Mark Fisher by Alex Niven + Exiting the Vampire Caste

Mark Fisher, 1968–2017

Mark Fisher gave a moribund left the imaginative jolt it needed to wake from the nightmare of neoliberal complacency.

by Alex Niven

Mark Fisher. Courtesy of the author

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“Dear Mark,” began an email I wrote to a man I had never met in the first days of 2010:

I read your book Capitalist Realism last week and it felt like coming up for air after a long time spent underwater. I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving such eloquent expression to pretty much everything that needed to be said, and for providing a reason to hope, when I for one was just about ready to despair.

To those unacquainted with the work of theorist, music writer, journalist, film critic, philosopher, editor, and lecturer Mark Fisher, who sadly took his own life last Friday, the above might seem hyperbolic or sycophantic. It is neither. Like so many other members of my generation, encountering Capitalist Realism at the age of twenty-five transformed my life.

During a tricky period — I had recently suffered a head-on collision with the British music industry — Mark’s writing really did give me a reason to hope. Through his eloquence, his lucidity, but more than that, his ability to get to the heart of what was wrong with late-capitalist culture and right about the putative alternative, he seemed to have cracked some ineffable code. Capitalist Realism made a series of simple points that bypassed years of postmodern hedging to offer a foundation for action; it was a spiritual call to arms, diagnosing the neoliberal problem and reimagining the socialist solution with the force of revelation.

This description runs the risk of casting Mark in the dubious role of countercultural martyr — an archetype he himself returned to repeatedly in his writing, notably the examples of Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis. But Mark’s literary output, Capitalist Realism in particular, always had an aspect of prophecy or at least uncanny prescience. He seemed to have grasped certain truths about the twenty-first century long before anyone else, so much so that, in the wake of last week’s tragedy, people are interpreting posts written under his k-punk alias in the early 2000s as timely commentaries on our present malaise.

Perhaps my sense of Capitalist Realism as a sudden epiphany comes from the fact that I only got to know Mark in his later years, when we worked together at Zero Books and then at Repeater, a period in which he acquired a degree of belated acclaim.

At both publishers, the staff tacitly understood that Mark was the soulful heart of the project, even when he was off the radar for long periods. By some distance, Mark was our best-selling author: a cult hero who gradually attracted the attention of politicians and celebrities from Slavoj Žižek and Laurie Anderson to John McDonnell and Russell Brand.

But he was also nine-tenths of our identity, even as he became increasingly silent over the last year or so. When we left Zero to form Repeater after a long-brewing dispute with our parent company, we knew that whatever the legality of the situation, Mark was Zero, and hence was Repeater, and that ultimately only he had moral ownership of either imprint.

For those who got to know Mark before I did, his rise to intellectual centrality over the last decade appeared as the inevitable outcome of a long and rich trajectory, one that combined the ordinary and the unheimlich.

He was born in 1968 in the East Midlands, an area that sits on an ambiguous fault line between Northern and Southern England. The region has a strong industrial heritage and forged the Luddite risings of the 1810s, yet sits close to the traditional pastoral terrain of southern English writers like Thomas Hardy and M. R. James. Mark regularly alluded to the aftereffects of his origins in this working-class edgeland: in his seminal blog posts on The Fall in 2006-7 and, more controversially, in his 2013 polemic “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” Indeed, Mark wrote about class with more subtlety and vehemence than any other contemporary critic.

But you got the feeling that he was leaving some things unsaid. I always suspected that Mark was building up to some great work on English class identity in the seventies and eighties. In the last couple of years of his life, he was writing about football culture, and I think this subject was the heart of the matter for him.

A little discussed — because little known — fact is that Mark attended Hillsborough Stadium on April 15, 1989, when ninety-six Liverpool fans were crushed to death thanks to police incompetence and manhandling. Wary of overstating his personal involvement — Mark was a Nottingham Forest supporter, so remained at some distance from the stand in which the deaths took place — he rarely talked about Hillsborough. But the tragedy and its subsequent cover-up profoundly impacted his political mindset.

For Mark, the collective traumas of the English proletariat in the seventies and eighties represented crucial — and always painfully immediate — lived experiences. A long section of his 2014 anthology Ghosts of My Life covers seventies British pop culture, and his intellectual project was largely organized around what he termed “pulp modernism” (latterly amended to “popular modernism”).

This project far exceeded garden-variety cultural studies. Mark never gave in to nostalgia for the postwar years (as his melancholic riffs on Joy Division and Jimmy Savile in Ghosts underline), but he did believe that the social-democratic counterculture circa 1965–1997 represented the true culmination of twentieth-century modernism. As such, it signified the zenith of human aesthetic development and studying it became a source of immense radical potential. As Owen Hatherley reminds us, Mark’s foregrounding of pop culture didn’t participate in the ironic postmodern reversals so prevalent at the end of the last century. Mark believed in mass culture’s power with every facet of his intellectual being, and this is one of many things that set him apart from his philosophical predecessors and coevals, Žižek and Jameson especially.

In the 1990s, Mark caught the tail end of actually existing popular modernism, as he immersed himself in an intellectual scene that pushed post-structuralism to its natural limit. While writing his PhD at Warwick University, he became involved with Nick Land’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), an early and sometimes wayward manifestation of the “accelerationist” tendency that has recently been revived under more pragmatic auspices.

With high theory acting as an umbrella, the Ccru cohort grabbed hold of the zeitgeist — drum and bass, cyberpunk, pulp fiction, early internet culture — and ran with it. Here, many of Mark’s key intellectual motifs were synthesized. He even dabbled in music production, first as a member of the jungle collective D-Generation and later as architect of death garage track “Anticlimax (Inhumans Moreerotic Female Orgasm Analog Mix),” the title of which offers a glimpse of Mark’s often undisclosed playful side.

The Ccru period was a time of heady activity, but Mark only really came into his own as a critic after 2000. As the cornerstone of a blogging community that eventually included music journalist Simon Reynolds, philosopher Nina Power, and architecture critic Owen Hatherley, among others, “Mark k-punk” helped develop and popularize a new intellectual sensibility centered around an important recalibration of the concept of “hauntology.”

The term originated as a half-pun in Derrida’s 1994 Spectres of Marx, but Mark used it as a means of foregrounding popular modernism. His k-punk blog posts typically veered between savage dissections of the moribund music scene of the mid-2000s and extensive discussions of how postwar socialist and social-democratic pop culture continued to haunt the present, a time when anticapitalist political alternatives had all but evaporated.

The hauntology concept Mark helped disseminate began as a largely aesthetic category during a period of political stagnation. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, however, it hardened into something more programmatic. With his close friend, novelist Tariq Goddard, he corralled the best of the 2000s blogging scene and founded Zero Books, which became a kind of nursery for the ideas underpinning the revived activism that spread across the United Kingdom — and indeed the world — as the 2000s morphed into the 2010s.

Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism, Nina Power’s One-Dimensional Woman, and Ivor Southwood’s Non-Stop Inertia were early standouts. But it was Capitalist Realism that was in the back pocket of countless demonstrators at the 2010 student protests, and which became the unofficial manifesto for the leftist resurgence of 2011 — the so-called year of dreaming dangerously.

Perhaps we should look more skeptically, from the slightly bleaker vantage point of 2017, at this emphasis on “dreaming,” on that period’s vague promises about another, newly possible, world. To be sure, Capitalist Realism does not offer much in the way of doctrinaire pronouncements, largely refusing to address how capitalism can actually be defeated. The revolution it encouraged in readers was far subtler and, with hindsight, more appropriate for a movement that was, and arguably still is, in the early stages of revival. The first step in the fight against the entrenched desocialization and dysphoria of the twenty-first century, the book argues, must be a simple freeing of consciousness.

This initially sounds like a throwback to the failed leftism of the sixties and seventies, and indeed Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is one of the models for Capitalist Realism. Mark set his argument apart, however, by making contemporary subjectivism the primary site of struggle and ultimately a means of reactivating collectivity. His writings on mental health enacted a series of brilliant inversions. You think you feel bad because of some arbitrary affliction called depression, but might your working conditions have something to do with it? We have been told that neoliberal capitalism liberated us from the horrors of statist dystopias, so why have mental-health problems skyrocketed in recent years? What if we looked beyond our obsession with self for a minute and re-emphasized our sociality? What if you held a protest and everyone came? These were the lyrical, elemental questions Capitalist Realism posed, and they highlight why reading it was such an emotional and transformative experience for so many people.

Perhaps because Mark’s personality and philosophical arguments depended on a kind of radical selflessness, his working life was harder than it should have been, despite his considerable intellectual prowess and achievements. Shockingly, he only acquired a permanent academic post in the last few years, and on either side of this he served as the laureate of precarity as it became a meaningful critical concept.

He regularly bemoaned the sheer volume of bureaucracy that academic work demanded, and he was victim to the call-out culture that has paralyzed left-wing discourse over the last couple of years. He left Twitter in the wake of the controversy provoked by “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” after being bombarded with ridiculous accusations of misogyny and chauvinism. However, while Mark’s great détournement was to reinstate a sociopolitical framework for understanding mental illness, it is evident from the available facts that while social pressures exacerbated his depression, they were not its sole cause.

In our reflection on Mark’s legacy, we should pay close attention to his insistence in “Exiting the Vampire Castle” that we must always operate “in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity.” After the organized left’s nadir during the Bush-Blair years, Mark’s work represented, more than anyone else’s, a much-needed leap of faith away from capitalist individualism and into communitarian praxis. At its heart, it called for rock-solid team spirit. Mark practiced this creed in his life and work, and we can pay him some small tribute by following his example.

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Exiting the Vampire Castle

by MARK FISHER on NOVEMBER 22, 2013

This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics. Exhausted through overwork, incapable of productive activity, I found myself drifting through social networks, feeling my depression and exhaustion increasing.

‘Left-wing’ Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone. Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism. The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me.

The open savagery of these exchanges was accompanied by something  more pervasive, and for that reason perhaps more debilitating: an atmosphere of snarky resentment. The most frequent object of this resentment is Owen Jones, and the attacks on Jones – the person most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the last few years – were one of the reasons I was so dejected. If this is what happens to a left-winger who is actually succeeding in taking the struggle to the centre ground of British life, why would anyone want to follow him into the mainstream? Is the only way to avoid this drip-feed of abuse to remain in a position of impotent marginality?

One of the things that broke me out of this depressive stupor was going to the People’s Assembly in Ipswich, near where I live. The People’s Assembly had been greeted with the usual sneers and snarks. This was, we were told, a useless stunt, in which media leftists, including Jones, were aggrandising themselves in yet another display of top-down celebrity culture. What actually happened at the Assembly in Ipswich was very different to this caricature. The first half of the evening – culminating in a rousing speech by Owen Jones – was certainly led by the top-table speakers. But the second half of the meeting saw working class activists from all over Suffolk talking to each other, supporting one another, sharing experiences and strategies. Far from being another example of hierarchical leftism, the People’s Assembly was an example of how the vertical can be combined with the horizontal: media power and charisma could draw people who hadn’t previously been to a political meeting into the room, where they could talk and strategise with seasoned activists. The atmosphere was anti-racist and anti-sexist, but refreshingly free of the paralysing feeling of guilt and suspicion which hangs over left-wing twitter like an acrid, stifling fog.

Then there was Russell Brand. I’ve long been an admirer of Brand – one of the few big-name comedians on the current scene to come from a working class background. Over the last few years, there has been a gradual but remorseless embourgeoisement of television comedy, with preposterous ultra-posh nincompoop Michael McIntyre and a dreary drizzle of bland graduate chancers dominating the stage.

The day before Brand’s now famous interview with Jeremy Paxman was broadcast on Newsnight, I had seen Brand’s stand-up show the Messiah Complex in Ipswich. The show was defiantly pro-immigrant, pro-communist, anti-homophobic, saturated with working class intelligence and not afraid to show it, and queer in the way that popular culture used to be (i.e. nothing to do with the sour-faced identitarian piety foisted upon us by moralisers on the post-structuralist ‘left’). Malcolm X, Che, politics as a psychedelic dismantling of existing reality: this was communism as something cool, sexy and proletarian, instead of a finger-wagging sermon.

The next night, it was clear that Brand’s appearance had produced a moment of splitting. For some of us, Brand’s forensic take-down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn’t remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class ‘superior’ using intelligence and reason. This wasn’t Johnny Rotten swearing at Bill Grundy – an act of antagonism which confirmed rather than challenged class stereotypes. Brand had outwitted Paxman – and the use of humour was what separated Brand from the dourness of so much ‘leftism’. Brand makes people feel good about themselves; whereas the moralising left specialises in making people feed bad, and is not happy until their heads are bent in guilt and self-loathing.

The moralising left quickly ensured that the story was not about Brand’s extraordinary breach of the bland conventions of mainstream media ‘debate’, nor about his claim that revolution was going to happen. (This last claim could only be heard by the cloth-eared petit-bourgeois narcissistic ‘left’ as Brand saying that he wanted to lead the revolution – something that they responded to with typical resentment: ‘I don’t need a jumped-up celebrity to lead me‘.) For the moralisers, the dominant story was to be about Brand’s personal conduct – specifically his sexism. In the febrile McCarthyite atmosphere fermented by the moralising left, remarks that could be construed as sexist mean that Brand is a sexist, which also meant that he is a misogynist. Cut and dried, finished, condemned.

