I’ll be dropping into Trafó Gallery in Budapest via Zoom on Wednesday night to give a short talk on acid, in response to the marvellous zine put together by T+U, which they are launching on the night.
T+U vol. VI. ACIDMagazine launch at Trafó Gallery 22. 12. 2021, 18 – 22h, 1094 Budapest, Liliom u. 41
“Psychonauts of the world, unite!”
From this Christmas on, when you think about acid it won’t be heartburn and reflux problems caused by the fish soup, stuffed cabbage and bejgli that comes to your mind. Technologie und das Unheimliche’s (T+U) latest „ACID” themed issue brings acid’s political and cultural allegory under the christmas tree. T+U’s publication vol. VI. ACID celebrates the revolution of acidification and its molecular apotheosis instead of the existing order of the alkaline moorland. Accordingly, to celebrate the launch of the new issue we will be tripping together in the form of an all night event where different artistic formats (musical improvisations, presentations, readings and performances) will organically dissolve into each other. Thus: “all that is solid melts into” the Big Cosmic Acid.
The ritual acidification sessions will be conducted by:
• 12z (Márton Kristóf, Áron Porteleki & Bálint Szabó) • Matt Colquhoun (UK) • Maria Jan?ová (SK) & Václav Janoš?ík (CZ) • T+U
The event can only be visited with a vaccination card and it is mandatory to wear a mask!
A group of Zer0 Books authors and ex-employees have written yet another open letter. Not on Cosmonaut this time, but somewhere else.
The authors “wish to avoid the exacerbation of a mud-slinging match between readers and authors of Zero Books under Doug Lain’s tenure (to be called Zero 2.0 from herein)” but they also want to “address a number of inaccuracies”…
Anything specific? Not really. They mostly don’t like that various Repeater fans and authors have expressed the opinion that Zer0 2.0 was full of cranks. But they also claim that now the new team are obstructing the promotion of certain books.
After I challenged this on Twitter, a few people came out of the woodwork. From what I can see, there’s various unspecified grievances that have apparently been raised by others elsewhere, but it’s still not clear who the article is referring to.
For example, it could refer to Eliot Rosenstock, who was recently offered his book back after he decided to partner up with another publisher for his launch. Since he didn’t seem to want to be associated with Zer0 3.0, he was offered a break from his contract with no hard feelings. But despite his own behaviour — and that of the other publisher — leading Zer0 to believe this is what he wanted, he took offence to the generous suggestion and has since whined about it in a few places online.
It could also refer to Christine Louis Dit Sully, who has since made it very clear on Twitter that a video of hers has not gone live on the new YouTube channel. She thinks this is censorship. But according to Christine herself, the reason given for the video’s absence is that it is “old”.
What this means is that Christine’s book came out in May, long before the takeover, so I’m not sure why anyone would feel obligated to start a promotional campaign this late. (Six months is a long time in an annual publishing schedule.) It’s also unclear how this constitutes a break in her contract, since her book has been published by the previous team and therefore has already been fulfilled. “Promotion is important”, she says, and that’s true. But I don’t understand the suggestion that the publisher is obliged to put out her self-made content whenever she feels like it… So this also seems like a non-issue, or at least another self-inflicted one.
It’s also worth noting that these authors’ circumstances are very different to those experienced by former Zer0 1.0 authors who got caught up in Doug’s initial takeover. Like Adam Kotsko, who wrote on Twitter back in November:
It makes me very happy that Zer0 Books has been returned to the control of its founders and that the asshole interloper who has been running things for the last several years will interlope no more!
I still deeply resent that he left [Kotsko’s 2015 book] Creepiness to die, as the last title from the original team, especially after I was promised greater promotion as an established author. Ultimately he tried to placate me by setting up a podcast with a recent Zer0 author who was a total crank.
Still, accusations of censorship are flying around. But again, no one is under any obligation to publish anything (or put up with anything) outside of contracted books. The continued whining will continue for some time regardless, no doubt. As someone astutely put it recently, “they need their points of conflict with the new management to maintain any hope of anyone paying them attention”. Hence three open and anonymous but vague letters in the last month.
But the attention many of us will be paying is to their political associations and positions. For example, if anyone is restricted from participation in the YouTube channel, that may be because Acid Horizon have had a “No Sp!ked” policy for a few years now (for various reasons). This was a position they held long before they took over the management of Zer0’s relaunched channel — Mike Watson was very angry about not being allowed on their podcast months ago for this very reason— and I don’t see why they would have to renege on those principles now. If the new management of the YouTube channel doesn’t want any culture warrace baiting on there — of the kind that sounds a lot like the race report that the Conservative Party put out earlier this year — that’s their prerogative.
But the reality is that the reasons for these latest disagreements are far more mundane than all that, and mostly just continued hot air from a group of reactionaries who’ve likely lost the biggest platform they’ve ever had or will have. For that reason, they’ve even made attempts to buy it back, with the help of Platypus, for example. But considering Platypus’s similar hostility to the original Zer0 project and their similar insistence on being out-of-touch “Marxists”, this is all just more reason why we’re all glad to see the back of the lot of them.
[Update: Regarding Watson, he’s since challenged the narrative mentioned briefly above, and we can probably expect another open letter about it in the near future. Having previously browbeaten members of the Acid Horizon podcast, he rejects he wasn’t allowed on and instead choose not to appear, if only after they relented. This relenting came about after Watson left a series of angry voice notes and message tirades in an attempt to get his way. The new management have received a few as well, or so I’ve heard, but have little intention of kowtowing to his tantrums. At the end of the day, he’s just a bully who doesn’t like being told to shove off.]
The reason I’m writing yet another post on this is that the open letter also makes repeated veiled references to me, and though they call it harassment, at this point — and for the last month now at least — I’ve simply been exercising my right of reply. (Seriously, this is their third open letter now!)
To be clear, besides those things clearly cited and backed up above, a lot of this is just my opinion. Despite what these authors seem to think or repeatedly insinuate, I’m not a Repeater employee or a Zer0 employee. I occasionally do some proofreading as a freelancer. I’m an author. I’m a contributor. I’m a gobshite. I’m not a sanctioned Repeater or Zer0 spokesperson and the team have every right to tell me to pack it in. (No such request… as yet.) I’m simply exercising my own voice and sharing my own familiarity with the takeover, with Repeater and with Zer0. If I was on the payroll of either publisher, I’d likely join the current teams in their stoic silence. But I’m not.
(Again, only Tariq has made a formal public statement on any of this, and he’s likely the only person who will; this statement was only made because Doug’s been running his mouth about things on every second-rate podcast that will have him on — not to mention falsely claiming he’d been “fired” before the sale of Zer0 was even made public.)
I’ve repeatedly said my piece on all this, of course, and if you’ve read what I’ve had to say before, you’ll find nothing new below. Just the same receipts and the same hollow retorts from the other side. But these receipts warrant sharing, if only to emphasise just how full of it they are.
The new open letter begins as follows:
Firstly we wish to address the maltreatment via potential slander, libel, trolling behavior … in the hope that a troubling development of negative portrayals regarding Zero 2.0 authors and staff, including Doug Lain, can be forestalled.
Slander, libel and trolling seem to refer to me here. They could be referring to a general cohort of supporters who just don’t like Zer0 2.0, but it would be silly to think Repeater have any influence over them at all.
We also question the narrative peddled by Zero’s new team (linked closely to Repeater, such that the new manager of Zero is the wife of Repeater’s manager)…
The connections are go much wider than that, you conspiratorial weirdos. The entire Repeater team seems to have some sort of hand in running Zer0 at this point. And why wouldn’t they? They literally founded it.
… which has from the offset revolved around the notion that Zero’s acquisition marks a return to quality publishing and the closure of period of poor management, low-quality theorization, and nefarious political positions.
This is all the open letter amounts to. They reject being called reactionary and they reject the opinions of others that their work was low quality. (This isn’t true of everyone, of course — plenty of their authors, both previous and prospective, have continued to approach Zer0 with great books under Doug’s stewardship, albeit often based on the reputation of original team’s work and Mark Fisher in particular.) Ultimately, a lot of this is subjective, and clearly doesn’t warrant a whinging open letter or the nonsense legal insinuations like anyone could be sued for “libel” and “slander” for not liking books.
As for the rest of it, literally show us the lie:
Doug got burnt precisely because he was funding Zer0 with a Patreon account (probably due to poor book sales), and was beholden to some dodgy-looking managerial arrangement that made the transfer so messy, where no one (not even him) was on a contract. Granted, that points to poor management from JHP rather than Lain himself, but that’s precisely why the original team left and why they considered Lain a scab — against the original team’s expressed wishes, he entered another dodgy “marriage of convenience” that was, at that time, very convenient for him.
