DOCUMENT
UFD0043
Enrico Monacelli, Massimo Filippi
To Wish Impossible Things: On
Mark Fisher’s Ab-joy (After All)
As a new volume of Mark Fisher’s K-Punk writings appears
in Italian translation, Enrico Monacelli and Massimo Filippi
struggle with the ambivalent jouissance of their untimely
call to Deep Futurism and the paradox of their recovery,
rehabilitation, and re-present-ation.
2
Why I started the
blog? Because it
seemed like a space—
the only space—in
which to maintain
a kind of discourse
that had started in
the music press and
the art schools, but
which had all but died
out, with what I think
are appalling cultural and political consequences.1
It is impossible to
deny that around the
CCRU—and
what
followed after its demise, Fisher’s blog
included—there has
emerged a mythology which exudes the
vague stench of obituaries and anatomical theatres. Even in
the parochial Italian collective consciousness, the
para-academic group, born in a tiny room at the
So begins the K-Punk anthology, the Italian translation of which is divided into four volumes, a merciful
choice compared to the monolith that is the English
edition, collecting together, in addition to a few short
articles appeared in various magazines, Mark Fisher’s
posts on his blog K-Punk. The first volume, dedicated to his political writings and entitled Il nostro desiderio è senza nome [Our Desire is Nameless], was
released in Italy at the beginning of 2020, and the
second, Schermi, sogni e spettri [Screens, Dreams
and Spectres], a few weeks ago (both translated by
Vincenzo Penna for minimum fax).
1. M. Fisher, K-Punk, ed. D. Ambrose (London: Repeater, 2018),
31.
1
A cascade of amen breaks, Ballard’s
and Gibson’s cyberpunk, the death of
sound philosophy under the blows of a
new pulp theory….
University of Warwick and finally killed off by the
Millennium Bug, is becoming, along with its defectors, descendants and followers, a mythological
figure that immediately translates into very specific, standard responses: the nineties transfigured by
an upheaval of epic proportions, the shock of the
augmented reality of and by the web, a cascade of
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amen breaks, Ballard’s and Gibson’s cyberpunk, the
death of sound philosophy under the blows of a new
pulp theory….
We would love to live in this frigid
simulacrum woven by the threads of
the fantasy tale born from the ashes
of the CCRU
4
2. Ibid., 237, 173.
4. Ibid., 211.
5. Ibid., 167.
3. Ibid., 125.
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Even if, abiding by intellectual etiquette, we feel
obliged to denounce this sclerotization, to try to
flee such facile and common thoughts—or, more
realistically, Pavlovian reflexes—we will not hide
the fascination we feel for these flat images and
for the shimmer of the macabre celebration of the
disappearance of the CCRU, the ‘diaspora’ of its
members under the blows of a Capital which, even
post-mortem, as Mckenzie Wark would have it, remains capable of ever faster and ever more lethal
3
mutations. We would love to live—if only it were
These knee-jerk reactions, however, do not seem to possible—in this frigid simulacrum woven by the
address any real issue; rather, they are becoming a threads of the fantasy tale born from the ashes of
problem in and of themselves in their return in the the CCRU, a tale that weaves hi-fi dreams in a lo-fi
form of clichés. Progressively freed from any conno- life. (‘Late capitalism can’t produce many new idetative and descriptive function, these associations as anymore, but it can reliably deliver technological
are in fact transforming into an authentic common- upgrades’).4
place, made, as is usual with common sense, out
of immediate and unflattering correspondences. In Friction-free, this common place, this inane smooth
other words, they are becoming yet another theo- space, keeps alive, deep in our guts, the insane
retical mannerism, not dissimilar from the epidem- hope that this posthumous joy will prosper, or at
ic fevers of, first, the Frankfurt Sickness, and then least survive the wear and tear of time and allow
later The Deconstruction Syndrome, a fever whose us to bathe in it ‘till the end of days. After all, we
miasmas and outpourings threaten to cosy up real are not immune—and why should we be?—to the
nice—where they have not already done so—in the compulsions of the Great Other, whom we all blame
stiff atmosphere of academic classrooms, virtual or for producing and reproducing the conformisms
that we claim to recognise and, therefore, reject in
IRL. Truly, a return of the depressed.
the little others around us.
‘[R]eality has fundamentally altered, and this must
God, the Father, the Big Other, the Symbolic
be faced, not denied’. We can’t deny that ‘intern2
does not exist; but it insists through the repetiment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist’.
tion of these rituals.5
The ‘reality’ that is designated is significant more
5
for what is absent from it than for any positive
properties it is deemed to possess. And what is
This flat image, free of anything abrasive, is tied,
absent, above all, is fantasy. Or rather, fantasy
certainly, to a form of nostalgia, for a time when
objects.3
the future still pressed on the doors of the present.
Unheimlich (weird or eerie, accordingly) of course,
a source of delirium but, at the same time, of hope.
