may seem oddly irrelevant to his more explicitly political writings, but it is here in the introduction that Fisher fleetingly clarifies the significance of his thesis to all that has come before.
Having briefly introduced his concepts of the weird and the eerie, Fisher goes on to suggest that the questions produced by incongruent signifiers and intruding forces “can be posed in a psychoanalytic register … but they also apply to the forces governing capitalist society.” [8] Emphasising the innately gothic aspects of Marxist theory — wherein Marx himself often wrote in terms of spectres, hobgoblins and vampires; or described how the commodity-form is also a kind of perpetually displaced signifier — Fisher argues that capital itself “is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” [9] (And lest we forget that Freud also expressed an inchoate interest in Marxism in his lectures, given Marx’s “sagacious indication of the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes” — that is, the impact of capitalism on the unconscious and its role in the shaping of human desires. [10])
Though readers may find that much of Fisher’s subsequent argument often relates to capitalism only implicitly, it is on this short section of Fisher’s introduction that the rest of his analysis seems to rest.
§
It is worth further acknowledging here that The Weird and the Eerie occupies — like its predecessor, 2014’s Ghosts of My Life — a strange place in the chronological development of Fisher’s thought. Though it is the third book Fisher published, the true sequel to his first book, Capitalist Realism, was left unfinished at the time of his death. Given the preliminary title of Acid Communism, only a draft of its introduction was shared by Fisher amongst his peers, allowing it to later be published posthumously in 2018. [11] Seemingly written in an entirely different register to this unfulfilled work-to-come, The Weird and the Eerie instead collects together and further develops a number of texts that Fisher wrote and published on his k-punk blog in the mid-2000s. But against any assumptions to the contrary, this is not to suggest that the book is irrelevant to Fisher’s overarching political concerns.
At that time, when many of the book’s chapters were first being drafted online, Fisher was enthused, like so many in the English-speaking world, with the writings of Slavoj Žižek, particularly his strand of Lacanian thinking that sought to bridge political theory and psychoanalysis. This was not only due to Žižek’s growing popularity and public profile but also Fisher’s contemporaneous attendance of Žižek’s lectures at various British universities. [12] We shall discuss Žižek’s influence on Fisher in more detail shortly, but it is first worth noting that it was whilst attending these lectures that Fisher began to move specifically “towards a weird psychoanalysis” — a move he more broadly attributes to Jacques Lacan in The Weird and the Eerie’s introduction, with Lacan’s seminars constituting a moment within the development of psychoanalysis “in which the death drive, dreams and the unconscious become untethered from any naturalisation or sense of homeliness.” [13]
Writing on his k-punk blog in 2007, Fisher more clearly articulates what exactly made this moment so weird and interesting to him:
Psychoanalysis, whose object of study and treatment is those “nameless, inscrutable, unearthly things” that go “against all natural lovings and longings”, can be — and usually is — placed under the sign of the Uncanny. Freud’s great essay on “The Uncanny” — with all its ambivalences, its repetitions, its over-hasty closures — remains the most potent theorization of the uncanny. The domain of psychoanalysis can be seen as the place of the unheimlich or the unhomely, the estranged familiar / familial. But can’t the unconscious also be considered Weird, with psychoanalysis the threshold into its alien world? [14]
What Fisher is referencing here is perhaps what Freud himself described as the great humiliation constituted by the emergence of psychoanalysis as a new field of epistemic investigation. In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud suggests that, following Copernicus — who first illustrated how “our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness” — and Darwin — whose “biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature” — psychoanalysis inflicts upon humanity a “third and most wounding blow”, proving “to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.” [15] The very theorisation of the unconscious, in this sense, destabilises the integrity of the thinking subject, who comes to realise that there is an unknowable quadrant of the human mind that functions behind and has the potential to disrupt its capacity for reason. It is a disorienting realisation that brings to mind one of the most famous passages from any work of weird fiction — the opening lines of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 short story, The Call of Cthulhu:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledges will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. [16]
There is a contradiction here, of course. The ironic nature of psychoanalysis, at least if we are to extrapolate from Lovecraft’s warning to the curious, is that an attendance to this theory, conceived of as a treatment for madness itself, might also, at the same time, be the very thing that drives us mad. It is perhaps because of this double bind that we have already voyaged so far and shall continue to. But against Lovecraft’s prevarications, voyage far we must.
