K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)

705 Pages·2018·2.97 MB·English

by  Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose

k-punk
Mark Fisher (1968 – 2017)
was a co-founder of Zer0
Books and, later, Repeater
Books. His blog, k-punk,
defined critical writing for a
generation. He wrote three
books, Capitalist Realism,
Ghosts of My Life and The
Weird and the Eerie, and was
a Visiting Fellow in the Visual
Cultures department at
Goldsmiths, University of
London.
Darren Ambrose is a
freelance writer and editor
from the North-East of
England.
Simon Reynolds is the author
of Retromania and Rip It Up
and Start Again.
k-punk
The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-
2016)
Edited by Darren Ambrose
Foreword by Simon Reynolds
CONTENTS
Foreword by Simon Reynolds
Editor’s Introduction by Darren Ambrose
Why K?
PART ONE
Methods of Dreaming: Books
Book Meme
Space, Time, Light, All the Essentials — Reflections on J.G. Ballard Season
(BBC 4)
Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan
A Fairground’s Painted Swings
What Are the Politics of Boredom? (Ballard 2003 Remix)
Let Me Be Your Fantasy
Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s “State of Emergency”
The Assassination of J.G. Ballard
A World of Dread and Fear
Ripley’s Glam
Methods of Dreaming
Atwood’s AntiCapitalism
Toy Stories: Puppets, Dolls and Horror Stories
Zer0 Books Statement
PART TWO
Screens, Dreams and Spectres: Film and Television
A Spoonful of Sugar
She’s Not My Mother
Stand Up, Nigel Barton
Portmeirion: An Ideal for Living
Golgothic Materialism
This Movie Doesn’t Move Me
Fear and Misery in the Third Reich ‘n’ Roll
We Want It All
Gothic Oedipus: Subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan’s Batman
Begins
When We Dream, Do We Dream We’re Joey?
Notes on Cronenberg’s eXistenZ
I Filmed It So I Didn’t Have to Remember It Myself
Spectres of Marker and the Reality of the Third Way
Dis-identity Politics
“You Have Always Been the Caretaker”: The Spectral Spaces of the Overlook
Hotel
Coffee Bars and Internment Camps
Rebel Without a Cause
Robot Historian in the Ruins
Review of Tyson
“They Killed Their Mother”: Avatar as Ideological Symptom
Precarity and Paternalism
Return of the Gift: Richard Kelly’s The Box
Contributing to Society
“Just Relax and Enjoy It”: Geworfenheit on the BBC
Star Wars Was a Sell-Out From the Start
Gillian Wearing: Self Made
Batman’s Political Right Turn
Remember Who the Enemy Is
Beyond Good and Evil: Breaking Bad
Classless Broadcasting: Benefits Street
Rooting for the Enemy: The Americans
How to Let Go: The Leftovers, Broadchurch, and The Missing
The Strange Death of British Satire
Review: Terminator Genisys
The House that Fame Built: Celebrity Big Brother
Sympathy for the Androids: The Twisted Morality of Westworld
PART THREE
Choose Your Weapons: Writing on Music
The By Now Traditional Glasto Rant
Art Pop, No, Really
k-punk, or the Glampunk Art Pop Discontinuum
Noise as AntiCapital: As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade
Lions After Slumber, or What is Sublimation Today?
The Outside of Everything Now
For Your Unpleasure: The Hauter-Couture of Goth
It Doesn’t Matter If We All Die: The Cure’s Unholy Trinity
Look at the Light
Is Pop Undead?
Memorex for the Kraken: The Fall’s Pulp Modernism
Scritti’s Sweet Sickness
Postmodernism as Pathology, Part 2
Choose Your Weapons
Variations on a Theme
Running on Empty
You Remind Me of Gold: Dialogue with Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds
Militant Tendencies Feed Music
Autonomy in the UK
The Secret Sadness of the Twenty-First Century: James Blake’s Overgrown
Review: David Bowie’s The Next Day
The Man Who Has Everything: Drake’s Nothing Was the Same
Break it Down: DJ Rashad’s Double Cup
Start Your Nonsense! On eMMplekz and Dolly Dolly
Review: Sleaford Mods’ Divide and Exit and Chubbed Up: The Singles
Collection
Test Dept: Where Leftist Idealism and Popular Modernism Collide
No Romance Without Finance
PART FOUR
For Now, Our Desire is Nameless: Political Writings
Don’t Vote, Don’t Encourage Them
October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder
What If They Had a Protest and Everyone Came
Defeating the Hydra
The Face of Terrorism Without a Face
Conspicuous Force and Verminisation
My Card: My Life: Comments on the AMEX Red Campaign
The Great Bullingdon Club Swindle
The Privatisation of Stress
Kettle Logic
Winter of Discontent 2.0: Notes on a Month of Militancy
Football/Capitalist Realism/Utopia
The Game Has Changed
