K Punk: classic or dud?

i quite enjoyed one of those insane comment-staged fights with carlin.
he seems like an interesting chap.

I wonder why he doesn't have the comment function any more. I find him one of the most interesting bloggers out there. Although I tend to let the Lacanian jargon wash over me.

duuuuuuuuuuuud.

Although I tend to let the Lacanian jargon wash over me.

that leaves the pooterish bile, then: awesome for you.

You seem to be following me around.

i mean ok, he could be well be a scintillating visionairy when it comes to fucking docotr who or whatever but since this is on ilm i refer to

- his godforsaken attempts to pluck stuff out of the pop charts for his dismal services (rihanna is an robot, fnarrr)

- hauntology etc, truly the most specious and intellectually bankrupt rearranging of a record collection i've ever witnessed

duuuuuuuuuuuud.

-- r|t|c, Friday, 29 June 2007 14:58 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

^^^ this

don't even know who you are

xposts

i mean ok, he could be well be a scintillating visionairy when it comes to fucking docotr who

lolololololol 8080

should probly mention that i havent read anything of his for a year, haha

but stop me if i'm wrong.

rtc otm, pseudo-intellectual bullshit of the first order.

i mean ok, he could be well be a scintillating visionairy when it comes to fucking docotr who

Are you talking about old-ILX here lol

He's had some interesting posts on Lynch. He was interesting on Joy Division. Not 100% sure about "hauntology", but since I haven't actually heard that Ghostbox stuff, benefit of the doubt. Not sure why the pseudo in front of the intellectual, why do you think he's a pseud (a term I find more used by anti-intellectuals than anyone else)

And all you guys who say dud, I'd be interested to know whether you read blogs (well obviously since you're conversant with K Punk) and if so what blogs you actually like?

Ban Zelda Zonk

OK, ban me. Bye!

haha oh yeah you know what his best, most awkwardest one was - the oedIpod!!!! classic

actually, didn't nick southall co-opt that one for a bit as well

I don't read him, or any other bloggers, but bccasionally I get linked to stuff he's said by people who know me and think I might be interested in specific ideas, and generally they're right.

x-post - I don't think so!

i used to read blogs. he is a classic pseud in that his ideas are all modifications of whatever hackademic gods he's worshipping to the thing in hand, and as with the bataille-on-paris thing on the reynolds thread it's ultimately a boring parlour game.

ok no you just quoted him

I did? When?

I really get into about one out of every five or ten posts, skim over a few here and there, and usually notice my eyes glazing over during most of the 'critical' talk over philosophers of the 20th century.

I had never heard the term "pseud" until I started posting on ilx.

I had never heard the term "pseud" until I started posting on ilx.

Were you brought up by wolves or something?

Huddled in the safety of the pseduo silk kimono.

Oh balls. Here's the rest.

Huddled in the safety of a pseudo silk kimono wearing bracelets of smoke
Naked of understanding
Nicotine smears, long, long dried tears, invisible tears
Safe in my own words, learning from my own words
Cruel joke, cruel joke

Huddled in the safety of a pseudo silk kimono a morning mare rides
In the starless shutters of my eyes
The spirit of a misplaced childhood is rising to speak his mind
To this orphan of heartbreak, disillusioned and scarred
A refugee, refugee

No, seriously, is "pseud" some british thing?

Not sure why the pseudo in front of the intellectual, why do you think he's a pseud (a term I find more used by anti-intellectuals than anyone else)

I have no problem with intellectuals, just with peeople who want to sound like intellectuals by smothering their analysis of Aqua or the like with critical theory speak. Being intellectual doesn't mean being unintelligible.

"Pseud" as in pseudo-Freud? That's hilarious. Of course he's not a pseudo-intellectual (incidentally, the last time I heard that slur it was used by Hannity against Hitchens - nuff said).

Ban Zelda Zonk

Zelda Zonk, just so you know, there are a lot of morons round here. But if you accept the stormy climate, it's all good.

'pseud' might be but 'pseudo-intellectual' seems like a fairly standard construction.

Of course he's not a pseudo-intellectual

he's pretty much the definish.

I really get into about one out of every five or ten posts, skim over a few here and there, and usually notice my eyes glazing over during most of the 'critical' talk over philosophers of the 20th century.

Yeah. k-punk strikes me as kind of an asshole (cf. Dissensus right before he quit) and possibly batshit insane to boot, but I like him anyway. I read his blog pretty regularly until it began to seem. ... predictable; I still find it really engaging, tho intermittently. Liked his writing on the Fall.

he is a classic pseud in that his ideas are all modifications of whatever hackademic gods he's worshipping to the thing in hand, and as with the bataille-on-paris thing on the reynolds thread it's ultimately a boring parlour game.

Hey, he's just DEEP INTO BATAILLE-LAND and is never coming out. I can dig it, sort of.

incidentally, the last time I heard that slur it was used by Hannity against Hitchens - nuff said

So what you're saying is that because someone called Hitchens a pseudo-intellectual, the term is automatically an off-limits slur?