Beyond all the culture war rubbish, I’ve repeatedly pointed out how Watson’s reading of Mark Fisher as an Adornian pessimist is precisely the memed reduction he claims to denounce in his recent book. That’s my personal bugbear, because Mark Fisher’s work is something I can attest to with mountains of receipts — as can many of those who knew him. Watson instead puts forth the sort of narrative my own work has repeatedly disproven, rejecting a one-dimensional reading of his thought. But even if this was a subjective disagreement, Watson also has a tendency to get even the most basic points of biography wrong. On this issue alone, the low-quality theorization and research is egregious, but it doesn’t stop there. There are countless examples that others have taken issue with in the past, with books often being poorly edited and in desperate need of a proper proofread.
As for nefarious political positions, if this wasn’t already obvious from the litany of Sp!ked authors they’ve published — twelve at the last count, and yes, that’s including figures like Nina Power and James Heartfield who were affiliated with the original crew and were later bounced after they caught brain worms (but whom Lain continued to court, of course) — Zer0 2.0 editor Ashley Frawley has been on failed Fox News rip-off GB News not once but twice in the last week alone. How’s that advancing the left? Even the most asinine right-wing columnists think it’s nothing more than “a humourless echo chamber for Ukip supporters” at this point. Clearly, Frawley isn’t Jon Stewart entering the lion’s den; she’s another garden-variety reactionary joining their roster of crank hysterics. This is the sort of person that Zer0 2.0 has boosted and facilitated.
Out of everything they could have overplayed here, these are the three things that are surely indisputable at this point… Nevertheless, it’s still “the new team of Zero Books” who continue to “divide the left”.
What follows is a “request that ongoing divisive attacks, which occur in tandem with personal attacks issued by at least one Repeater author” — that’s me! — “(at points amounting to quite literal harassment) naming a number of Zero 2.0 authors, cease.” I will, of course, stop when the open letters, poor theorisation and inexplicable references to my work stop.
They say that it’s bemusing I — or anyone — would behave “so aggressively to fellow leftists”, but just as Sp!ked likes to insist it’s a Marxist publication, there’s little to suggest these authors are lefties beyond their own insistence of that fact. They argue that calling them “‘right wing’ or ‘right adjacent’” deflects attention from the “genuine right-wing threat” we face. But when your opinions are wholly in accordance with the right — in this country at least; admittedly, the insanity of US politics probably skews their view out of the Overton window a bit, but there are plenty of Americans who aren’t beleaguered by culture war blinkers — how are you any different to that threat? How does Doug Lain supporting TERFs or platforming far-right darling Frank Furedi or editorial staff jumping on GBeebies twice a week not make you (at the very least) a useful idiot for the right’s agenda?
Call it trolling all you want — the critiques are valid and well-accounted for.
I often wonder what Mark Fisher’s politics would have been like had he not died :/ Would he have pursued the anti-identitarian, accelerationism-adjacent fash-lite politics that is just normal today bc he helped invent it? Or would he have done smth else
What has fueled a lot of my own work over the last few years — the introduction to Postcapitalist Desire being the most concise overview, or the introduction to Spanish k-punk if you want a less thorough (focused on k-punk anthology content only) but free version — is a general frustration with weird comments that say things like, “woah, who can know what Mark Fisher would even be doing now, honestly?”, when it’s all literally right there if you know how to use Google.
In the immediate aftermath of Fisher’s death, a few different people made the case for themselves. Jeremy Gilbert most notably wrote about what Fisher was working on, but it had the distinct palette of Gilbert’s own interests with Fisher’s more specific insights left to the side. I felt the best thing to do, as ever, was to just go back to what Fisher himself had to say. But people don’t, it seems, or don’t know where to start, so a bit of curation and contextualisation is clearly in order. I decided to do a bit of that work myself, if only because no one else was at the time, or what was being put out seemed woefully misleading or insufficient to me.
The Twitter thread above (since deleted) was the perfect example of why such work is needed, even now (five years on). It was so awful, I’m almost convinced it’s a particularly heinous troll — and if it was, it was very effective. Twitter got really mad at it, but the response was also heartening to see, with multiple references made to Postcapitalist Desire as a clear record that charted out, if not completely, at least in far more detail than the “Acid Communism” essay, where Fisher’s politics were situated (and where they were heading) at the end of his life. But still, the original poster wasn’t convinced. In a series of since-deleted addendums, they repeatedly focused in on Fisher’s anti-identitarianism, which they had apparently seen utilised by transphobes, presumably to denounce self-ID.
As cursed as this take was, it was quite well-timed. As I tweeted a few days before, I’d been transcribing a few additional Fisher lectures that I found on an old hard drive. They’re not really worth sharing in full — and the person who recorded them also doesn’t want me to — but they do reveal Fisher teaching things to his students that he might not be particularly well known for. The first recording I listened to is a case in point: it is a lecture Fisher gave on Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman.
Here we find Fisher talking about gender identity with an unusual frankness. To those really familiar with his work, it won’t be too surprising. He wrote on several occasions about his own sense of body horror — the horror of being embodied and of being gendered. Some early k-punk posts were very honest about experiences of sexual abuse Mark had experienced, for instance, and these experiences seemed to be at the heart of his own delibidinised and depressive episodes, circling a one-time identification with asexuality.
Though Mark wrote about this publicly in the early days of the blog, it still feels like an uncomfortable thing to speculate on any further, so I don’t mean to highlight this as saying anything concrete about Mark himself. But it does show how honest and transparent he was in questioning certain things.
This sort of critical questioning was always firmly embedded in his feminist and anti-capitalist critiques of society, which appeared frequently on the k-punk blog. He interviewed Jessica Rylan once, for instance, discussing the intersection of female embodiment and capitalist machinery (production and reproduction) — correction: this interview, which Mark hosted on his blog, was conducted by Nina Power; as ever, no accounting for her subsequent brain worms — and was later an early champion of the work of Gazelle Twin, whose 2014 album, UNFLESH, explored themes of pubescent androgyny and ungainliness as well as pregnancy and the prison of gendered existence, which Mark openly acknowledged really resonated with him. (See this great Quietus interview for more on that from Elizabeth herself.)
Suffice it to say that, throughout his life, Mark explored the outer reaches of what it means to be an embodied subject, from his PhD thesis to the limit-experiences discussed in the unfinished introduction to Acid Communism.
Many people mourn many different things about Mark’s work and its unfinished nature, but I personally think it is a great shame that he never got to experience the opening-out of our conversation around gender identity that has defined these last few years. I can personally imagine him being a staunch and vicious critic of British TERFs, and he would no doubt be deeply disappointed that a few of his former friends have gone down that bigoted path as well.
The lecture he gave on Irigaray in 2014 (as part of his postgraduate “Vocalities” class at Goldsmiths, University of London) is a good example of the sorts of philosophical position he held and shared with his students. 2014 was notably the same year Gazelle Twin’s UNFLESH was released and the course, as a whole, seems to openly grapple with the sorts of tension explored in Gazelle Twin’s music. Music-making is itself an often embodied practice, after all. Singing, in particular, is a sort of full-body activity that we nonetheless use to escape the body. The locality of the body is displaced as vocality escapes.
This always makes me think about Kodwo Eshun’s comment, which I’ve often repeated, in a reading group on The Weird and the Eerie held in 2017, talking about the vocalic bodies of various animals. The screams of vixens, for instance, terrify us, precisely because we cannot imagine the body that has made such a sound; the sound exceeds the bounds of (our image of) the body that makes it. The same is true, in my mind, of black metal vocalists, who attempt to embody the fury of the natural world precisely by exceeding the sonic bounds of their own “natural” or “normal” vocal palette. We might also note how one-time k-punk interviewee Jessica Rylan explored this through her noise project Can’t. The song “Crazy Cat”, in particular, feels like a demonic rendition of Long Nineties earworm “Smelly Cat” from the sitcom Friends, but here Rylan begins to embody a rabid cat herself, so that her vocalic body becomes less feminine and more feline as the track progresses and decays, with electronic distortion and screeching becoming disturbingly organic, like the growls, hisses and screeches made by upset cats themselves.