Creative Capitalism
Reality Management
UK Tabloid
The Future is Still Ours: Autonomy and Post-Capitalism
Aesthetic Poverty
The Only Certainties are Death and Capital
Why Mental Health is a Political Issue
The London Hunger Games
Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era
Not Failing Better, but Fighting to Win
The Happiness of Margaret Thatcher
Suffering With a Smile
How to Kill a Zombie: Strategising the End of Neoliberalism
Getting Away With Murder
No One is Bored, Everything is Boring
A Time for Shadows
Limbo is Over
Communist Realism
Pain Now
Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming)
For Now, Our Desire is Nameless
Anti-Therapy
Democracy is Joy
Cybergothic vs. Steampunk
Mannequin Challenge
PART FIVE
We Have to Invent the Future: Interviews
They Can Be Different in the Future Too: Interviewed by Rowan Wilson for
Ready Steady Book (2010)
Capitalist Realism: Interviewed by Richard Capes (2011)
Preoccupying: Interviewed by the Occupied Times (2012)
We Need a Post-Capitalist Vision: Interviewed by AntiCapitalist Initiative
(2012)
“We Have to Invent the Future”: An Unseen Interview with Mark Fisher (2012)
Hauntology, Nostalgia and Lost Futures: Interviewed by Valerio Mannucci and
Valerio Mattioli for Nero (2014)
PART SIX
We Are Not Here to Entertain You: Reflections
One Year Later…
Spinoza, k-punk, Neuropunk
Why Dissensus?
New Comments Policy
Comments Policy (Latest)
Chronic Demotivation
How to Keep Oedipus Alive in Cyberspace
We Dogmatists
London Litened
No Future 2012
Ridicule Is Nothing to Be Scared Of (Slight Return)
Break Through in Grey Lair
Real Abstractions: The Application of Theory to the Modern World
No I’ve Never Had a Job…
Fear and Misery in Neoliberal Britain
Exiting the Vampire Castle
Good for Nothing
PART SEVEN
Acid Communism
Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction)
Notes
Acknowledgements
foreword
The strange thing is that I encountered Mark’s mind long before I actually met
him. In a way, I knew him before I even knew of him.
Let me explain. In 1994, I wrote a piece for Melody Maker about D-
Generation, a concept-laden outfit from Manchester whose line-up included
Mark. But I only ever spoke on the phone with another member, Simon Biddell.
Because I was so interested in D-Generation’s ideas, it never even occurred to
me to do the basic journalistic procedure of asking who else was in the group. So
it was a full decade later that I learned I’d effectively written about Mark, when
he shyly revealed this fact in an email to me. And sure enough, digging out the
yellowing clip — D-Generation as “Pick of the Week” in the Advance section of
Melody Maker — there was Mark right in the centre of the photo: his hair in a
vaguely Madchester-style bob, his eyes staring out at the reader with a searching,
baleful intensity.
D-Generation were one of those groups that are grist for the mill of the music
press, catnip to a certain kind of critic: the conceptual framing was piquant and
provocative, the sound itself lagged slightly behind the spiel. Rereading the
piece and listening for the first time in many years to D-Generation’s EP
Entropy in the UK, it’s fascinating just how many of Mark’s signature fixations
were already in evidence. There’s the centrality of punk in his worldview: D-
Generation described their music as “techno haunted by the ghost of the punk”
(literally, in “The Condition of Muzak”, which sampled Johnny Rotten’s
Winterland 1978 kiss-off “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” and turned
his bitter jeering laugh into a riff). There’s the love-hate for Englishness: hating
the hale ‘n’ hearty, artless and anti-intellectual side of the national character
(“Rotting Hill” sampled “Merrie England? England was never merry!” from the
film version of Lucky Jim), loving a darkly arty deviant tradition that included
the Fall, Wyndham Lewis, and Michael Moorcock (all referenced in D-
Generation’s press release). There’s also early evidence of Mark’s virulent
contempt for retro: “73/93” targeted what D-Generation dubbed the “Nostalgia
Conspiracy”. And there’s even flickering ectoplasmic portents of hauntology,
that twenty-first century current of music and thought and sensibility that Mark
championed so compellingly.
Beyond those specifics, though, it’s the structure of the encounter itself that
is revealing and prefiguring. Here’s a music journalist (in this case, me) hungrily
on the look-out for a group with ideas, and, having found one (in this case, D-