It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good-humoured humility that was entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. “I don’t think I’m sexist, But I remember my grandmother, the loveliest person I‘ve ever known, but she was racist, but I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if I have some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics, like ‘darling’ and ‘bird’, so if women think I’m sexist they’re in a better position to judge than I am, so I’ll work on that.”

Brand’s intervention was not a bid for leadership; it was an inspiration, a call to arms. And I for one was inspired. Where a few months before, I would have stayed silent as the PoshLeft moralisers subjected Brand to their kangaroo courts and character assassinations – with ‘evidence’ usually gleaned from the right-wing press, always available to lend a hand – this time I was prepared to take them on. The response to Brand quickly became as significant as the Paxman exchange itself. As Laura Oldfield Ford pointed out, this was a clarifying moment. And one of the things that was clarified for me was the way in which, in recent years, so much of the self-styled ‘left’ has suppressed the question of class.

Class consciousness is fragile and fleeting. The petit bourgeoisie which dominates the academy and the culture industry has all kinds of subtle deflections and pre-emptions which prevent the topic even coming up, and then, if it does come up, they make one think it is a terrible impertinence, a breach of etiquette, to raise it. I’ve been speaking now at left-wing, anti-capitalist events for years, but I’ve rarely talked – or been asked to talk – about class in public.

But, once class had re-appeared, it was impossible not to see it everywhere in the response to the Brand affair. Brand was quickly judged and-or questioned by at least three ex-private school people on the left. Others told us that Brand couldn’t really be working class, because he was a millionaire. It’s alarming how many ‘leftists’ seemed to fundamentally agree with the drift behind Paxman’s question: ‘What gives this working class person the authority to speak?’ It’s also alarming, actually distressing, that they seem to think that working class people should remain in poverty, obscurity and impotence lest they lose their ‘authenticity’.

Someone passed me a post written about Brand on Facebook. I don’t know the individual who wrote it, and I wouldn’t wish to name them. What’s important is that the post was symptomatic of a set of snobbish and condescending attitudes that it is apparently alright to exhibit while still classifying oneself as left wing. The whole tone was horrifyingly high-handed, as if they were a schoolteacher marking a child’s work, or a psychiatrist assessing a patient. Brand, apparently, is ‘clearly extremely unstable … one bad relationship or career knockback away from collapsing back into drug addiction or worse.’ Although the person claims that they ‘really quite like [Brand]’, it perhaps never occurs to them that one of the reasons that Brand might be ‘unstable’ is just this sort of patronising faux-transcendent ‘assessment’ from the ‘left’ bourgeoisie. There’s also a shocking but revealing aside where the individual casually refers to Brand’s ‘patchy education [and] the often wince-inducing vocab slips characteristic of the auto-didact’ – which, this individual generously says, ‘I have no problem with at all’ – how very good of them! This isn’t some colonial bureaucrat writing about his attempts to teach some ‘natives’ the English language in the nineteenth century, or a Victorian schoolmaster at some private institution describing a scholarship boy, it’s a ‘leftist’ writing a few weeks ago.

Where to go from here? It is first of all necessary to identify the features of the discourses and the desires which have led us to this grim and demoralising pass, where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent – and not because we are terrorised by the right, but because we have allowed bourgeois modes of subjectivity to contaminate our movement. I think there are two libidinal-discursive configurations which have brought this situation about. They call themselves left wing, but – as the Brand episode has made clear – they are many ways a sign that the left – defined as an agent in a class struggle – has all but disappeared.

Inside the Vampires’ Castle

The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.

I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class.  In all of the absurd and traumatic twitterstorms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of class privilege was entirely absent.  The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race  – but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories.

The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the VC has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is …

The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering – those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.

The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour. Some of these working class types are not terribly well brought up, and can be very rude at times. Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures. The actual ruling class propagates ideologies of individualism, while tending to act as a class. (Many of what we call ‘conspiracies’ are the ruling class showing class solidarity.) The VC, as dupe-servants of the ruling class, does the opposite: it pays lip service to ‘solidarity’ and ‘collectivity’, while always acting as if the individualist categories imposed by power really hold. Because they are petit-bourgeois to the core, the members of the Vampires’ Castle are intensely competitive, but this is repressed in the passive aggressive manner typical of the bourgeoisie. What holds them together is not solidarity, but mutual fear – the fear that they will be the next one to be outed, exposed, condemned.

The second law of the Vampires’ Castle is: make thought and action appear very, very difficult. There must be no lightness, and certainly no humour. Humour isn’t serious, by definition, right? Thought is hard work, for people with posh voices and furrowed brows. Where there is confidence, introduce scepticism. Say: don’t be hasty, we have to think more deeply about this. Remember: having convictions is oppressive, and might lead to gulags.

The third law of the Vampires’ Castle is: propagate as much guilt as you can. The more guilt the better. People must feel bad: it is a sign that they understand the gravity of things. It’s OK to be class-privileged if you feel guilty about privilege and make others in a subordinate class position to you feel guilty too. You do some good works for the poor, too, right?

The fourth law of the Vampires’ Castle is: essentialize. While fluidity of identity, pluarity and multiplicity are always claimed on behalf of the VC members – partly to cover up their own invariably wealthy, privileged or bourgeois-assimilationist background – the enemy is always to be essentialized. Since the desires animating the VC are in large part priests’ desires to excommunicate and condemn, there has to be a strong distinction between Good and Evil, with the latter essentialized. Notice the tactics. X has made a remark/ has behaved in a particular way – these remarks/ this behaviour might be construed as transphobic/ sexist etc. So far, OK. But it’s the next move which is the kicker. X then becomes defined as a transphobe/ sexist etc. Their whole identity becomes defined by one ill-judged remark or behavioural slip. Once the VC has mustered its witch-hunt, the victim (often from a working class background, and not schooled in the passive aggressive etiquette of the bourgeoisie) can reliably be goaded into losing their temper, further securing their position as pariah/ latest to be consumed in feeding frenzy.

The fifth law of the Vampires’ Castle: think like a liberal (because you are one). The VC’s work of constantly stoking up reactive outrage consists of endlessly pointing out the screamingly obvious: capital behaves like capital (it’s not very nice!), repressive state apparatuses are repressive. We must protest!

Neo-anarchy in the UK

The second libidinal formation is neo-anarchism. By neo-anarchists I definitely do not mean anarchists or syndicalists involved in actual workplace organisation, such as the Solidarity Federation. I mean, rather, those who identify as anarchists but whose involvement in politics extends little beyond student protests and occupations, and commenting on Twitter. Like the denizens of the Vampires’ Castle, neo-anarchists usually come from a petit-bourgeois background, if not from somewhere even more class-privileged.