This flat image is tied to a form of nostalgia, for a time when the future still
pressed on the doors of the present
In a sense, the mythical halo that surrounds the
CCRU’s corpse enchants us because it looks like the
naive and exhausted mirage of a frontier, of a line
on the horizon, ever deferred and distant. A banal
but effective bait. It was an era—that of the CCRU,
an era that glaringly loomed over K-Punk’s posts—
that mastered capitalist thaumaturgy—‘“liberal
communism”—as exemplified by the charitable
gifts made by super-successful capitalists such as
Bill Gates and George Soros—is now the dominant
form of capitalist ideology’6—and could still try to
steer Capital’s enforced excitement toward emancipatory ends. An ethos which, in the midst of our
mad black cultural counter-revolution, could only
look like heresy.
The opposition that sets elitism against populism
is one that neoliberalism has put in place, which
is why it’s a mistake to fall either side of it. The
neoliberal attack on cultural “elites” has gone
alongside the consolidation and extension of the
power of an economic elite’7
Terminator: an astronomical division between the
illuminated side of a cold body and its dark side,
describing a boundary. The Terminator movies
feature a bio-technical reconstruct called Arnold
Schwarzenegger, wrapped in level after level of
artificiality, as a Turing-test nightmare retro-infiltrated to forestall human resistance to a neoreplica tor usurpation.8
6
The sharpest and most enduring symbol of this nostalgia for a future shock, for a breakneck whiplash
coming from a not so distant tomorrow, is Terminator,
the cult character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger
in the 1984 film of the same name. One of the most
vivid symptoms of the Deep Futurism that innervated the CCRU.
Land, however, seems to avoid the fact that
Terminator—already since the suspiciously superior
1991 sequel—had become a saga, and that it had
turned into a bloodless Hollywood franchise. While
remaining a symptom of something other, it had developed further symptoms (a symptom of the Other,
perhaps?), a symptom turned chronic, stagnant as
the times we still live in today.
Terminator is a cyborg from the future, reshaping the
course of history in a radical and totally unpredictable way. Assembled from the remnants of Fordist
assembly lines and representing the technological
upheavals that were banging on the door, Terminator
was the libidinal precipitate of a world open to the
unknown and the improbable. A world in which the
acceleration of the flows of goods, signs, and bodies
promised a deflagration so devastating as to unravel
Fisher too, in a sense, never abandoned Terminator’s
ab-joy, that desperate vitality (to use Pasolini’s livid
terminology). Fisher never stopped keeping alive the
disquieting hope for a Deep Futurism in the midst of
8. N. Land, ‘Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace)’, in
Fanged Noumena (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011), 422.
6. Ibid., 453.
7. Ibid., 208.
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and reshape the plot of the world. Terminator heralded a liquid aurora, a renewed horizontal cosmos, in
which every object would be dissolved in the corrosive acid of this blob made of flat batteries and silicon
flames saturated with information. In the presence of
this shocking wonder, Nick Land wrote:
make themselves real generates a nostalgia feeling
in Fisher and a nostalgia mode in Land. By ‘nostalgia feeling’ we mean a protracted production, even
at the height of despair, of visions of a future that
hopefully we might be able to secure at some point;
by ‘nostalgia mode’ we mean, instead, a mode that,
even at the zenith of mania, continues fixating only
on the irretrievably lost (eg. the idea of a runaway
capital even in the stagnancy of our post-history). In
this sense, Fisher is ab-joyous. and Land is not.
Fisher, in a sense, never
abandoned Terminator’s ab-joy,
that desperate vitality
Cyclone T.I.N.A.—at whose centre swirls the motionless, hedonic depression induced by our addiction to Capitalist Realism. Precisely for this reason,
his subsequent distancing from Terminator is the
disconsolate, but far from tame, recognition of the
victory of a present in which every novelty has atrophied, or been deprived of fangs and virulence.
[T]he nostalgia mode is about the inability to imagine anything other than the past, the incapacity to generate forms that can engage with the
present, still less the future.11
We believe that, at the end of the day, Fisher comprehended that it was impossible to ‘recover a lost
moment’, an intuition that naturally leads to the conclusion that, maybe, ‘this moment never existed in
the first place’.12
Hyperstition generates a nostalgia
feeling in Fisher and a nostalgia mode
in Land. In this sense, Fisher is
ab-joyous, and Land is not.