Though Fisher begins The Weird and the Eerie with an essay on Lovecraft’s weird tales, this chapter instead serves as a negative foundation for all that is to follow. Lovecraft is, of course, a very controversial figure today. His penchant for racism, above all else, makes him a writer whom many are horrified by for all the wrong reasons. But Fisher suggests that we are more than capable of thinking “the Outside” of present realities and the common-sense ideologies that structure them in ways that are more beneficial to us and less unjust. In the context of Lovecraft’s tales in particular, his question becomes: “what if the best deployment of Lovecraft was not a reversal of his texts’ libidinal polarity, such that the slimy and mulitiplicitous is embraced rather than reviled…? What if, instead, it was Lovecraft’s horror of the body and the chaotic that contained the most political potential in the current conjuncture?” [17]
Much like the racialised others who populate Lovecraft’s tales, rendered as channelers of chaos and evil, it is arguably the oppressed and enslaved masses who are most willing to venture out to the edges of received wisdom and knowledge. In fact, any emancipatory politics must inevitably contend with a madness of its own making, in thinking against so-called common sense. But “I am not here claiming that the outside is always beneficent”, Fisher writes. “There are more than enough terrors to be found there; but such terrors are not all there is to the outside.” [18]
The implicit suggestion here is that we must steel ourselves against what Fisher elsewhere calls Lovecraft’s “reactionary modernism”. [19] If Lovecraft remains an interesting figure at all today, it is precisely because he functions as a modernist writer who nonetheless writes against the effects of modernism itself, and it is an awareness of this contradiction that makes many of his works still productive for us, precisely for the ways that his xenophobia — his fear of the outside — mirrors the “frenzied stasis” of our postmodern moment more generally.
As Fisher writes on the k-punk blog, though he “was constitutively unable to abject” the avant-garde, Lovecraft’s writings nonetheless became “fatally infected with it, implicated in it”, and this is something common to capitalist realism itself. [20] Indeed, modernity, understood not simply as a period of time but as a machinic process in itself, becomes another unseen force that leads us into terrifying unknowns, and Lovecraft demonstrates, albeit in negative, how we must be vigilant of the ways in which modernism can, in turn, become possessed by more reactionary forces. Our task is far from simple. “We can only win if we reclaim modernization”, Fisher insists. [21]
§
This was a problem under broader discussion in the mid-2000s, both within and outside of Žižek’s various lectures. Fisher was particularly indebted to Graham Harman’s thoughts on the matter, later published in his 2012 book, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. In the book’s introduction, Harman writes: “One of the most important decisions made by philosophers concerns the production or destruction of gaps in the cosmos.” [22] He goes on to argue, “Since those who destroy gaps by imploding them into a single principle are generally called reductionists, let’s coin the word productionists to describe philosophers who find new gaps in the world where there were formerly none” — and it is H.P. Lovecraft, for Harman, who is perhaps the most “productionist author” of modern times, since no “other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess.” [23] (Fisher was so enthralled by this suggestion that he organised a “Weird Realism” symposium at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2007, during which a number of other thinkers were invited to respond to Harman’s ideas. [24])
Whilst writing at length on Lovecraft and other such productionists on his blog and in his subsequent books, Fisher finds these weird and eerie gaps in our understanding of the world addressed in more explicitly philosophical and psychoanalytic terms by Jacques Lacan, whose works cast a considerable shadow over The Weird and the Eerie. Perhaps the most famous psychoanalyst of the twentieth century after Freud, Fisher suggests we can understand Lacanian thought as “the revenge of the Weird upon Freud’s tendency towards homeliness”. [25] Indeed, a common critique of Freud’s work in the twentieth century is that it is overly preoccupied with a kind of common sense, as Freud’s understanding of mental illness is put to work in order to rectify any straying from the path of a preordained reasonableness and an ideological understanding of “normal” behaviour.
This is most apparent in Freud’s conceptualisation of the Oedipus complex, which contends with the initiatory behavioural deviations that are experienced by all, but which nonetheless threaten the essential functioning of the family as an integral part of society and its mechanisms of conditioning — arguably making Freud’s formulation of the Oedipus complex an example of a “reactionary modernism”. Philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, most famously — who likewise had a great influence on Fisher — challenged this foundation as being fundamentally reactionary in this regard, and so it was the task of many a twentieth-century analyst and theoretician to free psychoanalysis from its own repressive tendencies.