They are also overwhelmingly young: in their twenties or at most their early thirties, and what informs the neo-anarchist position is a narrow historical horizon. Neo-anarchists have experienced nothing but capitalist realism. By the time the neo-anarchists had come to political consciousness – and many of them have come to political consciousness remarkably recently, given the level of bullish swagger they sometimes display – the Labour Party had become a Blairite shell, implementing neo-liberalism with a small dose of social justice on the side. But the problem with neo-anarchism is that it unthinkingly reflects this historical moment rather than offering any escape from it. It forgets, or perhaps is genuinely unaware of, the Labour Party’s role in nationalising major industries and utilities or founding the National Health Service. Neo-anarchists will assert that ‘parliamentary politics never changed anything’, or the ‘Labour Party was always useless’ while attending protests about the NHS, or retweeting complaints about the dismantling of what remains of the welfare state. There’s a strange implicit rule here: it’s OK to protest against what parliament has done, but it’s not alright to enter into parliament or the mass media to attempt to engineer change from there. Mainstream media is to be disdained, but BBC Question Time is to be watched and moaned about on Twitter. Purism shades into fatalism; better not to be in any way tainted by the corruption of the mainstream, better to uselessly ‘resist’ than to risk getting your hands dirty.

It’s not surprising, then, that so many neo-anarchists come across as depressed. This depression is no doubt reinforced by the anxieties of postgraduate life, since, like the Vampires’ Castle, neo-anarchism has its natural home in universities, and is usually propagated by those studying for postgraduate qualifications, or those who have recently graduated from such study.

What is to be done?

Why have these two configurations come to the fore?  The first reason is that they have been allowed to prosper by capital because they serve its interests. Capital subdued the organised working class by decomposing class consciousness, viciously subjugating trade unions while seducing ‘hard working families’ into identifying with their own narrowly defined interests instead of the interests of the wider class; but why would capital be concerned about a ‘left’ that replaces class politics with a moralising individualism, and that, far from building solidarity, spreads fear and insecurity?

The second reason is what Jodi Dean has called communicative capitalism. It might have been possible to ignore the Vampires’ Castle and the neo-anarchists if it weren’t for capitalist cyberspace. The VC’s pious moralising has been a feature of a certain ‘left’ for many years – but, if one wasn’t a member of this particular church, its sermons could be avoided. Social media means that this is no longer the case, and there is little protection from the  psychic pathologies propagated by these discourses.

So what can we do now? First of all, it is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognise that there are no identities, only desires, interests and identifications. Part of the importance of the British Cultural Studies project – as revealed so powerfully and so movingly in John Akomfrah’s installation The Unfinished Conversation (currently in Tate Britain) and his film The Stuart Hall Project – was to have resisted identitarian essentialism. Instead of freezing people into chains of already-existing equivalences, the point was to treat any articulation as provisional and plastic. New articulations can always be created. No-one is essentially anything. Sadly, the right act on this insight more effectively than the left does.  The bourgeois-identitarian left knows how to propagate guilt and conduct a witch hunt, but it doesn’t know how to make converts. But that, after all, is not the point. The aim is not to popularise a leftist position, or to win people over to it, but to remain in a position of elite superiority, but now with class superiority redoubled by moral superiority too. ‘How dare you talk – it’s we who speak for those who suffer!’

But the rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the re-assertion of class. A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group. Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure. It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed. The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital.

If this seems like a forbidding and daunting task, it is. But we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. Actually, such activities would go beyond pre-figuration – they could start a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bourgeois modes of subjectivity are dismantled and a new universality starts to build itself. We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication. We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness. We must break out of the ‘debate’ that communicative capitalism in which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate in, and remember that we are involved in a class struggle. The goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate – and transform – itself. Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.

Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism and the forthcoming Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (both published by Zer0 books, where he is now a Commissioning Editor). His writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Film Quarterly, The Wire, The Guardian and Frieze. He is Programme Leader of the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and a lecturer at the University of East London.

Mark Fisher By David Stubbs + unpublished interview

Jan 17 >> MARK FISHER (1968-2017)

Remembering Mark Fisher By David Stubbs  (QUIETUS)

Author Start The Quietus Author End , January 16th, 2017 10:02

David Stubbs looks back over the life of theorist Mark Fisher. And below that, for those wanting to know more about Mark's work, we have a previously unpublished interview between him and Agata Pyzik conducted in 2010

Article Start

The loss of Mark Fisher, aged just 48, has not just left family, friends and colleagues shocked and devastated; it leaves a gaping crater in modern intellectual life. The poet and writer Alex Niven, with whom he worked at Repeater books, described him as “by some distance the best writer in Britain” and, as a flood of tributes on social media have come appended with links to his work, whether on k-punk, his much-read blog, interviews he conducted for The Wire or extracts from his very latest book The Weird And The Eerie, that is a judgment with which it is hard to disagree.

Mark was a theorist, steeped in and conversant with the realms of academic discourse which the lay reader might find bafflingly abstruse. While never diluting his own ideas or others for popular consumption, he played a singular, vital role in disseminating these ideas to a wider audience. As anyone who ever attended any of his talks would attest, he was a passionate and highly skilled communicator, not in the least bit dry, who fired up and enthused his audiences, as well as fellow writers. He could hold a room in the palm of his hand. “Inspirational” is a word that crops up repeatedly in the tributes paid to him. He further palliated his formidable barrage of ideas by applying them to popular culture, music in particular, providing unique readings of everything from Joy Division to grime, Japan and The Cure, Tricky and the Caretaker (aka Leyland James Kirby whose work is an excellent soundtrack to any reading of Mark Fisher), as well as mainstream cinema such as The Shining, The Hunger Games and figures like Russell Brand. He was even an ardent football fan, a supporter of Nottingham Forest and co-founded a blog to which I contributed, Minus The Shooting (in reference to George Orwell’s famously snobby crack about football being “war minus the shooting”), describing pundit Alan Shearer’s “faint air of suppressed violence that surrounds him: he looks like a squaddie who's just beaten someone to death with a shoe.” Yes, that was Mark Fisher.