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/soulseeking/no-music-day.htm

tsk i do feel a bit tainted with zelda's "anti-intellectual" jibe now. really i have no problem with his going pseudo-ott over stuff, the breadth of his discourse, his pretension if that's what you want to call it; save for the fact that i find his actual ideas just really quite barren and predictable

plus he's fostered this whole claque of similar bloggers that make it into even more of a parlour game shut-in

No, seriously, is "pseud" some british thing?

I never thought of that, maybe it is

really i have no problem with his going pseudo-ott over stuff, the breadth of his discourse, his pretension if that's what you want to call it

it's the way he uses it as a cloak to disguise the dearth of ideas which gets me - i am only ever able to tell when he starts writing about stuff that i know about though

k-punk uses 'anti-intellectual' a lot and it's lol-y mainly because his scope of what constitutes the, uh, 'realm of the intellectual', is so narrow. i have never, ever got the sense that he likes r'n'b or girls aloud or any of the other new music he writes about. i can believe he likes the smiths though.

I like his big attempt at consistency and systemisation. In the archives there is some brilliant writing on glam, postpunk, politics etc.

This hauntology stuff is like the systemisation overreaching itself and making do with the boring, comfortable Ghostbox aesthetic because it's so convenient for musing over. The results of these musings are completely palty too, it's so repetitive and never gets anywhere close to what it says it's doing.

The thing is, I can see he might be an intellectual you disagree with, or find his critical tools offputting, but I think it's plainly absurd to say he's a pseudo-intellectual, a pretend intellectual. He plainly knows his stuff and thinks about stuff and talks about it within an intellectual framework. Yeah, talking about popular culture within a Marxist/Lacanian/Baudrillardian framework is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, I'm not sure it's even my cup of tea. But it's not a priori pseudo-intellectual. As for dearth of ideas, come on.

Oh aye, I did quote him there, but that was on teaching rather than on philosophy, per se.

So what you're saying is that because someone called Hitchens a pseudo-intellectual, the term is automatically an off-limits slur?

I don't think k-punk is a pseud(o-intellectual) in the sense of not actually having read or thought about this stuff at length and in depth; it's just that he seems to be endlessly staking out and elaborating a position that is, among its other shortcomings, no longer at all fashionable.

(but was about ten years ago, woe)

i like k punk but spizzazz was more thought provoking.

Not really. That Hannity used it against Hitchens just proves that it's all too often used as a random slur against "real" intellectuals (I don't think many would argue that Hitchens isn't one - whether you like him or not). I'm all for its being used, but there's a time and place for it.

Fair enough, I'd agree that Hitchens may be a lot of things, but a pseud he is not. I'd stick by my assertion about k-punk above, though.

hitchens is not a pseud exactly, but neither is he an intellectual; he's a saloon bar ranter and formerly entertaining journalist.

I don't think k-punk is a pseud(o-intellectual) in the sense of not actually having read or thought about this stuff at length and in depth; it's just that he seems to be endlessly staking out and elaborating a position that is, among its other shortcomings, no longer at all fashionable.

Well, if one definition of pseudo-intellectual is staking out positions that are no longer fashionable, I'll give it to you!

my problem with reading much k-punk is that i have spent three years studying analytic philosophy and whilst i sort of decides that stuff wasn't "right" it has left me with a liking for clear argumentation. with k-punk it often seems to me he trips himself up over writing what essentially seem to be rather simple points. also i dunno how continental philosophy really works but some of the time he seems to merely use his chosen philosophers as appeals to authority, he could argue the point probably in more depth and more interestingly if he didn't just pull out so and so philosopher to "prove" whatever is the case. i don't read him that often tbh but his ideas seem kind of apocalyptic in a fashion i rather like but they lack urgency. it all seems rather remote compared to the fever of the likes of carmody and carlin but i guess they are doing something else altogether.

I like his big attempt at consistency and systemisation. In the archives there is some brilliant writing on glam, postpunk, politics etc.

i'd agree with this

also, this is as good a place as any to admit that while i don't reak kpunk much anymore, i'm well addicted to hyperstiti0n (highly highly toxic)

xpost : It's not MY def. of pseudo-i -- that's just why I think it's easy to call him that. Also, acrobat OTM re authority & apocalypticism.

i think 'pseud' usually *does* mean having done all the proper reading; in a way my problem with his corner of the blogosphere (and much of the academic world it's coming out of) is it's so relentlessly textual: everything is about connecting something some guy (badiou, zizek, baudrillard, whoever) said to certain cultural items other people have picked up on (grime, r'n'b, electropop). two fashions are being followed: blog music and philosophy. it's pseudy because it's a closed loop, nothing is produced, nothing is discovered; it's not specific ideas i disagree with necessarily, more the process itself. of course it's going to result in consistency and systemisation because the process is hermetic and won't allow any new or disruptive inputs: it all has to fit together. hence the overuse of the word 'precisely' (borrowed from zizek).

but some of the time he seems to merely use his chosen philosophers as appeals to authority, he could argue the point probably in more depth and more interestingly if he didn't just pull out so and so philosopher to "prove" whatever is the case.