Despite all of this, and despite the advertised focus on the voice, Mark instead begins the discussion by addressing the tyranny of the body in contemporary culture, which we naturally want to escape. We often focus on that which is repressed, of course, but despite what we are led to believe, surely the body is to insisted upon. He notes, for example, that despite the many of the attitudes of the 1960s and ’70s that we have retained, the truth is that “we’re not in a society dominated by bureaucratic… attempts to control sexuality… We’re not in a society dominated by religion… We’re not in a philosophical environment in which Descartes’ dualism is promulgated… If you look at the wider culture, in what sense is the body repressed in our culture?”
He is challenged on this almost immediately. We clearly still live in a heteronormative culture in which a similarly normative body image reigns over us, making us feel bad about ourselves and effectively controlling what we are supposed to desire. Mark responds:
Well, I obviously agree with that. But I think that is a different issue from [the suggestion that] the body as such is repressed. I mean, physicality as such isn’t repressed – it’s insisted upon, isn’t it? […] We’re in a culture that overvalues certain forms of the physical – for sure! – over other forms. But that’s very different from saying the physical as such is undervalued. I just can’t really see how that plays out in a straight-forward way. I think it just was more straight-forwardly the case, in the Sixties etc., that there was something to rebel against there, in terms of the body as such. I think you’re quite right – it’s not that we now live in a wonderful time and any form of body is acceptable – I don’t think we’re in anything like that. But I do think that is a different set of issues from the idea that sexuality as such is repressed. I just can’t see how that stands up in our culture. I mean, yes, certain forms of sexuality are normative still – less than they used to be, possibly – but the idea that, somehow, sexuality is excluded, marginalized at the expense of the cognitive – I just can’t see this in late-capitalism myself.
Already, we can perhaps see the seeds of an anti-TERF position. TERFs, arguably more than any other vocal political group, insist upon the body as a defining part of a person’s subjectivity, — that is, as an identitarian marker for what you can and cannot (or should and should not be able to) do in our society. The apparently frivolous nature of gender as a topic for discussion lets them get away with this, of course. It is a position that would more readily be denounced as ableist or racist in any other context in which the body is insisted upon as a measure of your right and proper identity.
This isn’t a surprising position for Fisher to take. He was a passionate feminist. We’ve had this debate before — more than once, in fact. His feminism — and that of the accelerationist crowd in general — is so frequently displaced, despite it being so central to much of his (and their) writing. There’s also an argument to be made that Fisher’s feminism was, in part, influenced by Nick Land’s (which was likely, in turn, influenced by Sadie Plant herself). But Land has since reneged on that part of his thought, of course. Fisher never did. In fact, it remained central to his thought until his death.
If Fisher held an anti-identitarian position as part of this, it most likely came from a distaste for over-defining any subjective position whatsoever, precisely because it made you a bigger target for capitalist dynamics. (Deleuze and Guattari always advocated for “getting out of the face”, of course.) But that doesn’t mean he was against self-definition or description, rather he was critical of who we are defining or describing ourselves for. (Even in “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, he denounces our tendency to essentialise other people, not any way in which we might try to self-identify ourselves.) He seems to ask: is it for our own benefit that we self-identify this way or that, so that others might see us as we are? Perhaps, but should we ignore the increased emphasis placed on self-identification and the ramped up individualism of communicative capitalism? This was Fisher’s concern — that we are simply prostrating ourselves before the gaze of the Big Other.
As such, I think that even attempting to fit this into an “anti-identitarianism” — even an unorthodox one — is misleading. His position was, instead, more akin to what we would now recognise as an anti-essentialism. He wasn’t against self-ID; he was against the individualising and essentialising tendencies of capitalism itself (discussed recently).
This may, of course, be an over-generous reading of his position, considered in the context of “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, first published in 2013. All the more reason why I perpetually insist that people read another essay. If his position at that time was just anti-idpol posturing, he had very clearly changed his mind no less than a year later.
Having argued that the body is insisted upon in contemporary society, Mark begins his lecture on Irigaray by introducing some of the writing that she positioned herself against, including the seemingly internalised misogyny of Simone de Beauvoir, who lashes out at capitalism as much as she lashes out at her own sense of a restricted subjectivity. Mark explains:
One of the things about Beauvoir, if you read it… And Beauvoir was a much better writer than Sartre… I think she’s just a much better stylist, much more composed, really. And you could argue that the major legacy of existentialism for our time comes from Beauvoir rather than Sartre, actually. […]
[W]ith Beauvoir, what’s interesting is the attack on cyclical time, and a loathing of female biology… One of the interesting things, I guess, about Sartre is his Cartesianism. He defends it! He will say, “I am a Cartesian.” Why? Because you are not your body… If you were your body, according to Sartre, then you would have a fixed essence in lots of ways. A key claim of Sartre’s is “existence precedes essence”, meaning you are not defined by any of the predicates that you have, and your body will be just a set of predicates for him, [a set of] properties. And what enables you to have choice is the basic structure of Cartesianism. The “I” that choses is not the “I” that, you know, can be described as a set of determinate properties.
In a way, Beauvoir takes this up with a hostility to the female body, which she thinks prevents her from having the same level of choice that men have. She thinks that men are freer from their bodies than women, and that’s why there’s this kind of loathing of the female body, as I say, in Beauvoir’s work.
This is what Irigaray rejects. This links, with Beauvoir, with this rejection of cyclical time. She thinks that, really, the time of freedom is a time of projects, which are open to the future, and where something new can happen, whereas historically women have been trapped in cyclical time, which is housework, basically. […] It’s the endless nature of it – it’s no achievement. […] Even when it’s done, you’re only back to zero. […] As long as there is life, there is domestic work to be done – and that is interminable.
Beauvoir links that, then, with the time of menstruation, which she sees as a prison of cyclicity, of the female body. Incredibly, if a man had written it, you’d think it was an incredibly misogynistic description of what it is to have a female body. And you can say that thatis in fact misogyny. You could argue that is, effectively, [the perspective from which] she is seeing her own body from, as it were. The gaze she is seeing it from is, you could argue, “the male gaze”, to use Laura Mulvey’s famous term. And this is basically the base of Irigaray’s critique of this stuff. It’s not in the way that she rejects cyclical time… The key claim of Irigaray – which, in a way, follows on from a lot of what Beauvoir said – is this thing about the second sex, you could say. There is no sexual difference – this is the key claim of Irigaray. There is no sexual difference. Why? Because there is only one sex, which means there’s no sexes, really.
Why does she say that? Well, because the position of the universal is occupied by the male, but in a surreptitious way. So whenever we talk about the universal we really mean men. Men don’t see it that way… Or the dominant forms of discourse don’t articulate it that way. The point is, it’s normal and universal to be a man, it’s deficient and particular to be a woman – that’s Irigaray’s argument. This isn’t explicitly stated because, if it was explicitly stated, the whole thing would fall apart in a certain way.
One of the chapters of Speculum [of the Other Woman] is “The Eternal Irony of the Community” – a quote from Hegel – about women’s position in the community. Are women inside or outside of the community? Obviously, for Hegel, this was in the nineteenth century, when women didn’t have a public role, typically, yet they were necessary for the reproduction of the community on lots of levels. So are they inside or outside? What does that mean? And, of course, where is this question posed from? There is no neutral place to pose any questions about gender – that would be the position of Irigaray – and so everything is distorted by this… When you have binaries, it’s not that the terms are equal. The binary is hierarchized as well. So, you know, we have the distinction between male and female, but male is above female. For Irigaray, then, there’s a whole set of other things associated with this primary binary, and particularly of interest to us for this text is the distinction between matter and ideality.
This is 2014, let us not forget, one year after the “Vampire Castle” essay, when Fisher was supposedly in the thralls of anti-idpol mania. Admittedly, this could go either way. The different between a material body and an ideal body is a line that TERFs continuously scour into the ground before them. No matter how you may imagine yourself in your head, you can never change your biological reality.
And so, in the context of our contemporary TERF clusterfuck, we could argue that “gender critical” feminists are clearly on the side of matter, whereas trans people live in an idealised fantasyland. But Fisher shows how, since Plato, things have always been the other way round…
He explains:
Plato’s general theory, remember, is that the material world is a world of simulation. It’s completely opposite to our common sense now [but] Plato thinks that the physical world is fake. The real world is the ideal world, the world of ideas. So you’ve got the physical world, the copy of the ideal. Art, certainly like visual art or whatever, is a copy of a copy – doubly degenerate. So let’s say you’ve got a tree – a tree is a copy of an ideal tree; a painting of a tree is a copy of a copy for Plato.