Mark emerged into the contemporary world of letters via pre-internet groups and fora such as D-Generation and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, a collective that grew from the philosophy department of Warwick University and the investigations of its founders Nick Land and Sadie Plant. Plant was a proponent of what was termed “cyber-punk”, which immersed itself in the potential effects of phenomena such as rave culture and Blade Runner and whose thinking contained neo-Situationist, quasi-mystical, occultist elements and pre-internet futurist imaginings. All of this was designed as a reproach to the fusty greys, complacency and Olympian detachment popular culture of the old guard of the left-leaning philosophical establishment. In his late 20s, Mark quickly emerged as one the CCRU’s most electrifying and exhilarating thinkers, part of a movement which urged an embrace of popular capitalism’s accelerationist, synthetic tendencies - hallucinatory rushes which might somehow hasten its own destruction. Mark spoke of "the false memory-chip of Socialist authenticity”, and in an early interview with Simon Reynolds said, “There's definitely a strong alliance in the academy between anti-market ideas and completely scleroticised, institutionalised thought. Marx has been outdated by cybernetic theory. It's obvious that capitalism isn't going to be brought down by its contradictions. Nothing ever died of contradictions!”

However, whereas antipathy towards leftist intellectual assumptions led some of the “Cyberpunks” perversely to embrace some aspects of Thatcherism, Mark never abandoned socialism and his commitment to what seemed a lost cause in the “reality” imposed in the 21st century was always tireless, sanguine and exemplary.

I first met Mark at a party where he enthused with typically dancing eyes and hands about having read my work at Melody Maker in the late 1980s. It was all the more chastening, then, to read Mark’s own music journalism, which ventured further into the depths of theory and perception than I could ever hope to reach. I can’t be the only fellow writer who emerged from his essays feeling educated and energised but also like a bit of a banal lunk by comparison. There is a fog that circles all of our consciousnesses; a fog of uncertainty and personal limitation, a fog which some take to mark the limits of what can be said, thought and done, a fog into which most fear to venture, for fear of seeming pretentious or coming unstuck, a fog which prevents us from making connections. Mark fearlessly walked through that fog. His subject matter, the ambience of his writing may have been nebulous but his observations, his illuminations were always laser sharp. He would demonstrate this in his most recent book, The Weird And The Eerie. Of this, Mark said, “The feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird. The simplest way to get to this difference is by thinking about the (highly metaphysically freighted) opposition — perhaps it is the most fundamental opposition of all — between presence and absence. As we have seen, the weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases of the weird (those with which Lovecraft was obsessed) the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something.”

Come the 21st century, Mark’s preoccupations became “hauntological”, drifted towards the misplaced hopes and ghostly ideals of the 20th century and its Utopian relics. The Situationists had talked about leaving the 20th century but its Utopian and Dystopian (pop) cultural monuments and lost futures preoccupied him greatly. This profound sense of elegy was not so much a lament as a potent device for escaping the clamp of modern times. He championed Burial in particular, interviewing the enigmatic, image-less electronic music artist whose work was a Noughties lamentation for the post-rave era, in December 2007 for The Wire. He wrote:

“Burial’s is a re-dreaming of the past, a condensation of relics of abandoned genres into an oneiric montage. His sound is a work of mourning rather than of melancholia, because he still longs for the lost object, still refuses to abandon the hope that it will return.”

As he cast his mind over the long, Gothic shadows of late 20th century post punk, meanwhile, he could, in the sweep of a paragraph in a blog essay on Joy Division, convey the conflation of literature, history, politics which was vital to the make-up of that group.

“It was in this Eastern bloc of the mind, it was in this slough of despond, that you could find working class kids who wrote songs steeped in Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Burroughs, Ballard, kids who, without even thinking about it, were rigorous modernists who would have disdained repeating themselves, never mind disinterring and aping what had been done twenty, thirty years ago (the Sixties was a fading Pathe newsreel in 1979).”

These were not mere names dropped but references thudded with acumen and effortless authority.

However, the work for which Mark is most famous, and which is mandatory reading for all, is his 2009 volume Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? The essence, the crux of this is encapsulated in its title, which co-opts the term Socialist Realism, the mode of art designed to glorify Soviet values in figurative images mocked by Western liberals for their risible wishfulness. Mark, however, saw that Capitalism, particularly post-1979 had imposed its own mode of “realism” which they had successfully persuaded the electorate and even large sections of the liberal commentariat to internalise - summed up in Margaret Thatcher’s own cruelly effective, wholly inaccurate dictum, “There is no alternative”. Years of Toryism, followed by the pliant neoliberalism of the Blair/Brown/Mandelson years have only helped embed this idea further in the collective consciousness. Simply put, you can vote for whoever you like but capitalism stays until the end of time. Understand that democracy’s bounds preclude its removal. Your dreams of revolution and foment are buried in the 20th century. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a dangerous fool.

Capitalist Realism strives brilliantly to decondition the reader of this idea, frequently using as its reference points the pop cultural products of capitalism itself. It is the culmination of all of his thinking and his most vital text, indeed among the most vital political texts of the 21st century, which has earned the praise of Slavoj Zizek, Russell Brand and Owen Jones among many others. I recall sitting in a cafe with Mark discussing my own book published at the time and wondering what sales we would be happy to register. A thousand, we agreed. Mine did a bit better than that - Capitalist Realism, however, sold in the tens of thousands, an astonishing tribute to its pertinence and impassioned lucidity.

In recent years, Mark could have been taken to task for over-investing faith in the ultimately disappointing likes of Zizek and Brand in particular, boldly predicting imminent revolutions which, alas, failed to transpire. However, those who sneer at such boldness are themselves a greater part of the problem; post-leftists who consider it more “grown-up” to settle into a knowing inertia, although all that this results in is the continuing drift to the right.

Mark was determined to snap out of this inertia, this inevitablist spirit. His positive energy was applied despite his own struggles with mental health, with which he wrote with candour, and in the hope that his mighty intellect might help slay the irrational forces which assailed him. He was even able to set his experiences in a political context. “Mental health is, in fact, a paradigm case of how Capitalist Realism operates,” he wrote. “Capitalist Realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but then again, we know that weather is no longer a natural fact). Poor mental health is of course a massive source of revenue for multinational drugs companies. You pay for a cure from the very system that made you sick in the first place.”

Simon Reynolds has described chatting to Mark about his future projects and the “vast edifice” they represented. Perhaps it was his determination to overcome his own personal despondency, as well as the sinking despondency of society at large, which lent him energy and ambition to construct this edifice, one which would stand tall and face down the oppressors, political and psychological, external and internal, he found himself ranged against. Perhaps he was uniquely qualified and situated to carry out this task. He leaves a truly formidable legacy; I believe he may well become a literary legend posthumously, his work revisited and referenced when others have shrivelled into irrelevancy, especially in our own, post-End Of History times. Right now, in the cold middle of January, with a Trump presidency almost upon us and a Tory government grossly over-trusted by the public about to carry out the ruinously stupid Brexit project, with inequality unchecked, Mark’s loss feels especially grievous. And yet, the antithesis to this grief, the much-needed filip, is to return to Mark’s own writing which crackles with the guiding, ever-burning, ferocious intensity of a brilliant and indomitable spirit. It’s all there, for all time, in the writing.