A valid criticism I think, and kind of what I meant upthread when I said I let the Lacanian stuff wash over me. I think he does have some interesting things to say about a lot of stuff I'm interested in as well (Highsmith, Lynch, post-punk etc), but there's no need to appeal to Lacan or whoever to make the point. I guess I too find about 1 in 5 of his posts interesting (pretty good odds for a blog).

K-Punk hits:

Glam
The Fall
Junior Boys
Japan

it's pseudy because it's a closed loop ... the process is hermetic
OK, yeah, that's exactly it. Sometimes that kinda works for me, sometimes not. ...I can just about imagine a k-punk post on The Hermetic. Maybe there has been one.

OK, I probably wouldn't want to live and breathe the K Punk world. But I find it interesting to check in once in a while!

k-punk is the klaxons of cultstud.

(...)

carmody and carlin are quite good comparative refs to bring up. i've never had the foggiest about what carmody's been on about, but nevertheless (and it's something much more than simple zealot fever) he's always been exciting and original, and i've nothing but respect for him. even when he's covered 'herr westwood and dipset nazism' or something equally, blatantly wrongheaded

carlin less so; i guess he comes like the bleeding heart humanist opposition, but really he's much the same as k-punk, ying and yang. sub the 'discourse' for the 'fever' and you've got the same "wah wah robo-bjork is crying inside ;_;" predictable guff. composing 50,0000 page threnodies every time an album comes out just isn't difficult if you can really be bothered - ditto with whatever k-punk gets up to, to my mind.

it often seems to me he trips himself up over writing what essentially seem to be rather simple points

This is kind of the problem with a lot of philosopher name-dropping writing I run into, in that it either awkwardly rewords some basic premises or is so self-consciously "deep" that I have trouble finding the point. Ideally, using a philosophical stance as a tangent to analyze pop culture (or culture at large) is a great idea, but often it seems like they're just two points thrown out and the blogging just kind of hints at the connecting line.

If people cared more about the ideas and communicating them, than they did about knowing philosophers and academic terminology, the whole world would be better.

If people cared more about the ideas FACTS and communicating them, than they did about knowing philosophers and academic terminology, the whole world would be better.

-- Scik Mouthy, Friday, June 29, 2007 10:12 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

are you suggesting some kind of objective writing about pop music enrique?

yes nrq when what's being discussed are entirely subjective opinions on pop music, the FACTS are exactly what we should concern ourselves with!

xp

to be fair, k-punk is usually talking about political theory, really -- but um hang on no, there has to be some fact-content to criticism. ie 'how is this effect achieved?' is a fairly basic requirement. 'entirely subjective opinions' are best kept to blogs.... oh, i see what you did there.

my problem with reading much k-punk is that i have spent three years studying analytic philosophy and whilst i sort of decides that stuff wasn't "right" it has left me with a liking for clear argumentation. with k-punk it often seems to me he trips himself up over writing what essentially seem to be rather simple points. also i dunno how continental philosophy really works but some of the time he seems to merely use his chosen philosophers as appeals to authority, he could argue the point probably in more depth and more interestingly if he didn't just pull out so and so philosopher to "prove" whatever is the case. i don't read him that often tbh but his ideas seem kind of apocalyptic in a fashion i rather like but they lack urgency.

This is very otm for me, too. I studied a fair amount of continental philosophy during most of my university years as well some analytic, and without making substantive comments about either approach, I found the emphasis on clarity and precision in analytic/Anglo-American philosophy as something to really admire. Making your arguments as clear and transparent as possible is really a virtue in philosophy/criticism/anything, and the posts I've read of K-punk's seem so unnecessarily abstruse. I realize clarity can't always be expected in blog posts, but the points k-punk argues aren't so complex as to warrant such tangled prose.

It's a tough bit, though, because in philosophy you spend all day reading these mostly brilliant thinkers who happen to be completely terrible writers (Kant, Hegel, Marx most of the time, Lacan, Derrida, I mean these guys are truly awful writers. There are some exceptions of course -- Nietzsche is a great writer, I think, and so is Hume, Bertrand Russell, AJ Ayer. It's no coincidence that analytic philosophy takes so much influence from the last three I mentioned.)

It's fairly common, I think, for students of philosophy to think "well, this is just how philosophy/criticism is done -- the issues are so complex that you have to use complex language to describe them." Then these students grow up and become professors, and the tradition of bad writing continues.

with lacan it's supposed to be a deliberate tactic, the bad writing. must have been an odd translation gig: "make as inelegant as you can kthx".

I like him.

But that should be obvious. Cause I'm hoos and I like this kind of shit.

plus he's fostered this whole claque of similar bloggers that make it into even more of a parlour game shut-in

-- r|t|c, Friday, June 29, 2007 9:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

http://kinofist.blogspot.com/2007/01/man-does-not-live-by-revolution.html

Is that one article supposed to stand in for *everything* on *both* that guy's blogs?

I mean so what if it's curatorial or hermetic, is it so obviously ridiculous that people want to make a case for a particular aesthetic?