This question of simulation becomes a big thing later on, with Baudrillard’s work, who was also part of the same era [as Irigaray] – this post-Sixties kind of theory – and that’s taken up by Deleuze in Logic of Sense – Plato and the simulacra.
Okay, so why did he think the ideal world is more real than the physical world? What’s better about ideas or forms [compared to] physicality?
A student suggests that ideas are “invariant”.
Yeah. He also thinks physical things are particular, and therefore limited in space and time, whereas ideal forms are not particular; they’re our definition of universal. How do you know what the chair is? Well, he says you can only know what a chair is because you’ve got an ideal form of a chair that you can refer to.
So how do we group together particulars unless we have an ideal? For him, the ideal doesn’t come from our minds, rather our minds have access to a real thing, which is the idea. And any physical thing is a degenerate version of this ideal form. The ideal form is invariant, eternal, not subject to change or decay.
The whole problem with TERF dogma is that it believes in this “ideal” form as a sort of text book representation of male or female bodies. It’s a kind of “scientific” ideal — which has its uses, of course — but which is clearly distinct from any social ideal, which even amongst cis people leads to forms of bodily expression that are vastly different (aesthetically at least) from some sort of scientific ideal.
This is a large part of the problem for Irigaray, and likewise Fisher. These ideals can be, by definition, ideological. Who produces them and for what purpose? For Irigaray, this makes Plato just one of the first step in a long line of patriarchal thinkers.
Okay, we’re back with Plato. We’re back with Plato because we’ve gone backwards in time to the so-called origin of Western philosophy – and the question of origins will make us think of Derrida straight away, and the problems of the concept of origin for Derrida – but also, for Irigaray, there is the association of origins with issues surrounding unbirth. And there’s a lot of play in this text about matter and the maternal – mater, matter, the relation between the two.
He invites a student to recant the story, which we’ll skip over for now, but it’s worth taking a look if you’re reading this and you’re not familiar with the story.
This is a metaphor for enlightenment – literally. […] It’s quite rich and complicated. It seems really simple, to start off with, but partly what Irigaray goes into the kind of detailed architecture that Plato sets up. So let’s restage it.
On the most simple level, what [Plato] thinks he’s doing here, presumably, is a story about enlightenment – taken literally. What happens if you see light when you’ve been in the dark? It’s not like a smooth process of, “yes, I can see now.” If you’ve been in the dark and you’re subjected to light, it blinds you!
I think the genius of the last bit of the story is this thing about… It’s a bit like Nietzsche’s parable of the madman. When you are enlightened and you go back to those that aren’t, they don’t say, “thanks very much, let’s all go get enlightened now.” They say, “what the fuck are you talking about?” To them, he looks mad! Because this is the only world that they know.
[…] It’s partly, then, about this question that has been taken up by political philosophers since, which is why do people love their own subjection?
Has anyone seen the Zizek film on ideology yet? The thing about They Live that it starts with – just brilliant. Have people seen They Live? The John Carpenter film? If people haven’t seen it, it’s, in a way, like a Platonic model of politics, actually.
They Live is about a world in which aliens have taken over earth, but nobody really knows about it. The only way you can find out is if you get these special glasses. You put the glasses on and you can see the secret commands of the aliens, like “OBEY”, “CONSUME BLINDLY”, and you can see these alien skull-heads amongst the human population and all of that. But the most puzzling thing about the film – I remember when I first saw it when it came out – is this at least eight minute long fight sequence. It’s this insanely long fight sequence, where the lead character tries to persuade his friend to put the glasses on, so that he’ll see… [Laughs.] But this guy just refuses to do it! And I basically thought, “why don’t you just fucking do it?!” He literally fights as hard as he can to stop him from [making him wear the glasses].
[…] So Zizek says that this tells us, really, about the nature of ideology. He already knows what he’ll see when he puts the glasses on, which is why he doesn’t want to do it! So, on some level, I think you get the same thing [in Plato’s allegory]. They already know, in some sense, that the world they live in is fake. But then we have to go to Plato’s general theory.
Here we have the comments already quoted above, about how the material world is itself a simulation, with variants understood in relations to invariant ideals. The question becomes:
So how do we group together particulars unless we have an ideal? For him, the ideal doesn’t come from our minds, rather our minds have access to a real thing, which is the idea. And any physical thing is a degenerate version of this ideal form. The ideal form is invariant, eternal, not subject to change or decay.
What is notable about this, for Fisher, is that it positions Plato against philosophies of becoming, like that of Deleuze or Nietzsche or Bergson.
For Bergson, [becoming] was a positive; for Plato, it was a negative. In a way, there is a gnostic side to Plato, which is the denigration of the physical world, and the idea of the physical world as this realm of deception, decay, and temptation and lure – which the Gnostics [also] thought. It’s in Philip K Dick a lot as well, and a lot of things like The Matrix or whatever. You can clearly see there is something Platonic, in a way. A lot of Philip K Dick stuff is like that. The whole world is a kind of fake. How do we know what the real world is?
The further problem, however, which Philip K Dick demonstrates himself in his eventual madness — think VALIS — is that it is very difficult to actually live with these sorts of problems.
This was David Hume’s argument, right? Hume’s argument against all skepticism was, “this is just philosophy, you can’t live like this”. Hume’s argument against skepticism was put a rabid dog in a room with a skeptical philosopher and see what they do. If they run away from the rabid dog, then how meaningful is their skepticism? You can’t live it. You can think it, but you can’t live it. In a way, Kant develops from this thought – it may well not be true, but we have to live with it as if it is. We’re hard-wired that way.
It’s like that scene in Total Recall. The great scene of that [film] – I’ve seen bits of the remake, but it was just preposterous; why bother? The original one, with Arnie… For those who haven’t seen it, Total Recall is based on a Philip K Dick novel – a short story, rather – about a construction worker… There’s this industry where you can have a holiday by simulation, basically. You can programme in advance the kind of vacation that you want and you can have it in a few minutes. It’ll feel real to you, but it hasn’t really happened. So he [the construction worker] choses exactly the kind of woman he wants to have an affair when he’s there; he choses that there’s going to be some sort of Martian invasion, battles and all of this… It’s a great deconstruction of the rest of the film, because that’s exactly what happens throughout the rest of the film. We see this being selected… But obviously, with this being Philip K Dick, it becomes a bit more complicated than that, and it seems the other way round. Actually, these things that he thinks are a simulation are actually the real world, and this identity as an ordinary construction worker is in fact the fake thing. It’s just a form of cover.
But there’s a great scene in which they send in a doctor – they send a doctor into the simulation, a psychiatrist, who says, “look, err, you know, you know this isn’t real, and if you keep acting as if it’s real, you’re going to have a total breakdown, and that’ll be it, you’ll get trapped into this total reality and you’ll believe it.” But Arnie says, “why are you sweating?” and shoots him. [Laughter.] But it’s this point of schizophrenia, really. You know, if you treat the whole world as a simulation, what would that mean?
Of course, what happens with Philip K Dick is that you get levels of this. The first level: okay, we can all cope with this. The first level: okay, it’s a simulation with some real world beyond that. It’s when the second-level world also becomes exposed as simulation, or you have to choose between the two, that’s when we get into real problems. [Laughs.] We all sort of accept that our world is a bit fake, but when there’s two levels of simulation to choose from, and even that second level is exposed as well, that’s when we start moving towards madness.
[…] But all of this stuff is somewhat in place in the idea of the cave allegory, really. The thing is, with Plato, it’s a bit like with Descartes… What is a secure form of knowledge, given all of this? Like Descartes will say later, the senses are just inherently tricky. We know that they’re not true. We know they’re not true, and that’s what Descartes demonstrates. The demonstration is clear. We know that if we look at something, like a building far away, it ain’t that big really. We know that if we put a stick in water, it looks bent but it’s not really. We know, on the level of common sense – pre-reflective common sense and experience – we know that our senses don’t tell us what the world is really like. We know we can’t really trust our senses – not only that we can’t trust our senses, but we don’t trust our senses. We adjust for the way our senses work, otherwise we would look at distant buildings and pick them up. We don’t do that.
The question of the so-called rationalist tradition – of which Descartes and Plato are the major philosophers, really – given that empirical experience is not reliable, what do we use as a reliable form of knowledge? They want to say – Plato first and then Descartes afterwards – that science and logic and mathematics are secure forms of knowledge. Why? Because they’d be true in any possible world. You know, if you can say that a triangle has three angles that add up to 180?, you don’t go look at triangles to prove that.