Mark was a colleague, a hero, an inspiration, but also a friend. I remember a series of meetings in the Hare And Billet pub in Blackheath, just a mile away from the site where Wat Tyler and the peasants rallied in 1381. I remember his savagings of his intellectual enemies, of Alan Shearer, the culture industry, the liberal press; I remember his humour, his warmth and generosity, freely pouring out the contents of that ever-active, ever-fertile mind. I remember meeting him with his lovely young family, upon whom he clearly doted and emotionally depended, at parks and parties. A literary legend he may well become, a touchstone, a towering figure - but all of those who knew him dearly wish that we could have back the man.

Mark Fisher interviewed by Agata Pyzik, 2010

("This is an interview I conducted with Mark Fisher in January 2010 in London, near City Lit where he taught part time. It was supposed to be a part of a book featuring talks with several of the most exciting bloggers and theorists I admired at the time, which included Dominic Fox and Owen Hatherley. I admired Mark the most and read his k-punk blog religiously. That was my very beginning in London and I was both starstruck and overwhelmed at such a meeting. But also I was very taken by Mark's generosity and friendliness and admired him ever since, considering myself extremely lucky to have known him." Agata Pyzik, 2017)

One of the more characteristic features about the emergence of your blog K-Punk is the fact you came to writing through the music journalism scene.

Mark Fisher: It wasn’t [just] music as such – I think it was more that music was a site from which you could make connections. When I started reading the music press in the 80s, it wasn’t only about music and music wasn’t only about music. It was certainly a medium that made demands on you, which assumed you knew things - if you didn’t know them you had to learn them really. All sorts of references, literary, theoretical references. It was really the association of music and theory that motivated me to read theory, in the works of Ian Penman and Simon Reynolds. And for my background at that time, I didn’t get [these things] from a formal education. There were lots of interesting people that cared to write about music in the 80s, who were talking about theory, but who didn't go to university, and there were other people who read [the music press in the 80s] and then studied for PhDs or became lecturers.

In your writing I’ve noticed you’re particularly sensitive to the “symptomatic” nature of phenomena; you find symptoms of certain hidden situations in cultural phenomena.

MF: The thing is, if something is not a symptom it’s probably not interesting. It’s not that I don’t like writing [standard] reviews, where I say that such and such a band's album is boring, for example. What is important is to say what the album reflects; what does it say? If something is not symptomatic, I’m in trouble, I can’t really write about it. I can't see anything else in it. It's annoying to hear from people who criticise my writing saying, 'This is not a review!' I’m interested in finding connections. My recent thing, on James Cameron’s Avatar is not a review, [I don't describe] what the film is about; it’s about what the film is a part of and what it connects to really.

In your theory on “capitalist realism”, expressed in the book of the same name published by Zero, artefacts become a type of screen where this is reflected.

MF: Capitalist Realism as a book is really an analysis of the symptoms of this condition. One of the ways of looking at it is seeing capitalist realism as a cultural pathology. And this regards various aspects of it, whether we're talking on the one hand about the regulation of work and the auditing and super-surveillance of work, that you find, for instance, in an academic job. (And all kinds of other jobs in late capitalism.) Also, it's about the idea that things have ended and that nothing will ever happen again. This is the underlying condition: simply the idea that “there’s no alternative” to the late capitalist order just the sense that things will just carry on as they used to lies very deep in people’s unconscious. Again, it deals in a literal kind of pathology: in illnesses, depression, and the fact this depression is completely taken for granted. The rise of depression within the society, and particularly among the young, is very high. For me that is a part of the same sense of collapse of possibilities. Everything has already happened, and nothing can ever happen again. Now, many people may disavow this, saying, no, they don’t think that – but they do think it. It's wildly excessive, in the unconscious, no one expects anything much to happen, and there’s a cultural dimension to it.

In relation to depression, there are lots of people that I teach in their late teens or early twenties, who were born around the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and into global capitalism, who assume this is a seamless horizon of life and they are not even conscious that this is how they perceive the world. When I was their age, there was still a fire of struggle around what the reality would be. There will still be the occasional anti-capitalist demonstration, but there’s no real sense it could lead to overthrow of the system we live in. This new reality is at the same time overstimulating and boring, it’s a strange combination of the two, and it is also anxiety producing. It's an assemblage of technology and affect which is kind of disabling. That’s what I’m calling capitalist realism - this sense of us always being inside of a Matrix, that we can't get out of, a constant sense of distraction, moving from one thing to another. It's important though not to see it purely from a perspective of an older world that is now gone, which we can see as a Fordist world, of rigid organisation of work, in a pre digital era. We shouldn’t be nostalgic for all of that, but there are aspects of it that are worth being nostalgic about. There are potentials in this new configuration. But one of the things that is noticeable is a lack of negativity. Instead of a kind of narrative of negativity that there was up to the 90s, this ability of saying ‘no’ really, it is not a good time to be alive, it doesn’t really happen anymore. It’s there, an explicit refusal of negativity, that what you get is depression instead of that, a kind of implicit negativity.

Younger people can recognise it is not a good time for culture at all, it’s just not in lots of ways. With music – it’s just not as it used to be. We should establish it as a problem, and not be cheerleading our times. But the message is: you can't be negative, you can’t be down on it, it’s just miserabilism. Negativity is just built into the period in which we live in, it is a terrible period of reaction and restoration. I like this term from Badiou, that any period of reaction has on its side the advantage that is the latest period of history at that time, that it looks modern by the sheer fact there is nothing after it. I think that’s kind of a trick that is being played now: there is a period of reaction, pastiche, retrospection, but it still looks modern because there’s nothing that comes after it really.

I think we are in a “trad” period really, where you have trad music, trad rock, which only constitutes forms which change very little. No one would have believed in 1993 that things would stay like this and still be the same in 2010, it’s unimaginable that things have stayed so recognisable, ten years into the next millennium, [very similar to] ten years before. I think it’s a final argument, to me – irrefutable, against “poptimism”, the idea that things are so vibrant and dynamic – they’re not. The changes that we’re accustomed to now are small, they happen, but it’s not very good anymore. There’s an immense sense of inertia, and really one of the crucial things about capitalist realism is lowering the expectations. And corporate capital, in almost anxious, deliberate ways, had to massively lower what people expected from culture. Because it's easier to standardise and mass re-produce mediocrity. It’s much harder to reliably tell us something actually interesting. What happened is that people don’t expect that anymore. Those low expectations have to be engendered. The depression that people feel causes a dissatisfaction – 'come on, things are really great, it’s not a bad period' – but the depression figures tell a different story about what is happening.