I agree that they could do to engage more with the modern world in a less dismissive way, but humble pluralism on the other side is just as bad.

that one article is on a collective blog that k-punk's involved in and is tied up with a film show that k-punk is involved in. it's a fair sample. there may be a case for the riefenstahl aesthetic -- i doubt it, tbh -- but owen's case for it is terrible. i hate the word 'curate', but that aside, there's nothing curatorial about plucking old films out of an old canon. is there any discovery involved in the enterprise?

He wasn't arguing for the Riefenstahl aesthetic, he was arguing (not very thoroughly) that it differs from leftist modernism, and that the two can't be equated, like liberal critics tend to do.

Is there discovery? Sure, within a narrow field. If you are interested in how the legacy of modernism might fit in with modern left wing politics, then these art history posts are interesting.

He wasn't arguing for the Riefenstahl aesthetic, he was arguing (not very thoroughly) that it differs from leftist modernism, and that the two can't be equated, like liberal critics tend to do.

i am unconvinced that anyone is 'equating' them but, y'know, it's not exactly crazy to point out the manifest similarities. he never explains what his modernism entails anyway. i missed the part about modern left-wing politics in his post but here's how i read it:

There has always been a desperation among cultural conservatives to find the missing diabolical link that ties all their hatreds together.

REF PLZ

In cinema, this role tends to have been played by Leni Riefenstahl. In her work, we find the quickfire montage and sharp camera angles of the Soviet avant-garde, the shadowy chiaroscuro and fluid camera of the German expressionists, and the fixation on mass gatherings so beloved of the Socialist spartakiada public festivals.

ALSO, NAZIS

“A modernism from hell,” Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones called Triumph of the Will, comparing it to Battleship Potemkin in a long think-piece published last year, and thus the sneaking suspicion is quietly implanted, that, irrespective of Nazism, modernism itself was always-already from hell.

UH.

Jones himself puts it as follows, “to survey the cinema of modernism is to recognise its affinity for political extremes, and to realise that we are the lucky ones, enjoying the cinematic echoes of Metropolis in the architecture of Tate Modern's turbine hall before going into the museum cinema to savour those shadows - from a distance.”

OK, JONES IS A BIT WRONG TOO -- IT'S RIDIC TO CALL 'METROPOLIS' MODERNIST, UNLESS HG WELLS IS ALSO A MODERNIST... BUT MAYBE MONOLITHIC NOTIONS OF MODERNISM ARE MAD GAY WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT.

The point here is not just a matter of taste or opinion about different aesthetic styles, but rather embraces the very idea of the aesthetic as such.

AH.

None other than J.G. Ballard himself has put this point plainly. “I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton,” he wrote in the Guardian last year, riffing off the V&A's moneyspinning (“Utopia soap! Only five pounds!”) exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World, “but I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry. Architecture supplies us with camouflage, and I regret that no-one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast, people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the National Gallery... Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us... Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature’.

JG BALLARD IN OTM SHOCK?

In other words, dehumanizing, unromantic and brutal, modernism failed to respect the frailty of human nature, to the extent that a human disaster then naturally followed.

I DON'T THINK SANE PEOPLE THINK MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE 'CAUSED' THE GULAG... BUT THE EUPHEMIZED "HUMAN DISASTER" HAPPENED DURING THE FUCKEN RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR.

“Death always calls on the very best architects,” Ballard darkly concludes, adding a note of the sinister to this basically conservative schema. Architecture is best left to merely adorn, tradition best left to be venerated, thought best left to be hesitant, and utopia certainly left always to be deferred.

WHY, WHAT ON EARTH COULD HAVE GIVEN BALLARD THIS GRIM OUTLOOK ON LIFE...?

This, then, against the background of the continuuing, pressing social imperative, to fall in love, or to put it another way, to breed.

"SOCIAL"

Elsewhere in his piece, Ballard alludes to the profoundly modernist environs of London Zoo, where last year, a guilty conservationalism, deeply unnerved by the Constructivist legacy left to them by Berthold Lubetkin and his Tecton architectural group, replaced the water of the penguin pool with woodchips, and moved the penguins to another location, in a desperate attempt to encourage them to produce more little baby penguins. So that now, under the impossible swoops and curves of the boards, a pair of porcupines sit disgruntled, contemplating their future, like a young professional, recently married couple, silently watching the news in their small ersatz cottage in some urban enclave somewhere, gingerly taking their first steps on the housing ladder.

PROJECTION MUCH

Dreary conformity, then or fascist death: such is the basic contemporary ideological ‘choice’.

OR DISINTERRING SOVIET AESTHETICS OF THE '20S, OBVIOUSLY

And yet, there are two telling moments in Triumph of the Will which resist the tedium of this trajectory, and suggest that the identification between fascism and modernism is not quite as clear as it is often suggested. These moments occur within minutes of each other, in the scenes shot inside Albert Speer’s vast, abstracted-classical Zeppelinfeld.