[…] Point being, you don’t go out and look triangles to establish whether that is true or not. You know, you don’t go, “right, I’ve found a hundred triangles now, all of the angles add up to 180?, that means…” It’s exactly that you need an axiomatic definition of something, which is true no matter what. It’s the circularity of it that makes it secure. But the circularity of it also makes it useless, you could argue. You can’t use that, because it’s just self-referring, in certain respects.
But anyway, that’s why they turn to logic and mathematics. They feel they’re secure, and anything that has to do with matter is not secure. Because matter is this rotting… You know, becoming – a positive for Bergson and post-Bergsonian philosophers like Deleuze – is negative for Plato, because becoming equals transience… Becoming is a rotting for Plato, in lots of ways.
So, straight away, there is a binary, a series of binaries, set up between matter and the ideal. And, for Plato, the ideal also has this colloquial sense, doesn’t it, of the perfect? It’s perfect because it is non-tainted by particularity. So, then, you’ve got another binary: the universal and the particular. So matter would be particular, the idea would be universal. And you’ve also got mind and body as well. The body deceives us – doesn’t mean to; can’t help it – the body deceives us, the mind can have access to truth.
Given this basic metaphysical and epistemological set of commitments that Plato’s got, this is the background to the allegory of the cave. So, yes, to go back to that, in the cave we have a group of men – and they are gendered, I think – facing away from the cave entrance. They probably don’t even know they’re in a cave. You know, the basic point in McLuhan: the one thing fish can’t see is water. Probably the most important things to us are the things we can’t perceive, because we take them for granted. This is, in a way, the thought of Heidegger. For people like Heidegger – and Graham Harman, who really follows this up – we can’t bring to presence the things which we may depend on, because we can’t see them.
Anyway, so they don’t even know they’re in a cave. That’s just how things are to them. But they’re chained up, they’re looking at the back of the room, the back wall, and so what they see is the reflections, the shadows cast by fire onto that back wall. This is a kind of stripped-back, allegorical representation of his theory. You don’t think the things themselves, you just see distorted and partial reflections of things.
Then there’s the escape into the light, which, as I say, is one of the best bits. What then happens – it’s unpleasant and traumatic to see the light! It’s not good. It’s not like you then go, “That’s wonderful, I’ve seen things… Come on, chaps, let’s get out.” “Okay, let’s go.” It’s not like that at all. It’s traumatic to see the light. Again, your body betrays you, in some ways! Your body is always tempting you into it – that’s Plato’s story. But there’s a distinct double […] there, you could say. Because enlightenment is also about the mind. It’s a cognitive shift that is traumatic. And, as I say, the resistance of the men in the cave to the idea that there’s anything out there is worth [their] leaving, that these chains are worth throwing off, again would be the work of the body. The chains [represent] the work of the body. The chains are the appetites. The body, which is telling us that that’s all there is, insisting on its dominion over us.
Here a student asks about the Freudian idea that men are always looking to find ways to return to the womb, to the comfort of the origin, which tees Fisher up perfectly for what comes next.
Yes. That’s Das Unheimlich, that’s the uncanny. He explicitly argues this – that the name for the female genitals is often associated with the homely or the home in men’s minds… But, as I say, her [Irigaray’s] relationship to Freud is a complicated one. She sees Freud as massively gendered, patriarchal, but then she [critiques Freud] and how she does that is by using Freud’s own method against him, by psychoanalysing Freud himself from a gendered perspective.
What are the telling images, or metaphorical or tropological commitments that Freud makes, which reveal the implicit bias? Because everything that’s assumed in that Freud essay that she reads is that the female is a dark continent, as he puts it in that essay. “What do women want?” The great mystery! Of course, who’s asking this? It only makes sense, in a way, to be asked from an implicitly male perspective.
What she’s reading, then, with a certain Freudian technique – she’s reading Plato as exactly this. This is a story about an ambivalent relationship to the womb, you could say. For Irigaray, on one level, this is a story about birth and the escape from matter and the mother, from the mater-matter-maternal. What Plato narrates as a story about the escape from the confining prison of shadowy, duplicitous materiality is, from another perspective, a highly gendered story about the escape of the transcendent male body from the dungeon of a gendered nature, where the womb stands in for nature in general and nature stands in for the womb. Matter itself is gendered.
For Irigaray – in Irigaray’s work – there’s a frequent concern: what are the alleged conditions for the so-called “autonomy” of the male subject? The male subject cannot tolerate its dependence on matter and on the mother. Its origins in the slimy dungeon of materiality are always to be repudiated. Yet, at the same time, there’s also a longing for return and reunion into the womb as well, and this ambivalence tells us the miserable, tragic story of male subjectivity since forever.
Her reading is, then, that we must see the very downgrading of matter and the upgrading of mind in terms of a gendered opposition, fundamentally.
We still see a potentially TERFy path opening up here, but Fisher shuts it down immediately, and it is from here that he gets to the crux of his argument — and Irigaray’s — which is, like Fisher’s own work, both positive and negative, pessimistic and optimistic, diagnostic and speculative.
The thing with Irigaray is that she’s accused often of being an essentialist. In positioning herself against Beauvoir – Beauvoir is saying there are all these features of female biology that are bad; it’d be good if we could get rid of them. Irigaray seems to be celebrating physicality, in particular in This Sex Which Is Not One, and there are also lyrical passages about female biology, about blood, milk, lips…
Lips are key for Irigaray. The phallic is about the One – the One, the unitary – whereas the female is about the disruption of the distinction between the one and the multiple for her. We can go with the image of the phallus, which is one thing, or there’s the vaginal lips – are lips one or two? She thinks that the distinction between one or two is much more problematic in relation to female biology than in relation to male biology. It’s reproductively problematic. Because of the question of one becoming two in relation to pregnancy, for example – the question of whether there are two beings, one being, etc., in this kind of relation. We can’t really say it is either of those two things. The way that counting – counting in terms of pre-existing unities, self-contained unities, is just wrong. That’s what she thinks. Yet, our minds are dominated by this kind of phallic, atomized form of counting and relating to the world. Her text, then, you can see as, rather than saying that female biology is x, y or z, it is an attempt to construct, in your imaginary, what female biology might be in a world in which there was sexual difference – because there isn’t sexual difference in this world, remember. In this world, there’s… It’s not difference if all kinds of gender distinctions are thought of as normal and deviant, or superior and inferior, where male is superior, normal and universal, and female is inferior, abnormal, etc.
In a world where there was actual sexual difference, that binary would not operate the same way. There might still be a binary, but it wouldn’t have that hidden, hierarchical weighting to it. So what would that be like? We don’t know. We simply can’t know what that would be like, but we can try to imagine it. In a way, we can see that Irigaray’s celebration of physicality, particular female physicality, her attempts to re-poeticise and lyricise aspects of the female body, are not final, definitive claims about the female body is like. They’re ways to think outside or beyond; ways to construct glimmers of this future where sexual difference actually exists.
[…] There’s a way that you can read it as very pessimistic, a lot of her work, because if we have to look 1000 years into the future to get to anything that might be able to shake this… It’s pretty bleak, in lots of ways. But she’s trying to have it both ways, in a way that we should probably support. She’s trying to say, okay, there’s a millennia-old kind of suppression that has gone on here… There were other forms of relation before patriarchy – she does say this in some of her work – but we can’t really get to those anymore. They’re so buried by this metaphysical, historical weight…
One of the tropes throughout her book is symmetry, and the question of asymmetry, really. Generations are held up, in some ways, as being symmetrical, but there’s also a weight… There’s a blind spot in this whole dream of symmetry, as she puts it. So yeah, in some sense, then, it’s imagining this future, but also trying to live it already, because another 1000 years down the track is very long… So yeah, she’s saying we don’t know [what that future will be like], but that doesn’t mean we have to stay where we are now. We can try to imagine what that would be like. There are different forms of imagination of what it would be like to live in a world in which gender wasn’t dominated by a patriarchal binary.