One way of doing this, at least according to Deleuze, was to embrace rather than shy away from moments of weird and eerie incursion. This is especially necessary for philosophy, and it is perhaps no coincidence that many of Lovecraft’s characters are researchers, detectives and academics, who find their own inquisitiveness to be their downfall. But as Joshua Ramey has more recently argued, “the power of thought, for Deleuze” — who also made references to weird fiction in his writings — “consists in a kind of initiatory ordeal”, which “transpires through an immersion of the self in uncanny moments when a surprising and alluring complexity of nature and psyche is revealed.” [26]
Deleuze identified such an initiation in popular culture through the works of Lewis Carroll, particularly Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — works that contain “splendidly bizarre and esoteric words; grids; codes and decodings; drawings and photographs; a profound psychoanalytic content; and an exemplary logical and linguistic formalism.” [27] They are works that imbue Alice, and the reader, with a “capacity to elude the present”, with a capacity to humiliate common sense and access the peculiar world that exists on its outside through a linguistic play that is otherwise used to tether us to a sense of reality that is arguably not our own. [28]
Lacan made numerous such attempts to elucidate this capacity of language for himself, using psychoanalysis more explicitly to interrogate the ways that any given subjectivity is structured by language, which may serve as a prophylactic against the machinations of the Outside, but which can also make us more vulnerable to outside intrusions. [29] Indeed, Lacan argued that “the experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis” itself is one that allows us to understand the means by which “the symbolic takes hold in even the deepest recesses of the human organism.” [30]
The symbolic, for Lacan, is that region of the unconscious that is most structured by language, and necessarily so, such that it allows us to determine the implicit linkages and inferences between the content of signs and their capacity for expression. Adapting Freud’s own tripartite theory of the structure of the unconscious — to which Freud assigns the concepts of the id, the ego and the superego — Lacan instead offers up a broader structural apparatus, which connects the individual mind to its socio-cultural, as well as more decisively “inhuman” contexts. Alongside the symbolic order, which is structured through its relationship to language, we also have the imaginary order — a pre-linguistic order structured through more primordial identifications — and the Real — that eerie zone that exists behind the symbolic and imaginary, which we do not have any direct access to. Fisher would make frequent references to these Lacanian concepts throughout his works, with the Real, in particular, being of interest for its location behind a more common-sense reality that is, today, covered over by the symbolic and imaginary machinations of capitalist ideology. As Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism:
For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us. [31]
§
One way of actualising such a strategy is through the symbolic, which projects onto the Real an illusory structure. It is that area of the unconscious mind that renders the things we encounter with a meaningful significance. But what is particularly important about Lacan’s argument (as well as Fisher’s) in this regard is that the symbolic order is that which “makes the very existence of fiction possible.” [32]
Fisher takes this provocation very seriously, and indeed, always had done. On his k-punk blog, he argues it is Lacan’s conceptualisation of the symbolic that leads to one of his “most gnomic and provocative formulations: ‘truth has the structure of fiction’.” [33] Though once again discussing this formulation on his blog in the context of one of Žižek’s lectures, it undoubtedly stuck out to Fisher for its resonance with his interests as a PhD student at the University of Warwick in the late 1990s.
Whilst writing his thesis — which similarly explored evocations of the uncanny in works of science-fiction — Fisher was involved with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (or Ccru). [34] Despite its somewhat official sounding name, the group were a decisively para-academic gathering who sought to both investigate and produce mythologies of and for the early Internet — that is, new fictions — which arguably rival Lovecraft’s own Cthulhu mythos, his “Great Old Ones”, in both their scope and contemporary cultural influence. With Lovecraft’s mythos firmly in mind, the Ccru developed a bestiary of symbolic and eerie entities, which provided an elusive form to many of the impersonal forces that had long since controlled us and which were themselves finding new modes of expression in our new technological age.
Amongst the cornucopia of concepts engineered at this time is the idea of “hyperstition”. A play on the word “superstition” — our irrational tendency to believe in moments of acausal coincidence — hyperstition is instead defined as an element “of effective culture that makes itself real.” [35] The question for the Ccru becomes: how can cultural studies and philosophy — which can, like science-fiction, exacerbate certain qualities of the present in their analyses of cultural artefacts — also make certain futures not just culturally significant but actual and real?
Beyond the Ccru’s cybergothic modes of expression, hyperstitions can likewise be understood in Lacanian terms. If “truth has the structure of fiction”, then what is needed for fiction to take on the structure of truth? We already know that such a thing is possible — capitalist realism demonstrates this most effectively. Viewed from the other side, however, and bearing directly on Fisher’s entire body of work, we might ask ourselves: what does it take to actualise the seemingly impossible “fictions” of alternatives to capitalism?