First, a distinguishing gesture: Hitler, alluding to rumours of disunity (specifically, the disunity that led to the murderous events of the Night of the Long Knives two months earlier) proclaims that the Nazi Party is, on the contrary, utterly solid. “It stands as firm,” he barks, slamming his fist down upon a stone, “as diese Block hier!” This apparent piece of pure political theatre in fact alludes to a deep ideological division. In response to “Der Ring”, the Bauhaus-centred, left-leaning German modernist architectural collective, the Nazi wing of the profession formed “Der Block”: fixed, where the modernists were dynamic, volkish where they were cosmopolitan, made for eternity rather than for a society in flux. Solid, immutable, fit to last to the end of the Thousand Year Reich. Riefenstahl’s lovingly shot stone incarnates this solidity.

OH MY FUCKING GOD

Second, an apparent blot on the copy: soon after Hitler reminds us of the Reich's firmness, the camera pitches up to gaze at the swastika-festooned tribune above him. Unmistakeably, running up and down it, is a lift with a cinematographer perched inside. Our attention isn’t exactly drawn to it, but it isn’t hidden either. What is happening here? Could it be that Riefenstahl is indulging in a kind of pseudo-Brechtian laying bare of the device? Are we being reminded of the construction of reality that lies behind all this?

OH MY FUCKING GOD

As it is unlikely that this was simply a mistake (it's all too meticulous for that) it can perhaps be seen as a signature, along the lines of Hitchcock popping up here and there in his films.

OH MY FUCKING GOD

After all, the construction isn’t really threatened by it: it doesn’t provoke thought in the sense of the modernist ‘making strange.’ Indeed, it doesn't really provoke thought at all, rather, seeming to serve instead an essentially narcissitic, parasitic, even idiotic function - like the’Hi Mom!’ of the US soldiers in the background of television news, undistracted by the destruction they’ve created.

OH MY FUCKING GOD. NB: EXACTLY HOW BORING IS THE NOTION OF "LAYING BARE THE DEVICE" AS MASTER-DEVICE OF "MODERNISM"?

The use of artificial light in this film is one of the elements that most disturbed Weimar avant gardists.

INTERESTING TO KNOW BACKSTORY HERE. I GUESS THEY WERE DISTURBED IN EXILE...

Riefenstahl's montage always takes care to emphasize electric lettering, ironically a technology pioneered in Germany by the Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn. He, of course, was horrified to see his creation used so powerfully by the Nazis, though, they did not, of course, use it on any buildings even remotely resembling his own. Notice the moment we see, lit up at night, the house where Hitler is staying: a shining swastika and a burning “HEIL HITLER,” beaming out from a kitsch set of tweedy Bavarian lodgings.

I'M MISSING THE POINT HERE

The asynchronic film sound advocated by Dziga Vertov and Hanns Eisler also finds a strange correspondent here.

EVERYBODY WAS ADVOCATING THIS BY THE EARLY THIRTIES, NOT JUST EISLER AND VERTOV.

The first quarter of Triumph of the Will is silent, with a tacked-on soundtrack, a glutinous melange of music and cheering, overdubbed onto it.

BIT LIKE IN HITCHCOCK'S EARLY SOUND FILMS THEN, ONLY MORE NAZI

What we hear is not what we see. No one speaks in synch until we reach the conference room: thus, we are given to understand the Nazi hierarchy of power amounts to an essentially natural one, with Nazi leaders in effect identified as the men possessing the most fundamental temporal fidelity.

"THUS" DOING A LOT OF WORK

The lovingly shot boys of the first quarter, gaily wrestling, showering, cutting each others’ hair, evoke the body culture of Weimar, a social trend also foregrounded in the only Communist film of the Republic, Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht's 1932 masterpiece Kuhle Wampe. And yet, again, despite this apparent similarity, a vital distinction pertains here as well. For all her jollity, with Riefenstahl, everything is much more stiff, sexless, ritualized, wholesome, and crucially, male, in marked contrast to the explicit feminist undercurrents in the earlier film.

OK

This last point draws attention to a wider historical division between fascist and communist bodies. As curious as it may seem, in the pre-1933 period even nudists were politically polarised, with Adolf Koch’s socialist naturists pitted against both the Free Sunland movement and propagandists for the “nordic nude” like Hans Suren.

WHY IS THAT "CURIOUS"?

Photographs of Suren and his beautiful boys immediately evoke Riefenstahl with their hard, glossy, tensed bodies. Think also of the sequence late on where, intercut with the speeches, we see a succession of gloriously cheekboned Aryan youths, staring forwards, shadowed via stunning chiaroscuro into angular abstracts.

For all her formal daring, the true relationship of Riefenstahl to the avant-garde, can be summed up quite succintly, in the seemingly endless parade of marchers that takes up much of the last third of Triumph of the Will. Germany, it seems, is on the move again, and the effect is either hypnotic, or utterly interminable, depending on your boredom threshold, or perhaps, your politics. In either case, the crucial point is this: here, whatever else we see, the cross-cutting always takes us back to Hitler, who salutes each new flank.

