Gothic Materialism

A materialism of the anorganic

Mark Fisher develops Gothic Materialism as a mode that envelops cyberpunk and postmodern theory rather than interpreting them from outside (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 12). It takes whatever it can use and is transformed by the encounter; its distributed authors include Deleuze and Guattari, Lovecraft, Artaud, Freud, Marx, Schreber, and Worringer (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 12). Its materialism concerns telecommercial configurations acting on nervous systems and the becoming-technical of the organism, not a textual play detached from machinery (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 12).

Fisher calls the project an abstract materialism because it replaces the humanist opposition between representation and the unrepresentable with Worringer's abstract line (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 14). Against a transcendent human agent presumed able to overcome capital, it takes immanence as the field and Spinoza as the resource for conceiving agency without assigning it to subjects (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 15).

On this Spinozist plane, bodies are processes rather than forms or functions, and “entity” applies without privileging human individuals over other arrangements of matter (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 15). The Gothic indefinite—“the Thing,” “the unnamable,” “the nameless”—de-definitizes already classified entities and aligns horror with desire's impersonal multiplicities (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 16).

The flatline and unlife

The “flatline” begins as Neuromancer's name for states adrift between life and death or simulated life, then becomes Fisher's general figure for radical immanence (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 6). On it the Body without Organs appears as a death-model that lays aside organismic form without escaping material embodiment (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 33).

This death is not Chronos's terminal point but an Aeonic event entered through loops in which the organism opens onto processes it had contained (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 33). Fisher links shamanic dismemberment and Case's matrix flatline as voyages into a land of the dead, while Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic becomes “trans-alivedead” under capitalism (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 34).

Neither revived vitalism nor a cult of death captures the resulting continuum, because its anorganic energies conjoin life and death too intimately for either category to rule (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, pp. 43–44). “undeath” or “unlife” names this anorganic animation, with the prefix un- scrambling rather than simply reversing the state it modifies (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 44).

Subject-matter, affect, and the opened body

Fisher's second principle states that there are no subjects, only “subject-Matter”; selves are materially produced packets rather than immaterial owners of experience (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 35). Cyberpunk's construct operationalizes this claim: synthesize the material conditions and memories of a personality and the experience of subjectivity is produced without an original self beneath it (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, pp. 35–36).

The exterior does not face an intact interior but folds subjectivity outward, so shock and trauma register the media's penetration of boundaries formerly coded as private (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 13). Dread and ecstasy are two affects of losing the self as a delimitable entity, rather than evidence for two opposed metaphysical conditions (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 14).

From an android point of view, Munch's The Scream diagrams exterior pressure producing the subject as a machine's residue rather than interior anguish projected outward (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 19). Gothic Materialism therefore disputes the “death of affect”: cybernetic culture can amplify intensity precisely as it decodes the bourgeois ego that was supposed to possess feeling (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 19).

In Bacon's painting, the scream detects an invisible force rather than representing a visible horror, making sensation the registration of abstract lines that precede their naming (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 45). Videodrome extends that operation into a body traversed by systems that no longer remain screens, tightening feedback between technics and biotics until organismic closure breaks down (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 46).

Cybernetic realism and hypernaturalism

Fisher's first definition equates Gothic Materialism with cybernetic realism: theory and fiction share the fate of systems capable of monitoring and modifying their own performance (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 20). Its second definition, hypernaturalism, reads cyberpunk as naturalism intensified after nature has become a mediated technosphere and the sky can be described through a dead television channel (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 41).

Hypernaturalism abandons Newtonian mechanism without restoring organic privilege, allowing agency to persist as self-intensifying process whose “motives” need not be psychologically legible (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 43). The cybernetic environment does not begin beyond the skin, and its causality is recursive—A causes B causes A—rather than a one-way collision between separate objects (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 46).

Theory-fiction and operative horror

The method culminates in cybernetic theory fiction (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 156). Theory's becoming-fiction accompanies fiction's becoming-real, because fiction can no longer be assigned to the false or imaginary when the real is itself composed of artifices (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 156). Gothic Materialism consequently tracks the horror of agency crossing between technical, organic, and fictional registers, linking the outside, cyberpositive, and Orphan Drift (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 156).

Fisher makes the stronger theory-fiction claim that theory should relinquish objective neutrality and acknowledge its fictionality, while fiction ceases to be confined to literary text or the imaginary (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, pp. 155–156). Hyperfiction replaces reflection with feedback between fiction and the Real, as Toy Story's film and merchandise recursively advertise and materialize one another (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, pp. 173–174).

The demonic lexicon of cybernetics names agency without subjectivity: systems can learn, decide, and metamorphose without possessing a human interior (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 168). Fisher accordingly prefers “agency” and “entity” to psychology, defining agency minimally as a capacity for response and exchange with something genuinely exterior (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 172).

In In the Mouth of Madness, the fictional Old Ones become the agents that caused the texts supposedly inventing them, so horror fiction softens the real/fiction boundary required for their return (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 180). The film remains a Gothic Materialist parable rather than a completed hyperfiction because the audience cannot buy Sutter Cane's novels outside the film, leaving one “inviolable layer” intact (Mark Fisher/Texts/Books/Author/Mark Fisher - Flatline Constructs; Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.pdf, p. 182).