(Presented at the Accelerationism symposium, Goldsmiths: 14:09:2010) "Why political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would...| Tumblr
(Originally published in The Wire) Alan Glynn’s novel The Dark Fields, which was recently made into the film Limitless, is about a smart drug which optimises users’ cognitive capacities and enables...| Tumblr
(Originally published in Film Quarterly) “Can what is playing you make it to level 2?” asked Nick Land in his landmark 1994 on cyber-theory, “Meltdown” (Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, Urbanomic, 456). Ominous and playful, Land’s intuition that computer games would provide the best way to understand subjectivity and agency in digital culture was also the gambit of David Cronenberg’s 1999 eXistenZ. eXistenZ takes place in a near-future in which games are capable of ge...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Originally published in Film Quarterly) Dystopia has returned to cinema in three recent films - most spectacularly in the blockbuster The Hunger Games but also in two lower profile films, Never Let Me Go, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, and In Time, written and directed by Andrew Niccol. In these three films, class and precariousness are forced into the foreground. To be in the dominant class is, in each film, to achieve a certain liberation from precariousness; for the poor, meanwhile...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Originally posted on k-punk, 17.10.04) Danny Baker’s breakfast shows on BBC Radio London are delightfully and genuinely anarchic: unscripted, unplanned, interrupted only by the station’s de rigeur News and Weather slots (which, like the nagging awareness in a dream that you will awake, are irritating emissaries from the Real World which you must soon re-enter), the show is held together by the charismatic sorcery and joyful force of Baker’s cracker-barrel personality. Baker is th...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Presented at the Accelerationism symposium, Goldsmiths: 14:09:2010) “Why political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you, you have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged, smooth-skinned types, but also because you dare not say that the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage p...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Originally published in Dazed and Confused) “Is Nick Land the most important British philosopher of the last twenty years?,” asks Kodwo Eshun. On the face of it, the question might seem an odd one - Land only published one book, The Thirst For Annihilation : Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism and a series of short texts, most of which had a limited circulation when they first appeared. Nevertheless, Eshun’s question makes sense because that small canon of texts - which have been co...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Originally published in Kaleidoscope magazine, 2010) The first question is linked to my experiencing UK dance music of the 90s as a person living in a different country - via imported records and british music press - and one interesting thing was the idea of “futurism” that seemed to permeate the scenes: in terms of how the press presented the music as an area of advancement because made with “machines”. What are, if any, are the futuristic elements and aspects in UK 90s dance music...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Reflections on music and politics at the end of 2011 for The Wire magazine) When the Real rushes in, everything feels like a film: not a film you’re watching, but a film you’re in. Suddenly, the screens insulating we late capitalist spectators from the Real of antagonism and violence fell away. Since the student revolts in late 2010, helicopters, sirens and loudhailers have intermittently broken the phony peace of post-crash London. To locate the unrest spreading across the capital, you ...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Originally published in Visual Arts News Sheet, Dublin) “This isn’t just art that exists in the market, or is ‘about’ the market. This is art that is the market – a series of gestures that are made wholly or primarily to capture and embody financial value, and only secondarily have any other function or virtue.” So wrote Hari Kunzru of Damien Hirst’s work in The Guardian. I’m not interested in rehearsing here discussions of Hirst’s merit as an artist; what interests me inst...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
Miles Davis On The Corner boxset (Director’s cut of review originally published in The Wire) During 1972, Miles Davis began to play Stockhausen’s Hymnen on the cassette machine in his Lamborghini. On October 21st, 1972, he crashed the sports car. TheComplete On the Corner Sessions is a record of an era in which speed, technology, modernism popular culture shared the same crash site. The six-CD box set, which includes twelve previously unreleased tracks, and several not before heard in the...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
Radiohead King of Limbs (Originally published in The Wire) “Wake me up…“ slurs Thom Yorke on The King Of Limbs’s final track, “Separator“. Ever since Radiohead repositioned themselves (as an ‘experimental’ group), there’s been something very somnolent - heavy-lidded, cotton-headed - about their music. I have to admit I’ve sometimes found it (literally) soporific, and I confess I’ve never made it through Kid A without falling asleep. Radiohead come off like dream music,...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Originally published in The Wire) Adorno For Revolutionaries Ben Watson Unkant Press About halfway through this book, Ben Watson recounts a poignant and revealing anecdote. Watson has just delivered a paper at a conference in which he eviscerates an academic in front of her. Said academic walks out, but returns to denounce Watson for his “neanderthal Marxism.” Watson leaves, shocked, shaken but ultimately satisfied that he has disrupted the staid rituals of academia. “[It]’s the assu...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
Image for my contribution to Wyrd Tales 2. Available from here| Mark Fisher ReBlog
Wyrd Tales 2 launch| Mark Fisher ReBlog
Your work seems to have as much to do with poise as Noise. The sound has a very designed quality about it, and a tremendous sense of control and tension. I wondered if you thought that was a fair description – and if so, how do you go about achieving it? That relationship between chaos and control is most certainly at the core of what I am doing. The thing is, I get lost in music. When I find a phrase of notes or a rhythmic structure or stumble onto some golden combination of the two I ...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Originally published in Kaleidoscope magazine) MARK FISHER: Maybe we could start off by talking about the role of popular culture in your work. Why the focus on popular culture? MARK LECKEY: Popular culture is just things that are immediate to me. When I was in college in the ’80s, I found everything too detached or ironic, and I didn’t want to make work like that; I couldn’t make work just out of critical disinterestedness. I decided that I should use as material my own history and ba...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
I’m intrigued by the music that has shaped you. The mix you did for Exotic Pylon was made up of music that comes from an interzone between goth, Industrial and experimental electronica, all from quite a specific period: nothing before 1980 and nothing after 1988, and no dance music as such. Some of it - the Danse Society for example - is very unfashionable music that I remember liking in my youth; it’s quite surprising to hear this music exhumed again, especially by people I’m assumin...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Originally published in Sight and Sound) An ordinary looking man in his thirties is walking towards the camera holding a carrier bag. It could be you or me, and the streets he moves through, with their off-licences and corner shops, could be anywhere , too – most people living in Britain wouldn’t have to go more than a mile to walk streets such as this. Still, something is not quite right: his expression looks distracted yet also troubled, while the music, an electronic drone punctuated ...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
Crass The Feeding Of The Five Thousand (Originally published in The Wire) In his recent book Cool Capitalism, the cultural theorist Jim McGuigan argues that the concept of bohemia involved “more than a marginal nuisance to bourgeois society”. Bohemia proposed that, if art was to be valid, it must involve a “Great Refusal”, a demand for a completely alternative way of living. Crass very much belonged to a British tradition of bohemianism - in fact, they might be part of its last gasp. ...| Mark Fisher ReBlog
(Originally published in Visual Arts News Sheet, Dublin) “A salient feature of these riots,” designer Adrian Shaughnessy wrote of the recent disorder in England, “has been the fact that the main target of the attacks has been the shops of the major retail brands of British commercial life.” Writing on Design Observer’s website, Shaughnessy further noted that most of the outlets which were targeted – sports stores, mobile phone shops – “spend huge amounts of money on brandi...| Mark Fisher ReBlog