At one point it is broken up by percussive cannon blasts. At a similar moment in Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin, each blast leads to a chain of association, outside of the immediate subject along lines of thought and development. Here, each blast only returns us to Hitler.

OH SNAP, THAT'S COMFORTING

At another point we see a row of tanks, immediately followed by Chariots, carried along by galloping horses. Thus the mechanised warfare of Nazism, aligns itself ethically with the outmoded forms of the past. The technical properties of the State and the Director may be sometimes innovative, but in the end, the ideas they carry herald something far more atavistic.

JESUS CHRIST

1st I wasn't trying to defend that article.

It doesn't even try to say why constructivism is better politically (just thin refs to Brecht and montage). The anti-liberal bit is kind of lifted from Zizek, and he does that better.

There is much better stuff on 'The Measures Taken' blog, but if you are looking at it from a position completely hostile to the Soviet avant-garde etc. then I wouldn't bother.

in what sense was it an 'avant-garde', within soviet art? i am interested in it in terms of how it was interpreted as such in the west. the main theoretical problem so far as i see it is that the more you play the "avant-garde meets masscult" thing, ie "zomg eisenstein + disney1!!1!!", the more you admit that the two categories are severely wanting. or you would do if you didn't have an axe to grind... to me 'avant-garde' implies some kind of resistance, and not necessarily a leftist one. by definition, soviet state employees were not any kind of resistance. but generally that scene gives me the creeps, big time.

The constructivists were already against the categories 'avant-garde / masscult' all the way back then.

You can say they were disingenuous about it, but it was part of the rhetoric.

he's OK

i like k-punk a lot

k-punk is the klaxons of cultstud.

So, good then?

I think it's like anything else. If you understand what the person is saying it at the level intended then there is quite a lot to be gained from it. If you don't, then you might choose to find ways to assail it.

I'm sure there are people who would think that even the most pedestrian ILM thread is overly "intellectual". Even "classic or dud" is too much for some people's brains to handle.

BAN SAXBY D. ELDER

Ban the wisecrackers who think the "ban ———" prank is the height of ROFLness.

I sometimes read K-Punk. He has some interesting things to say, and talks about lots of music/lit/books/film that I like, but, more often than not, I disagree with his general point of view.

His whole political outlook seems to come from a very rarefied academic world that has little connection to what some of us might call "real life". He continually implies that the world right now is about as bad as it ever has been, and he seems to pine for the late 70s.

I find this to be very perverse and nonsensical, but then I live in middle class Austin, TX and everything here is peachy keen, so WTF do I know...

strung out on jargon/perverted by language/doesn't make a lick of sense

saxby's post was retarded, i'm not going to respond to that shit reasonably.

dude, you might have a real problem...

No shock to not get a reasonable response from you. I guess we can all look forward to a caps-riddled rant though.

I was actually keeping it pretty light. I don't really see what the big controversy might be (although some people might not realize that i was just kidding about the klaxons being "good").

I think it's like anything else. If you understand what the person is saying it at the level intended then there is quite a lot to be gained from it. If you don't, then you might choose to find ways to assail it.

is a remarkably lame attempt at pwnj. you could always engage with the arguments. or even say what you gain from it.

http://westvillage.punt.nl/upload/dec2006/a2112064.jpg

This is my reasoned response to this thread.

I like some of the writing he does for Fact Magazine just fine. On his blog though he does succumb to his worst tendencies - too much jargon, referrals to authority, confirmation bias, and ideas cloaked in lit-speak. Also, the Hauntology line he and Reynolds have been pushing is a little too precious for my taste. It's like he and Reynolds are looking for sounds or movements on which to hang their pet ideological baggage. Death of music, well maybe, but often he seems ignorant of the historical antecedents. Hasn't canned muzak performing the same environmental function as the ubiquitous I-pod been around since the fifties? Only difference is the listener can select his own background noise. He definitely needs an editor.

ban "always already" plz

also, what moodles said.

i don't read k-punk much any more because as others have said, once you've 'got' his aesthetic you kind of already know what he's going to say about pretty much anything. plus i can't really be bothered getting to grips with any of his theory.

having said that, i still think lots of his writing about music is fantastically readable, and that when he wants to, he can pull of a great combination of the detailed sonic analysis (FACTS) with breathless enthusiasm. he has often made me want to rush out and listen to whatever he's writing about - which means i've listened to some stuff i don't like, but i guess he's doing something right.

I like some of the writing he does for Fact Magazine just fine.

pwnj = Piscataway, New Jersey?

Also, I was just keeping it light. I wasn't in the mood to get into all the bullshit you got into.

Ban me.