7
8
That Fisher would continue to feel the emancipatory power of the first Terminator is shown in the
distance that he inserts, even in this case, between
himself and Land:
The great, paradoxical value of Screens, Dreams
and Spectres—and of the K-Punk volumes in general—is precisely that they embody the sense of defeat that Fisher discovered in contemporary mass
phenomena and against which, despite everything,
he never ceased to fight—with critical obstinacy
and moral rigour. The entire volume, in fact, is a kind
of painful schizoanalysis of cinema, pop culture and,
more generically, of the images of our present, dissected as if they were the zombie return of a broken
and dismembered desire. It could be said that the
screen (or TV set), protagonist of this second volume, is the glossy wreck of a Ballardian automobile
upon which glint the symptoms of anxiety, disorientation, and the paranoid drifts of our present—the
identity closures and the broken minds. It is certainly
Land’s piratings of Terminator, Blade Runner
and the Predator films made his texts part of
a convergent tendency—an accelerationist cyber-culture in which digital sonic production disclosed an inhuman future that was to be relished
rather than abominated.10
This brings us to an even broader theoretical question: the political conceptualisation of hyperstition.
A conceptualisation that has never stopped tying/
separating the two in an indissoluble non/relationship: the techno-science of ‘cultural objects’ that
9. Fisher, K-Punk, 245.
10. M. Fisher, ‘Terminator vs. Avatar’, in R. Mackay and A.
Avanessian (eds.), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader
(Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), 335–46: 344.
11. Fisher, K-Punk, 116.
12. Ibid., 116.
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‘By this point, we’ve already seen the original 1984
model of the Arnie Terminator blown away by an older Terminator’, an ‘already irritating combination of
cutesy smart alecry […] and apocalyptic foreboding’,
‘[b]ut by 2015 that excitement has long since flatlined’.
Terminator turns into the sad employ of some boring
non-place somewhere where ‘twenty-first-century
labour’ is reduced to ‘quasi-automatism is expected
of workers as if the undeclared condition of employment were to surrender subjectivity and become
nothing more than a bio-linguistic appendage tasked
with repeating set phrases that make a mockery of
anything resembling conversation’.9
We are aware, however, that the extraction of these
writings from a blog that could disappear at any
moment is an operation not without merit. In other
words, we would not want to lose forever the chance
to read, for example, Fisher’s lightning-fast and illuminating diagnostic reports such as: ‘Postmodern
fascism is a disavowed fascism […] just as homophobia survives as disavowed homophobia. The strategy
is to refuse the identification while pursuing the political programme’. Or: ‘We know that our wealth and
comfort are achieved at the price of others’ suffering
and exploitation, that our smallest actions contribute to ecological catastrophe, but the causal chains
connecting our actions with their consequences are
so complicated as to be unmappable—they lie far
beyond not only our experience, and any possible
experience. (Hence the inadequacy of folk politics)’.
And again: ‘Yet work can be affective and linguistic
without being cognitive—like a waiter, the call-centre worker can perform attentiveness without having to think. For these non-cognitive workers, indeed,
thought is a privilege to which they are not entitled’.15
A kind of painful schizoanalysis of
cinema, pop culture, of the images of
our present, dissected as if they were
the zombie return of a broken and
dismembered desire
not a pleasant read, but it is instructive and useful—that is, potentially transformative—to feel with
such a degree of intensity how far our sadness and
neuroses go.
No tragedy now—only spasms of soon-to-beforgotten outrage, ejaculations of hatred and
suffering snacked on like fast food.13
Or;
Let us ask ourselves: ‘[H]ow long can a
culture persist without the new?’
9
It creates, however, a certain discomfort to re-read
these ‘live’ interventions within the bounds of a book
that, volens nolens, reterritorializes the deterritorializing flows of Fisher’s diffractions.
The ambivalence between affection and comprehension—towards Fisher—ought to suggest a
supplement of reflection, and should force us to
ask ourselves whether it is really necessary to stuff
every cultural product into its paper box or whether
we are bound to respect its mysterious and impalpable volatility.
All the pieces that make up Screens, Dreams
and Spectres and, more generally, the entirety of
K-Punk, were conceived of as interventions on a
blog, interventions loosed without precautions—like
screenless dreams—into the magmatic flow of the
web. They were bullets aimed at the present in fieri,
moved by the desire to be quick and compact, to hit
the flesh of the collective imagination right where
it hurts most. In short, they were interventions designed to be fragile, contingent, and lethal creatures.
We cannot, therefore, fail to notice the pungent
smell of incense that spread from this premature
embalming. Perhaps this anthology is the expression of an excess of zealous tact toward writings
that continue to claim their right to die together with
what they criticised or celebrated.
‘A culture which takes place only in museums is already exhausted. A culture of commemoration is a
cemetery’. Let us ask ourselves: ‘[H]ow long can a
culture persist without the new?’16
10
And now, at the very end, some ab-joy:
The problems are logistical, not ethical, and the
issue is simply how and when revolution can be
made to happen, not if it should happen at all.17
15. Ibid., 156, 198, 149.
13. Ibid., 251.
16. Ibid., 174, 173.
14. Ibid., 118.
17. Ibid., 219.
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The rise of fantasy as a genre over the last twenty-five years can be directly correlative with the
collapse of any effective alternative reality structure outside capitalism.14