[…] You could say that, at least in the 20th century, we’ve moved to lip service towards equality… Lip service would be interesting given Irigaray [Laughs]… But that’s not nothing… The idea that, at least in theory, at least in terms of the eyes of the Big Other, we should be aiming for equality now… That is a shift. Because that before the 20th century that wasn’t even thought of… But we’re clearly a long way off… Irigaray isn’t so much interested in the brute sociology in that way. It’s more literary – a literary phenomenology of feminine subjectivity. This Sex Which Is Not One particularly imagines that through lesbian encounters, because a lot of Irigaray’s work, at this time, is concerned with this idea of “what do lesbians do?”, as posed by dumb heterosexuals, because they think that sex must involve the phallus in some way. In a way, her whole work is to show this whole poetics of encounters of women among themselves; to start to remove the female body from being a commodity, which she looks at in terms of Levi-Strauss – the origins of marriage as a kind of commodity exchange, women as objects of exchange amongst men… One of the interesting things about Irigaray’s work is its encounter with patriarchy as a single-sex economy (which is not the same as homosexual). In other words, she says that men are typically interested in other men – and not directly sexually necessarily, but that they hold the opinion of other men, or the esteem of other man, above that of women. And women are being used as a token within this struggle between men a lot of the time. So what would it be for women to remove themselves from this economy, where their value is determined by this all-male economy? If you read This Sex Which Is Not One, which is really easy to read, actually, a lot of it, and quite short as well… It’s really worth reading. These are some of the things she tries to play with there.
The move into lesbianism is partly, then, a move… Sexuality is never just about sexuality. It’s about imagining a world where men as the spare part, rather than the essential. And also, then, of liberating time… Instead of a climactic time, it’s plateau time. There’s a relation to a lot of the stuff that Deleuze and Guattari do. Anti-climactic plateaus. Also the de-localization of the libido – “But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere” is a line from This Sex Which Is Not One – rather than this localization of libido, which is typical of phallic sexuality, etc.
So I think, if we want to position this as a positive text, an attempt to imagine a thousand years from now, bleeding somehow into the moment, this is the negative text, which is about undoing the patriarchal heritage, particularly in terms of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
This is perhaps what is so disastrous about TERF dogma and its rejection of trans people. It may often affirm the experiences of lesbians in particular, but it remains trapped inside that “economic” binary, even in its attempts to cleanly negate it. A TERF’s abject distrust of trans people, and trans women in particular, comes from the way that trans people supposedly change the rules of (ultimately symbolic) exchange, which their “radical feminism” exists wholly within, if nonetheless using it to define itself in negative. TERFs fully embrace Irigaray’s pessimism, we might argue, whilst neglecting the future-oriented nature of her thought. As a result, they attempt to regulate trans women’s bodies anew, creating a moral panic, as if trans women are a cryptocurrency flooding the gendered economy. (I know many trans women who would likely adore that description, actually.)
Of course, this is not clear cut evidence of Fisher’s political allegiances. But Mark only ever taught things he was passionate about and believed it. You can hear that in his voice. Combined with the blogposts referenced above, on topics related to gender(ed) expression, or even blogposts not referenced, such as the few times he waxes lyrical about his love of glam and its attitudes towards gender — in terms that, admittedly, haven’t necessarily aged well — he was nonetheless clearly an ally. Anyone that uses his work to attack or undermine trans women has no idea, and anyone that downplays his feminism has no idea either.
There is more work to do in this regard — as ever. Fisher’s work is itself essentialised and twisted in obscene ways by critics and fans alike, and his feminism is one such topic that remains championed by his friends (and particularly the women in his life) but neglected by his readers. The above is only one part of that tapestry — and notable for being previously unheard / unseen — but despite its fragmentary nature, I hope it might serve as an introduction to Fisher’s feminism, and indeed to Irigaray herself, if you’re not already familiar with her either.
“Egress” was an awkward word to translate into Spanish, or so I’m told. Pepe mentioned this before our chat the other day. “Egreso” is very archaic, he said — and it is in English as well, unless you’ve served in the military. But it seems like Spanish might contain more of a multiplicity of senses than I first appreciated.
This might be utter rubbish, of course, but I’m currently enjoying how various platforms have attempted to translate it whenever I take a look how it is used in context — for instance, on Twitter or Instagram. (The enthusiasm from Spanish readers has been marvellous and palpable online, by the way — thank you.) Though in English it seems to straight-forwardly suggest an “exit”, in Spanish I’ve seen “egreso” translated both as “I’m back” and “addiction”…
These translation algorithms might just be confused, but this sense of a revenant compulsion is fitting, I think. What is intriguing about “egress”, at least in English, is its association with space and the ocean. It is not simply an exit into an Outside but a passing-through, a passing-over, and sort of perversion (a “turning-through”). The inside is a folding of the outside, as Mark wrote in The Weird and the Eerie, and so an egress as a return, a sort of non-Euclidean excursion outwards that takes you further in, is very evocative — like the atemporal exits of Arnie in the Terminator franchise (“I’ll be back.”)
I started psychoanalysis recently, of the Laingian variety. I’m not going to make a habit of blogging about it, for reasons that I assume are obvious, but I had a spooky, serendipitous moment just now and wanted to share it.
I had a difficult session tonight, speaking a lot about Mark Fisher’s work, my mixed feelings about intellectualising my own trauma as a way to deal with it, whether related to Mark or other things I’ve been through, and how I’m not sure how healthy that is. In many ways, it made even seeking out psychoanalysis feel like a contradiction, lying in wait.
I found myself struggling to talk about how I’d decided to write about Mark’s work in the way that I have, taking personal experience and claiming to make it productively impersonal. That’s the goal, but I’m not sure — on a personal level, at least — how successful I’ve been. And if I have been successful, is that anything to be proud of?
Unsure of the answers, I’ve nonetheless been trying to get away from it. Acknowledging a tendency to insert an intellectual distance where there isn’t (or perhaps shouldn’t be) any, I tried to explain that my interest in Laing was precisely a way out of that. I know just enough to undertake this journey but not enough to get caught up in the theoretical details. I am aware it is a phenomenological approach to therapy, after all, that creates a space to live in and feel things rather than turn them into philosophical problems. But in being here, I am nonetheless aware what the philosophical problems are. They don’t disappear, but I don’t want to turn therapy into a study group, if I can help it.
After the session ended, I started trying to write down the feelings that I was struggling to bring to the surface, so that I might be able to articulate myself better next week — the impossibility of fully intellectualising an experience, or fully “feeling” it, precisely because the two things are not ultimately distinguishable. But the problem is that I have taken my reasoning too far, perhaps. I struggle to acknowledge feeling, often forcing myself to do so in ways that perhaps seem insincere, vocalising feeling but still never quite feeling it, always slipping into an irrational rationalism (the Vulcan paradox).
In the end, I turned, as I often do, to the k-punk blog and was stunned to find a post that was written on this exact day, seventeen years ago.
Mark is responding to a blogpost by Simon Reynolds, in which Simon queries his recent posts on “cold rationalism” on the Hyperstition blog, specifically a post titled “Surfascism”. Here Mark provides a brief unpacking of that Vulcan paradox, wherein
Rational analysis rounds upon itself. The scalpel of analytic reason – the capacity to understand Nature and the principles which animate it – becomes a weapon of auto-laceration turned both against reason itself and its agent. Never fully extirpated (because never fully extirpatable), reason is lured into a hideous line of abolition.
It’s Mark’s intriguing post against Bataille. Responding to a lecture that accuses Bataille of proto-fascism (or “surfascism”, which a number of his contemporary critics accused him of), Mark suggests that Bataille’s affirmation of a kind of “unreason” is no response to this Vulcan paradox, which is already self-defeating. For this reason, the affirmation of unreason ends up on the same “hideous line of abolition”, just as an ideal of absolute logic does too.
what is Music if not emotion, intoxication, sensuality, violence, the orgiastic? […] There is a superfluousness, a futile gloriousness, an excess to requirements, an utterly non-necessary aspect to music — which relates very well to the Bataillean worldview.
(He adds how it’s quite funny “how swiftly Mark (and presumably others in the post-CCRU milieu) have junked one entire canon of thought (Nietzsche, Bataille — whom Nick Land wrote a great book, The Thirst for Annihilation, about — Deleuze & Guattari, presumably Ballard too now as he’s a big fan of surrealism, mythology, etc.) for its complete inverse. But I guess it’s all part of the adventure that is the life of the mind.” Quite!)
Mark later clarifies that the point is not to fall on one side or the other of a reason/unreason divide:
What has to be resisted at every level … is the idea that emotions are some ineffable and inexplicable slurry. The great breakthrough of Freud was to return to the Spinozist insight that all emotions have rationales. The devastating radical enlightenment thought is also astonishingly simple. Everything that happens — and crucially that has to include emotional reactions — has a cause. But a prior — or mechanical — cause, not a final cause or teleology. […]
Romanticism is a kind of secular resistance to the radical implications of this Cartesian-Spinozist mechanism, the return of Jahweh in the form of the ‘inner self’. What is important, Romantics convince themselves, is what we feel (with feeling explicitly opposed to thought and action). The true reality of ourselves lies ‘inside’, in the interior, the phenomenological. Somehow, this alleged interior is to be thought of as absolutely independent of its material substrate. Feelings and consciousness aren’t epiphenomenal side-effects of socio-neurochemical interactions, they are irreducible traces of some ‘deep’ and ‘eternal’ human soul. […] This is mysticism, not philosophy.