In the aforementioned blogpost from 2005, Fisher asks this question directly. Writing up notes on a conversation held at Birkbeck, University of London, between Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, Fisher summarises the cleft of their discussion as follows: “For Badiou, the challenge was the production of new fictions; for Žižek, the problem was escaping the already-operative fictions of Capital.” [36] It is these two questions that would arguably concern Fisher for the rest of his life, with The Weird and the Eerie discussing myriad fictions that exist somewhere in between. But it was always the production of new fictions, as explored by the Ccru, that Fisher hoped would soon come to bear on the already-operative fictions of capitalist realism. In between the two, we find a direct problematisation of our desires.
As Fisher would argue in his final lectures, given at Goldsmiths, University of London, in late 2016, the central problem of any emancipatory political philosophy worth a damn is the active questioning of our desires. [37] Do we want what we say we want? What if we wanted other things? As Fisher argues, we do want other things, quite obviously — other selves, other political realities, other worlds. Though capitalism attempts to recapitulate our errant desires whenever they emerge, forcing the system to adapt and cover over the gaps in its ideological firmament, the implication is precisely that, against capitalism’s assertions to the contrary, it does not hold the monopoly on our desires. This is significant. As Fisher writes: “Partly what is at stake here … is the idea that the unconscious cannot lie” — a point that, “at the simplest level”, is only the reiteration of one of “the oldest and most familiar lessons of psychoanalysis: slips of the tongue, dreams, symptoms give us access to a truth which cannot be accessed directly.” [38] And so, what would it take for our unconscious desires — which often differ considerably from (but are otherwise denied actualisation by) the libidinal restrictions of capitalism realism — to escape a wishful thinking and instead become astute political demands?
In a follow-up blogpost on the same conversation between Žižek and Badiou, Fisher offers perhaps the most concise and actionable answer to these questions he is able to provide, elucidating what is required of any emancipatory and pointedly libidinal political project that hopes to overcome capitalist realism:
The first hypothesis we might hazard is that, counter-intuitively, only fictions are capable of generating belief. “The final belief must be in a fiction,” Badiou quoted Wallace Stevens as writing. The belief at stake is clearly not a propositional but an attitudinal belief; which is to say, not a belief that a particular factual state of affairs obtains but belief as a set of commitments.
Secondly, since capitalism is itself inherently fictional, it is essential that counter-capitalist fictions be produced. Fiction here would not mean an “imaginary” (in a Lacanian or any other sense) alternative but an already-operative generator of possibilities.
Fiction ensures that things are not only themselves. Capital is the most effective sorcery operative on the planet at the moment because it is adept at transforming banal objects into … sublimely mysterious commodities. Trans-substantiation. The allure of the commodity arises from the non-coincidence of the object with itself … Anti-capitalism needs to take the form not only of a demystifying, depressive desublimation but of the production of alternative modes of sublimation. [39]
It is in The Weird and the Eerie that Fisher lays the cultural groundwork for these political hypotheses. How his observations could practically be applied and actualised is not abundantly clear, however. Perhaps these were to come later, in his unfinished Acid Communism. Nevertheless, through his engagement with the various “fictions” of H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, The Fall, Tim Powers, Philip K. Dick, David Lynch, Daphne du Maurier, Christopher Priest, M.R. James, Brian Eno, Nigel Kneale, Alan Garner, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Glazer, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Christopher Nolan and Joan Lindsey, Fisher demonstrates how we already have a wealth of already-operative generators of possibility at our disposal in weird fictions of all kinds. In often fantastical terms, these authors, musicians and filmmakers all challenge our collective unconscious nonetheless, which, as Fisher argued, never lies.
§
Certain readers may be disappointed (others grateful) that the kind of theoretical exposition presented in this preface — which admittedly attempts to cover a lot of ground in a necessarily short piece of writing — is lacking in Fisher’s text itself. Many have described The Weird and the Eerie in the same terms that Fisher used to describe Freud’s essay on the unheimliche: it is full of “ambivalences”, “repetitions”, and “over-hasty closures”. Anecdotally, it has been suggested that this is because Fisher’s depression made him reticent to properly engage with the editorial process pre-publication, such that he resisted making improvements and clarifications within the text that others felt were needed. But speaking personally, and reading Fisher’s work with an appropriate generosity, if this makes Fisher’s final book a particularly weird addition to his collected works, it is all the more intriguing for that fact.
Fisher sets about opening various portals in this final work, which will hopefully lead the reader to the text’s various outsides. His fleeting references to Lacanian theory, in particular, allow for an initiation into works much more dense and complex than his own. This was always the strength of Fisher’s work, in my view. Like Capitalist Realism itself — a surprisingly short and accessible book that is nonetheless sprinkled with allusions and references to far more difficult works of philosophical and political theory — it serves as an initiation rather than a warning to the curious.