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/

Mentioning a working class background may seem glamorous or cool to some, but what we are talking about here are the very non-glamorous feelings of shame, embarrassment and inadequacy. Tone of voice is sufficient to trigger that feeling of inadequacy: that is partly the reason that the sepulchural tones of Radio 4 drive me into a rage, the plummy, affectless voices sending the implicit message that any excitation is some juvenile deviation from commonsense mundanity. (Owen is just developing a concept of 'mundanism', which does seem absolutely central to Popism and other variants of deflationary hedonic relativism. Notice the way commonsense mundanism is integral to ruling class anti-intellectualism - see for instance Pseud's Corner and ILM - with Oxbridge graduates pretending to be plain, common men who just don't understand Theory but who know, by george, that it's damn silly.)

lol

http://www.shocktees.com/images/film_logo/tshirts/large/tshirt-fl0103.jpg

see for instance Pseud's Corner and ILM - with Oxbridge graduates pretending to be plain, common men who just don't understand Theory but who know, by george, that it's damn silly

Is he right? never got the whiff of Oxbridge around here I must say....

xpost - well maybe...

My pro-bourgie mindset has been allowed to go on unchecked for too long. Kudos for K-Punk for having the balls to say something. Maybe he can then spam the e-mail inboxes for everyone on here again so we can all have our attention drawn to his point?

well, most of the freaky trigger gang went to oxford, is what he means. and um so did i. the idea that pseud's corner and ilm represent the ruling class is probably a bit of a stretch, though. perhaps i've been reading the wrong kind of theory.

it takes a bit of intellectual gymnastics to at once say that these oxbridge guys are clever chaps (ie they're "pretending" not to understand "T"heory), then accuse them of anti-intellectualism. personally, i do understand theory insofar as i can be fucked to. i'm not pretending not to understand it; just that what i understand of it i disagree with. and it's not just me, it's "highly regarded" top-flight marxists who i agree with.

it's not really about commonsense things -- but bigger stuff like its attempt to do away with materialism (timpanaro), with socialist strategy (perry anderson), with the practice of history (e. p. thompson). those names tell you how old the critique of "T"heory is. zizek is some kind of postmodern, CGI version of the old leftist philosopher gods of the '70s, he's a tadpole.

i studied marx for a-level, marx at oxbridge, and marx since then. i don't think rejecting "T"heory can be equated with anti-intellectualism, and i also don't think "T"heory can be identified simply with marxism.

saying that notions of "the commonsense" have been polluted by capitalism makes sense, but it's bad reasoning and worse tactics to say "and therefore all commonsense is wrong."

well, most of the freaky trigger gang went to oxford, is what he means

OK, Thanks

Think k-punk is otm about class in the piece quoted above, whatever about the swipe at ILM

"Simply by pitching a tent on the lawn in front of the library and following a programme of collective auto-didacticism, the event posed questions about access to education and the possibility of anti-capitalist dissidence."

right, only... this wonderfully autonomous event was still held at a university and was organized by students. and presumably used the toilets paid for and kept in soft paper by the neo-liberal administration.

"Hence Oxbridge types will happily call themselves novelists even if they have never written a novel, or curators even if they have never curated any events."

really?

"in my experience, so many members of the ruling class resemble Daleks: their smooth, hard exterior contains a slimy invertebrate, seething with inchoate, infantile emotions."

YAAAAOOWWWWW

One of the tensions that came up when I had Cognitive Behaviour Therapy was over precisely the issue: I refused to accept that I (or anyone else) had intrinsic value.

Dude sounds like he needs a visit to a little place called the "Watercooler Thread".

haha.

"But better that hell than the empty certainties of ruling class confidence."

if he wasn't a putz i would sympathize with him here. but to him, me going to poxbridge makes me "one of them" already. the hot news about the ruling class is that their famous confidence is largely a projection tied up in social ritual, same as it probably is in other classes -- certainly in the middle classes. most english people of my acquaintance have, in private, some kind of class anxieties. they also have other kinds of anxieties, believe it or not! some of them suffer illness and bereavement and loneliness, or so i hear. certainties, empty or otherwise, seem pretty thin on the ground.

but not to accept the intrinsic value of people seems far worse a view of humankind, to my mind, than the no doubt sloppy and neo-liberal and human rights-oriented view that everyone has worth and deserves universal rights, etc.

He seems like a very serious fellow. I don't have anything against what he's trying to do, but I often have a hard time following him.

"intrinsic value' and 'worth and (deserving of) universal rights' are a bit different, no?

you could consider it a desirable state of affairs for everyone to have a range of entitlements and duties in exactly the same measure, and this to be a baseline index of 'social worth' and still consider 90% - or even 100%- of people to have no 'intrinsic value'

xpost

why would you want that outcome if you didn't think people had intrinsic value? i said i thought everyone had worth, which is just a synonym for value here. i get that some people are keen on taking the moral imperative out of left-wing politics.

http://www.qwantz.com/comics/comic2-748.png

rofl

y know i'm kinda glad he has control of a blog rather than my local council

why would you want that outcome if you didn't think people had intrinsic value?

Because you might think society would be more peaceful - and therefore more pleasant to live in for you personally - if you treated people *as if* they had worth?

i said i thought everyone had worth, which is just a synonym for value here. i get that some people are keen on taking the moral imperative out of left-wing politics.