He later aligns his rejection of a Bataillean unreason to his comments on “psychedelic fascism”:
Spinoza says children are abject because they do not know what causes their actions or desires. Like many adults, they confuse being free with ‘doing what they want’, when freedom entails attuning your desires and emotions to your reason.
Simon is still confused — and understandably so, since Mark’s response is so dense and unwieldy, if nonetheless fascinating. He summarises:
I suppose ultimately I don’t really get what he’s talking about when he uses the word “rationality”, now that’s supposed to include emotion and the body?
But Mark’s response is characteristically taut and to the point. He exercises his Spinozism, turning what sounds like a contradiction into a call to arms:
the point is to subordinate passive (i.e. self-destructive) emotions to reason (= identification of the causes of actions) in order to increase the capacity to act.
If there is a perversity to my book Egress, it is precisely in its attempts to use Bataille towards these ends, reconnecting Mark’s intensive Ccru mode to his later rationalist tendencies — a project I think he was undertaking for himself towards the end. But even beyond an intellectualised “Fisherian” project, this is similarly how I hope to deal with whatever life throws at me, colliding with my understanding of Deleuze’s Stoic adage that “we make ourselves worthy of the things that happen to us” as well.
When we subordinate our passions to reason, we increase our capacity to act.
That is all I want out of therapy too. I want to get better at doing this — feeling things andunderstanding them and their affects; improving my capacity for handling them and thinking about them. Not thinking about pain as a way to neutralise it, rationalising it as a way to abolish it, but rather rationalising it as a way to acknowledge and live with it. It is a fine line, but at this point in my life, it is also the most important line there is.
The interview was conducted in English but has Spanish subtitles, and a full Spanish transcript will be published at a later date. We spoke about Mark’s enduring legacy, how Egress responds to it, and how the pandemic changed both. We also talk about psychedelia, Sally Rooney, Westerns, my next book, and various other things.
As ever, I’m grateful to be accommodated as a shamefully monolingual Anglo. Below are some tweets from a couple outlets and individuals introducing the discussion en español.
? Hace unos días, nuestro compañero @pepetesoro estuvo charlando con @xenogothic sobre cultura popular, Mark Fisher y psicodelia, a raíz de la publicación en castellano de su libro: «Egreso. Sobre comunidad, duelo y Mark Fisher» (@cajanegraedit, 2021).
Originally tweeted by Instituto de Estudios Culturales y Cambio Social (@ieccs_) on December 13, 2021.
Con la excusa de la traducción de su libro ‘Egreso: sobre comunidad, duelo y Mark Fisher’ por @cajanegraedit, entrevisté a @xenogothic para el @ieccs_. Aquí tenéis la entrevista subtitulada, donde hablamos de Fisher, Sally Rooney, psicodelia y mucho más!
Como supongo que comprobaréis, los nervios traicionaron un poco mi inglés, pero creo que lo esencial de la entrevista, el extraordinario discurso de Matt, y los temas que trata (cultura popular, el legado de Fisher, el western, el mito de Narciso…) merecen de sobra la pena.
Hoy publicamos esta fantástica entrevista de @pepetesoro a @xenogothic en la que hablan del legado de Mark Fisher, psicodelia y otras muchas cosas. La he disfrutado muchísimo, especialmente el intercambio sobre series y la importancia de lo popular.
As the new Zer0 Books YouTube channel has emerged from its rocky transition, it was interesting to see comments of genuine concern made by long-time viewers who want reassurances that the accessibility of the previous management’s output would still be a guiding principle.
On the one hand, it is disappointing to see this concern vocalised. This perception has come from the Lainers’ cynical disinformation campaign, as if the various corrections offered on their readings of certain figures, not least those they ventriloquise from beyond the grave, make their critics academic gatekeepers or trolls.
But on the other hand, this is a very fair comment and one that I know is actively heeded by Craig and others. In fact, I think accessibility is something that everyone in this part of the theorysphere cares about — not just an intellectual accessibility but supporting other forms of access as well.
This is what is most exciting about the new Zer0 YouTube channel being a space for a lot of like-minded folk to really pull together for the first time under the same umbrella. There has never been a sense of competition between anyone newly involved in Zer0 Books, just mutual respect and appreciation, and using that as a foundation for a new venture is really exciting to all of us, not least because it provides new opportunities to combine our networks and interests and lift others up, featuring voices of different backgrounds, genders and nationalities. (The idea to include Spanish language content or develop a Spanish language channel is particularly exciting to me, as there’s been a general desire to strengthen connections beyond the Anglosphere for a while, and the reception of Mark Fisher’s work in that part of the world in more recent years has opened up exciting opportunities to refresh the conversation around his legacy.) This will be a real improvement on the accessibility offered by the previous management, at least in this particular sense of the word.
But beyond that, it is certainly true that many of us have a tendency to get caught up in academic shorthand, if we’ve had the privilege of learning it. For me and others, I know the desire is always to translate certain forms of knowledge and critical thinking back into a more colloquial language. But what is colloquial for you may not be colloquial for another. It is difficult, if not impossible, to please everyone. (This is why I think our Buddies Without Organs podcast works well; it is fuelled by a desire to make difficult texts accessible without also dumbing them down, precisely by trying to make sense of them with and for each other — just as the memes have long demanded.)
This can be easier said than done, however, especially when terminology is invented precisely because things are not easily expressed in everyday language. And this is also a core function of philosophy, after all. This shorthand is often not simply “academic shorthand” but rather is constituted by concepts, which are the very building blocks of thought. Unfamiliar concepts are useful precisely because they require you to think differently about a topic that you might otherwise approach intuitively, and perhaps incorrectly. It is a question, then, of adequately introducing them — defining your terms — so that everyone knows what a tool is and how it is being used, even if some are more skilled at using these tools than others.
With this in mind, accessibility in theory soon collides with issues of functionality. For many of us newly involved at Zer0, there is a strong desire to retain the nitty-gritty of an argument or position and discuss it on its own terms, but how do you do that without making anyone else feel like they can’t participate? This is where accusations of elitism often come from, I think, but what use is a sense of “accessibility” if something is dumbed down to the point of inaccuracy and uselessness? In this sense, how do you make something accessible whilst retaining its disruptive purpose?
Mark Fisher implicitly pondered this point in Capitalist Realism when he wrote that
Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp — and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension — that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
The question that arises here, often ignored, is: how do you make the difficulty itself more accessible? It is grappling with the difficulty that precisely turns the world inside out, but that can be done collectively and with a supportive hand. Accessibility does not — and should not — mean an immediate acquisition but rather the collective and supportive understanding of an approach that you must make yourself. This is also easier said than done when the primary medium is audio or video, but watching and listening to “content” needn’t be passive; though it may not be active in and of itself, it can still be activating.
This is what Fisher wanted to do with Capitalist Realism, after all. The cliché is that he just said things are bad and resigned us to our fate, in a world always already co-opted by capital. But the opposite was true. His despair at the present was fuel for further action. He strove to open up cracks in the firmament by hacking away at the coal face of popular culture. It was for this reason that, if he repurposed certain words, phrases or signifiers, it was to conjure the weird out of the familiar, instead of flattening everything onto the totalizing familiarity and false consistency of capitalist realism itself.
This is the odd paradox of his thought. “There is no outside to capitalism”, spatially or temporally, but all the more reason why we must find new routes of escape and egress. Capitalism’s materialist infrastructure might be pervasive and all-encompassing, just as its reasoning seems to frame the entire mind as capitalist “common sense”, but the inefficacy of these systems is precisely what allows them to be ideologically undermined nonetheless. In challenging our intuitive understanding of the system — even of philosophy itself — we begin to put philosophy back to work. Echoing Gilles Deleuze and Sadie Plant, the sentiment is one of “flee, but whilst fleeing, pick up a weapon.”
This was Fisher’s approach to pop culture, and it was always active, never passive. As he wrote in response to accusations that Capitalist Realism was a pessimistic book:
For me, it isn’t pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life – it is what Zizek would call the “spontaneous unreflective ideology” of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity). Far from nothing ever changing, something already has changed, massively… The terrain – the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects – is there to be fought over.