But do you think it is specific to our time, this feeling of general hopelessness? Also, I guess we don’t have a time perspective enough to judge the 00s yet – the opinion on the 00s will definitely change, when we will have the next decade behind us. This brings me also to the fact you’ve been theorising a lot about the demise of the public sphere in general, on inter-passivity, that this has become the way people are dealing with each other now.

MF: There have been periods of restoration before, but I don’t think they have the same meaning as it does now; also it probably hasn’t happened for over a hundred years, I’d say. But in a broader sense of modernity - the sense of it that used to emerge into new cultural forms - one could see things change in significant ways in a relatively short period of time. I think the level of stasis now, of the last 15-20 years, is mind-boggling. Late capitalism has really fundamentally become defined by retrospection, [both] active and disavowed. So you get an increasing number of TV programmes that are about how it was back in the day, pretty much avowed in their retrospection, but then there are things disavowed in their retrospection. A classic example is indie music, bands like Franz Ferdinand and all this, which really, in every respect do sound exactly like things from 30 years ago. It’s a bizarre situation. The 30 years since then – there has been a slowing down of culture and of change in that period. And of course there have been periods of slowing down culture. But the specific features of the assembling job are different.

One of the things that is happening is a massive discrepancy between technology and culture. Up to the end of the 90s you could have heard the sound of culture ticking within the music, you could’ve heard technology. And the biggest sound signifiers in this decade have been Auto-Tuning in rap and r&b, which started in the mid 90s. What are the sound signifiers now that we haven’t heard before the past decade? There are none. So although the notion of technology is moving, the technology has moved on, it is not audible anymore. You can’t hear it.

What about such genres as grime and dubstep? You yourself coined the phrase “hauntology” in relation to dubstep, as a genre referring to the forgotten but still undead theories and concepts of social reality…

MF: Grime started ten years ago, it was here already in the previous decade. Dubstep is not new at all. All of the elements of dubstep were there already in the mid-90s, they just didn’t happen to actualise in that way at that time. The difference is between the thing that simply hasn’t happened yet and the thing that was sonically previously unimaginable. Dubstep was not sonically unimaginable in 1994. All of the materials were there really. Grime no one had thought about, grime was new.

However it is significant that that despite circumstances, dubstep didn’t happen [like that], as maybe the evolution developed in a very different way.

MF: But it has fallen back on itself. For jungle to exist there needed to be time-stretching, it was a simple as that. Until there were lots of Akai samplers there couldn’t be jungle. Because of the time-stretched beats, the sound of jungle was contingent on that technology. You can also hear time-stretching in the vocals, so it just couldn’t have happened before. With Dubstep, technologically it could’ve happened in the 90s. The reason it didn’t happen then and it’s happening now is exhaustion. You go back over unactualised paradigms from the previous time. Obviously the technology has moved on. In a way, there was massively affective music in the past decade, but it was the distribution of music and the playback of music, not the production of music, that was the point. We have seen the most momentous developments in the technology of music in the past decade, and effectively the most sure [of these developments] is the decommodification of music. I think that’s what’s happening. It is hard to imagine that in a decade music will be paid for, really, anything like it was before. This change now doesn’t really have an influence on the production of music at all. It seems, more to the point, technology changes, but culture doesn’t change. Not in the consumption or production sense of change.

On the other hand, this rhetoric or ideology of ‘exhaustion’ is something that has existed for the last 30 years. It’s become a certain kind of a story, a narrative, that is being told to us. Or there’s an aesthetics of ending [happening]. This may be a way of rejuvenating. Or if it is not a way of ‘rejuvenating’, it is at the very least some story, which we are telling ourselves to make this declining culture remain interesting to us.

Yeah, but like Evan Calder Williams said, the ending never ends. You're just stuck in this perpetual, fetid, endless half-life, half-death of things, where things never really end, they carry on without end. That is the oddness of it for me. I lived through this massive de-acceleration. What we’re talking about is de-acceleration more than exhaustion. [We got] used to things changing rapidly; changes by months or years, and then suddenly whole bits of time go when nothing changes that much. [You go from] some strange, literal culture of speed to now [which is] the culture of entropy; the endless end, that again, never really ends but it doesn’t seem to change that much either.

You think this entropy is exclusive to now?

MF: As I said, there have been moments like [this in the past]. But in terms of capitalism I’d say yes. If you go back to the time period that is involved, the 50-60 year period I’m talking about, you’d expect to see new developments by now. The thing is, even this narrative of exhaustion [itself] seems so exhausted now.

On the other hand, people seemed excited by the idea of the ‘postmodern’ and now it tends to be completely dismissed.

MF: I wouldn’t say completely. Postmodernism is not something you can look on from outside; you’re completely inside postmodernism. Everything that postmodern theory said will happen, has happened. And I think we just lose perspective on it. To come back to inter-passivity, Zizek took it from Robert Farr, who initially came up with it, in this idea of things acting in our stead. And one of the examples of this I talk about is anti-capitalist culture. A very peculiar syndrome really. In what I call completely dominant capitalist realism, nevertheless, mainstream Hollywood entertainment is routinely filled with anti-capitalist ideas. Taking Avatar, taking Wall-E, taking any of these examples - the corporations are always evil. And how did we get at the same time the most aggressive period of corporate capitalism and routine representations of capitalism as pure evil?

I think it has to do with the construction and functioning of capitalism itself, that sort of feeds itself on incorporating change, revolutionary changes. At the beginning you said that now we feel there’s no alternative, I guess that it is precisely because capitalism is mirroring society.

MF: The thing is it is already pre-incorporating the alternative and represents this in an uneasy way. The film does your anti-capitalism for you, so you can sit there, drinking your coke, eating your popcorn, and paying money to corporations, because the film is doing anti-capitalism on your behalf. But inter-passivity as a wider term - I think the term itself is a nice display of inter-activity. I think Baudrillard was really strong on this, deeply anticipating the forms of cultural capitalism that we’re now fully immersed in, to do with the fact they elicit participation from us, one isn’t a subordinate with the spectacle any more: you are required to join in. You’re part of the product itself in the sense that without your feedback the product can't exist.

When you started blogging in 2003, it was still quite spacious terrain. Blogging is an alternative space to the occupation of the public sphere by capital. And interestingly, after years of this, you came back to print, started to publish books again. Why did you decide to go back to this mode of circulation?