Nevertheless, the difficulty of these texts may fill new readers with terror, but terror is not all there is to found on the outside of this or any of Fisher’s works. Indeed, The Weird and the Eerie functions as a toolkit for engaging with the peculiar nature of our present moment. Our world is strange and uncanny, weird and eerie, but in attuning ourselves to its seemingly inscrutable machinations, we can find paths that lead us outwards from the common-sense structure of reality that is presented to us. We can begin to find ways out of capitalist realism, already present in so many examples of popular culture, which begins to describe many of the preliminary steps it is necessary to take along such paths, imbuing these movements with a profound political confidence that has otherwise been denied us.
[1] Aaron Bastani, “Is This the Most Important Book So Far This Century?”, Novara Media, 13 January 2023: <https://novaramedia.com/2023/01/13/is-this-the-most-important-book-so-far-this-century/>
[2] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zer0 Books, 2009, 2.
[3] Mark Fisher, “Fans, Vampires, Trolls, Masters”, k-punk, 12 June 2009: <https://k-punk.org/fans-vampires-trolls-masters/>
[4] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 2017, 10-11.
[5] Ibid., 11.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, ed. James Strachey and Angela Richards. London: Penguin Books, The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 2, 1973, 215.
[11] See: Mark Fisher, “Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction)”, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016). London: Repeater Books, 2018, 753-770.
[12] Fisher often typed up his notes from these lectures and published them on his blog. See, for example: Mark Fisher, “Why are you so afraid of class?”, k-punk, 26 May 2006: <https://k-punk.org/why-are-you-so-afraid-of-class/>
[13] Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 11.
[14] Mark Fisher, “I put my finger on the weird”, k-punk, 29 November 2007: <https://k-punk.org/i-put-my-finger-on-the-weird/> Here, Fisher is quoting Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby Dick, or The Whale, in which Captain Ahab, pre-empting Freud’s theory by some decades, directly interrogates his unconscious desires, his own agency, and in particular, his strange obsession with the whale that eludes him: “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.”
[15] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, ed. James Strachey and Angela Richards. London: Penguin Books, The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 1, 1973, 326.
[16] H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi. London: Penguin Books, 2002, 139.
[17] Mark Fisher, “Lovecraft and the Weird: Part II”, k-punk, 25 May 2007: <https://k-punk.org/lovecraft-and-the-weird-part-ii/>
[18] Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 9. My emphasis.
[19] Mark Fisher, “Weird/ Psychoanalysis”, k-punk, 17 December 2007: <https://k-punk.org/weird-psychoanalysis/>
[20] Ibid.
[21] Mark Fisher, “Spectres of Revolution”, k-punk, 17 January 2010: <https://k-punk.org/spectres-of-revolution/>
[22] Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. London: Zer0 Books, 2012, 1.
[23] Ibid.
[24] See: Mark Fisher, “Weird Realism”, k-punk, 19 February 2007: <https://k-punk.org/weird-realism/>
[25] Fisher, “I put my finger on the weird”.
[26] Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012, 2.
[27] Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester and Charles J. Stivale. London and New York: Bloomsbury Revelations, 2015, xi.
[28] Ibid., 2.
[29] Lacan, it has been suggested, was a fan of Deleuze’s book, Logic of Sense, perceiving his own influence on the text’s various analyses.
[30] Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006, 6.
[31] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Repeater Books, 2009, 18.
[32] Ibid., 7. It is notable that Lacan makes this assertion in a seminar given not on Lovecraft but his equally weird predecessor, Edgar Allan Poe – specifically, his short story “The Purloined Letter”.
[33] Mark Fisher, “Left hyperstition 1: The Fictions of Capital”, k-punk, 28 November 2005: <https://k-punk.org/left-hyperstition-1-the-fictions-of-capital/> For Lacan’s discussion of this specific formulation, see: Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. London: Routledge Classics, 2007.
[34] See: Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction. New York: Exmilitary Press, 2018.
[35] CCRU, “Glossary” in Writings 1997-2003. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017.
[36] Fisher, “Left hyperstition 1: The Fictions of Capital”.
[37] See: Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun. London: Repeater Books, 2021.
[38] Fisher, “Left hyperstition 1: The Fictions of Capital”.
[39] Mark Fisher, “Left hyperstition 2: Be Unrealistic, Change What’s Possible”, k-punk, 29 November 2009: <https://k-punk.org/left-hyperstition-2-be-unrealistic-change-whats-possible/>