The difficulty comes from what we should do next, and identifying the right things to fight over is part of that.
This is arguably resonant with the fraught and disgruntled nature of the Repeater-Zer0 takeover. (Isn’t everything at the moment…) Doug Lain’s approach to Zer0, which was politically promiscuous, contrarian and fuelled itself on courting outrage, has been held up as a punk attitude in the face of Repeater’s more respectable (and therefore apparently “corporate”) appearance. But it often confused and flattened its negativity onto a pessimism mistakenly attributed to Fisher himself as a core part of their marketable back catalogue.
Repeater has always rejected this and despised it, long in private if only recently in public, because it runs contrary to their entire project. In fact, it stinks of an outdated Gen X attitude that has never done anything other than exacerbate its own impotence. But this is precisely an approach that Repeater (and, indeed, Zero in its initial phase) always challenged — a tired edgelord culture.
The issue with an edgelord’s approach to cultural production is that it always falls in on itself. The unavoidable paradox of punk is that it must either move forwards or self-destruct. Moving forwards is selling out; staying true to punk means affirming your own stasis. That was the importance of Fisher’s personal (and Repeater’s broader) post-punk approach — making good on the opportunities that punk’s refusal made possible, rather than languishing in a perpetual tantrum of nihilistic refusal and the persistent affirmation of your own incompetence. (And this is something that is as common on the right as it is on the more “dirtbag” side of the left today — another telling difference between UK and US lefts, where vulgarity retains an air of cool for a certain quadrant of the latter but is generally associated with grifting centrists like the MP Jess Phillips in the UK.)
Rather than just another dig at the old management, this is important to note because it is central to questions of accessibility, as well as how we can better contend with the difficulty of the present, and perhaps illuminates how many Lain loyalists have so far understood his own “accessible” approach.
Punk was “accessible” because anyone could do it. It thrived on an anti-intellectualism, an anti-aesthetic nature, a DIY sensibility, a “scorched earth” approach to all questions of value and beauty that were passed down by a supposed cultural elite. But this refusal is also founded on a sense of affirmative impotence, which was quickly seen as unsustainable by many punks and led to many jumping ship just before it went mainstream — see John Lydon’s pivot from Sex Pistols to Public Image Ltd by the time Never Mind the Bollocks was in the shops.
It’s also the tension between Amyl and Mad in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. Mad wants to burn everything to the ground; Amyl is instead more concerned with transformation and rebirth from the ashes of their great refusal. Mad is happy just to light the fire, but it is Amyl who dances the ballet in the flames. This was the core tension and contradiction of punk — the tandem desire to both destroy culture and contribute to it. But it was punk’s inability to settle this tension that led to its demise. Those who survived and went on to do interesting things no doubt found themselves relating to Amyl, who finds that it is precisely in tearing down the cultural hierarchy and ripping up the history books that she is able to salvage what she wants from the past to actively produce a new and more interesting present. Whereas Mad would rip it up and throw it all away, languishing in the ruins, Amyl rips it up and starts again. It is through this attitude that she finds herself able, as a punk, to dance the ballet. It makes it newly accessible to her, having been ripped from the toffs’ cloistering hands. Ballet becomes subversive because of the context in which it is being practiced and the kind of person practising it. (Mad, of course, thinks Amyl is a loser regardless.)
After the apparent “end of history”, it was only Mad’s mantras that seemed to survive. The contrarian pyromaniac with an unformed political consciousness, that may despair generically at a political landscape but ultimately does nothing about it pleases no one but herself. It doesn’t matter what I do, so I’ll just do what I want. Whereas Amyl says “make your desires reality”, Mad embraces ressentiment and hangs onto the fact that the present reality rejects her desires. She finds superiority in her inferiority complex. As Amyl dances, she’s off throwing rocks through the windows still in tact among the ruins, a vague display of “power” with no consequence and no imaginative sense of salvage or reclamation.
Mad’s approach was already for the scrapheap then, in 1978, and it’s hardly of any use to us now. Many of the old edgelords have realised this. The ones that haven’t had this realisation have inevitably become reactionaries, stuck refusing an old world that doesn’t even exist any longer… But there are some from that generation (and the post-punks who came after it) who still bring hope and a renewed confidence today.
Consider, for example, Steve Albini, who posted a series of tweets addressing accusations of his being an edgelord a few months ago. Reflecting on the culture of bloodyminded refusal of the ’80s and ’90s that he helped to define as a musician and as a producer of many seminal albums, he wrote:
For myself and many of my peers, we miscalculated. We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony. [1]
If anything, we were trying to underscore the banality, the everyday nonchalance toward our common history with the atrocious, all while laboring under the tacit mistaken notion that things were getting better. [2]
I’m overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring “edgelord” shit. Believe me, I’ve met my share of punishers at gigs and I sympathize with anybody who isn’t me but still had to suffer them. [3]
This sense of no future that Albini once spoke to, through the nihilistic fury of a number like Big Black’s “Kerosene”, isn’t a call to arms in any sense. It is instead an attempt to rattle a culture through contrarianism and fury. And it might piss off your parents, but beyond that, what does it do? Of course, it doesn’t have to do anything. I’m quite happy that Steve Albini is not Billy Bragg. It’s still possible to enjoy that music and vibe to it — and I very much do. But it is also better to acknowledge its limitations than think our contrarianism serves any real purpose beyond pissing in the cultural wind — especially when it isn’t properly in tune with the present.
What Albini rages against in 1986 does not exist now, and he seems to recognise that, even suggesting that his refusal back then was nothing more than a young man yelling at clouds. But what does exist is the spectre of that refusal and its imagined cultural power, perpetuated by capital, which keeps us stuck, still responding to the problems of the past, which we may have only just given form to. We can enjoy the gesture, the fury, and find it affecting us in the present, but over time it has lost any sense of an active negativity. It doesn’t speak to or offer a critique of now. And Albini seems to acknowledge that — his refusal suited a moment, but it is no foundation for a political position, especially today.
Still, we can understand how this attitude continues to resonate in this weird online philosophy scene, which has long entertained edgelords and contrarians — and, in many ways, continues to. This is especially true among a younger crowd that is coming to Nietzsche or Bataille or Land for the first time, believing the transgression is the point, who feel emboldened by it and further ejected from pop culture and its normative values. But even these thinkers were refusing to their present. The ways they did so are informative and interesting, but recycling their tactics for now achieves nothing. More often than not, their second-hand pessimism helps no one and only feeds into the ideologies of ressentiment that often orbit the alt-right (even when supposedly emerging from the left).
We might return to Albini on this point. Michael Azerrad, in the seminal Our Band Could Be Your Life, notes how Albini’s “punk” attitude was rooted in a kind of (left-)melancholic masochism:
His confrontational aspects … were the preemptive instincts of someone who’s been routinely picked on. Choosing the reason you get your ass kicked is a way of exercising at least some control over the situation. It harks back not just to the earliest inklings of punk rock, but to the origin of the term “punk” itself, which referred to someone at the bottom of the jailhouse pecking order who realized that self-abasement was his only means of survival.
This is perhaps how people like myself miscalculated also. The glee with which Lain’s downfall was observed only played into their self-defined (and self-deprecating) punk status. But Repeater was fed up of how, in their self-abasement, Zer0 was abasing others too, not least Mark Fisher who had a very different relationship to the world, which may have included Mad’s pyromaniac refusal — as was true of all post-punks — but complimented it with Amyl’s generative gestures far more often.
The new Zer0 channel is all set to retain and improve upon a sense of philosophical and cultural accessibility in this sense. It will not make itself accessible by appealing to a child-like desire to be difficult, as a one-dimensional personality trait, but by affirming the difficulty that already surrounds us. And I think, culturally, we’re ready for that. We know that real social problems, like climate change most pressingly, require real work and real changes if they are to be sufficiently addressed. It is a difficult problem with difficult solutions. And our preparedness for that is reflected in popular culture more broadly.
I’ve written about this once before. Popular culture embraces difficulty and studious Ness today, perhaps more than it ever has done before — how else would you explain the popularity of things like speedrunning or the Dark Souls franchise? Even a cultural space like video gaming, once synonymous with slackers, has built various communities on the foundation of getting good at very difficult games. People like a challenge — a real challenge, rather than a superficial and aesthetic one. Why not give it to them? Why not make that more accessible, the very difficulty of philosophy, rather than the superficial idea of a poorly thought-out provocation? I think the new team behind Zer0 are more than capable of making good on that.