MF: All that I've said up to this point isn't supposed to be conservative: 'Oh, things used to be better.' But also things won’t get any better by me or anyone else saying they are good. That’s the irony - when there was a more vibrant culture, there was more refusal, criticism and negativity within the culture. In this culture, which is quite objectively, an unashamedly mediocre, retrospective one, there’s very little negativity, and those two things are related. We have to recognise: pessimism is not in us, it’s in the culture itself. In the low expectations, depression, recombinations of the already existing things. We have to accept that is the situation. That recognition is itself a way to leave that embedded pessimism. And I use negativity and say, these things are bad, they just can be de-normalised, de-naturalised. Not in the name of how things were before - the only point to seeing things how they were before is to denaturalise. Because there's a hyperstimulated boredom in contemporary culture; gossip is the dominating form. You don’t really want to know about Katie Price’s new boyfriend, but you sort of want to know about it. This is a form of distracted irritation really, you’re irritated, but you still have to know somehow. That is the dominating form of living in the times of reality TV. Because it’s so low level, you can’t get stimulated by it, but still you draw yourself to it. You just can’t help losing your time by looking at all sorts of boring things, the internet plays a great role in it. still stating that is a step forward to realise how strange the present moment is!

I think an initial step in breaking this scene is recognition, turning these things into symptoms. Initially it was a way of constructing an alternative collective space which has become the blogging thing, and here we can talk about unprecedented possibilities that are available now. I talked about how music has slowed down, but in terms of dissemination of writing, we take it all for granted that I can write something on my computer, publish myself and then someone in Egypt reads it.

What is the precedent for blogs really? Things like fanzines. But they are a local thing, it costs money to distribute them, you’d be really lucky to get my fanzine in Poland. The fact this conversation is taking place at all is an evidence something has happened. The sheer fact of it doesn’t mean much really, it doesn’t mitigate the mediocrity and the fact that people don’t listen really. What is important is a network which affects things. That is worth developing. You can think about the music press from the 80s and, to a large extent, the blogs that are much more sophisticated. Blogs are really defined through writing, where you formulate lines, outside of demographically defined spaces of print journalism. Yet the books have an impact blogs do not have. The transformation into a different physical form is an example of what Deleuze calls corporeal transformation; things have more status when in a book form. Also, although lots of my book is already on the blog, for some people it was easier to read in this form. I’m surprised by how much impact the book had. Most of the ideas were familiar, but actually when you put it in a book, it focuses them, with the internet it's harder to concentrate on them. The internet is addictive, but produces this sort of network stress. When you enter the internet, you immediately feel all the things you should be doing at the same time. Concentrating on the one thing you’re reading is almost impossible. You have 20 windows open at once, you're constantly checking your email etc. So a book takes things out of that space. The internet is good for distribution, good for constituting a network. But I think books consolidate that and take it to a different speed.

But what does it say about the readership and styles of reception? We are less modern than we think. I also believe that the book is a quite an eternal form.

MF: I used to be very dismissive about the mp3; I said that no one would buy them. Of course now I only listen to mp3s. I barely listen to CDs anymore. The reason for using mp3s is sortability – it’s really easier for me to find things, if I have them on mp3.

The thing is people don’t want to pay for culture anymore. I was just recently thinking about it considering poetry – there’s no demand for it anymore, so poetry is gradually disappearing from the landscape. Because poetry stopped being a part of the economic reality. And if culture will continue like this, people will stop thinking they’re supposed to pay for culture at all.

MF: It’s an interesting problem. We need new models for rewarding cultural work. Simply paying directly is not going to happen much anymore. Will the rest of culture follow the pattern of the music? If music has become decommodified, and it surely has for young people, they don’t dream of paying for music.

So on one side is everything we described earlier, inter-passive depressive individuation, everyone is on a terminal and under a network, i.e. everyone is networked but isolated individually; on the other side, there is this massive drive to share. The internet is definitely not determined by capitalism, but by people wanting to share stuff. If you look at Youtube or Wikipedia, these are things that people do, okay, maybe for some kind of recognition, fine, but it’s a pretty harmless thing to expect for this load of effort. I think it poses the problem of rewarding work.

And it's a culture of dedication, where people are doing things on their own because they love it. Amateur art.

MF: Neoliberalism states that people are only motivated by money, and fear in a way, but the culture of the internet depends on the impulse to share. Something can come from that. It raises the problem how people get paid though - I earn nothing for my work on the internet, but my status is based on doing things for free.

A difficulty we’ve got with Zero is the lack of a ceremonial or evental time. I don’t mean evental in a Badiouan sense – I mean it in a very banal sense. In the broadcast or print era, time was punctuated. A TV programme was broadcast once a week and to watch it you had to turn on the television at the exact time. Public space is created out of that evental, punctual nature of time in a way. Everything about that has collapsed now. With your iPlayer, you can watch TV anytime. How do things come together to constitute public space? There clearly is some kind of a public space out there, but it’s hard to experience it as such, [because of] a lack of the ceremonial quality of evental time. How do we constitute a public space under these conditions? Zero Books are trying to contribute to the creation of that public space. And no one knows what form it is going to be, because the old monoliths found themselves struggling. The nearest thing you can get right now is The X Factor.

The issue with The X Factor is it's not just a public event but creating a public space as well. I don't think we need to revolt against The X Factor especially; a challenge to it is a much more healthy sign. The X Factor is successful, because it generates its evental time and everyone watches. This is a very inclusive use of the word "everyone": from executives to old people. The utopian element to The X Factor is the fact that it's still possible to constitute a popular public space, even under the conditions of 2.0 culture (all of the earlier forms of media combined together, print, TV etc. are ailing, the internet is stronger but you can’t make any money out of it and despite all of this, something that everyone will watch can still be made). If it can be done for that nonsense, it can be done for anything else. You have to regard that space as worth competing for. You can’t say: "Oh, let’s be alternative, let’s make films, let’s experiment." In the 70s, even in the 90s, the experiment within culture wasn’t what it is now. People wanted to take over the mainstream, in lots of ways.

One was not contented to be in an experimental niche. What happens now is that experimental preamble, a formation of a whole series of autonomous networks. Arts funding bodies, the festivals, which keep it going, which have no desire [to engage] the mainstream at all. Instead it’s a Bourdieu-esque kind of privilege of some people belonging to this experimental circle. And indie rock is no more experimental. It’s experimental by generic designation only. Partly why it happens is that this old circuit between the experimental and the public and popular has been removed. The experimental is quite conservative, in its own way, but it's also not mainstream. You’ve got the idea that there’s a popular public out there worth competing for, even experimental things will be come back. They will be allowed to go somewhere, beyond their niche. There is a kind of deadness in [experimental art], that comes from the fact they disregard public space. People like The X Factor judge Simon Cowell made their money on the presumption that you can never underestimate the taste of the public, he's always sold shit to people. If those people set the stuff for the mainstream circuit, we can always do better than them.

In a way it’s easy to be alternative, it’s easy to be in permanent revolt, to sit there. We have to have the confidence. The right wing have the confidence, they say, this is how we should live, we are the mainstream. The left always assume the position of marginality, they complain, 'we are the margins'. And yet we want to be the mainstream, we want to take it over!