Actually I think replacing politics - and justice - with a moral imperative or ethics can be a problem; relying on individual good will, rather than coherent collective action means solving a famine in Africa becomes a case of appealing to the good will of first world citizens, rather than collective action by the people immediately affected

k-punk don't give a fuck

xpost

no, i don't think that follows. why should a moral imperative be linked to individual action (let alone good will, which is another thing)? 'solving' famine is a) in everyone's interests b) a moral imperative.

but it's also a practical problem, and of course acts of individual first-world citizens won't do much on their own. on the other hand, other first-world citizens willing collective action by africans won't achieve anything either.

i have little clue 'what ought to be done', but without the moral imperative, without the idea that the lives of africans have intrinsic value, what else is there? to value collective action *in itself* seems odd.

why should a moral imperative be linked to individual action (let alone good will, which is another thing)?
Fair point. I don't think it should, but was assuming you were connecting the two - bad argumentative strategy

I think he likes the idea of music more than the music itself...

...like that ghostbox haunty thing or kode9

sorta nice concept but the tunes just arent that flash...

Does k-punk seriously think that ILM is representative of "ruling class anti-intellectualism"? Or indeed of anything else?

That'd totally work if not for the fact that a bunch of classless americans wander around here

Results 1 - 10 of about 13,900 for "bored office workers". (0.12 seconds)

It's really not that hard to understand, you know.

That's me, alright!

I think he likes the idea of music more than the music itself

I think that's a truly awful thing to say about someone!

I like k-punk, although, like Enrique, I realise that I'm the kind of person who can never win with him. But he makes me think, and he writes some really good, more-than-readable pieces. He also makes me wish I understood a lot of the stuff he mentions in passing: I don't feel too intimidated and shut-out by what he cites and how he cites it, and that's quite a rare thing to come by, I think. He can be aggressively wrong and annoying with it (though there's others in his general orbit who are genuinely nasty, which he isn't), but in the main I fall on the side of classic.

there's a dissensus thread where they pick apart his aversion to marijuana and analyze it, if you want to see someone get defensive, it's worthwhile

intimidated is an interesting choice of word.

'chav' v 'eton boy as dalek'

why is one generalization akin to a hate-crime and the other is not?

Link to weed thread?

https://twitter.com/kpunk99

Meta

Miss this guy for real.

http://repeaterbooks.com/books/post-punk-then-and-now-gavin-butt-mark-fisher/

^^^this is something i probably need to read (if only to be cross how much i've been missed out)

RIP

Just saw that he'd died from Geeta's twitter. Fuck.

:O

i was at uni with Mark, and tho i don't remember us crossing paths i think it's likely that i did and i've just lost it along with most of the rest of my memories. which is apt i guess.

Fuck. Just read on Twitter. RIP.

Really sad about this. I used to enjoy being challenged by his blog posts, when I cared about such things. And I really did. And he was really unique.

Never got around to reading capitalist realism but I liked the Michael Jackson book he put together

I was debating the other day on whether to preorder his new book that comes out at the end of the month. I remember when Google Reader still existed and checking for updates on a handful of blogs was part of my daily routine, it was a good day when he'd posted something new. I'd usually put it to the side until I had the time to sit and give his writing my full attention.

Yeah I read his blog pretty religiously for some time. This is just terrible news.

RIP. Used to read his blog religiously, even if I didn't always follow/agree.

http://www.factmag.com/2017/01/14/mark-fisher-k-punk-capitalist-realism-has-died/

His wife, Zoë Fisher, confirmed his death on her personal Facebook page, saying he had taken his own life.

Excellent interview from 2014. http://www.neromagazine.it/n/?p=20620

Ahh fuck, so terrible to hear this. RIP

Oh no.

RIP, this is awful news. I always got a lot out of his writing.

that nero interview is good. if there are any other good interview links post them here. he was swell in conversation.

http://blissout.blogspot.com/2017/01/rip-mark-fisher_14.html

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=13999

https://itself.blog/2017/01/14/mark-fisher/

http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2017/01/negativity-not-pessimism-rip-mark-fisher.html

https://www.facebook.com/johnfoxxandthemaths/posts/1708297872529197

it's really striking how many people there are saying that reading his blog was a formative experience for them

Through twitter I have been surprised at the range of people saying he was a big deal for them. Capitalist Realism has made quite an impact.

I just read capitalist realism over the break. Good read, rip

xp it's apparently sold an obscene number of copies for what it is, into the 10,000s.

his writing on mental health in recent years was really remarkable.

This is a big blow. His blog was formative and inspiring for me as well, for both theory and his ability to weave (pop) culture into his ideas and writing.

Had just ordered his latest book.

David Stubbs remembrance in combination with a previously unpublished interview with Agata Pyzik:

http://thequietus.com/articles/21572-mark-fisher-rip-obituary-interview

owen hatherley:

http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/imet-mark-for-first-time-in-pub-in.html

It's not really the right time, but I wonder if he knew what effect his work had had/was having? What would that knowing have looked like, by which I mean, how do any of us measure what we've achieved? Ah, christ. It's such a damn shame.

That Hatherley piece is excellent, as is Adam Harper's.

http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2017/01/vale-mark-fisher.html

I am grateful to Mark for being one of the very first people to take an interest in my writing. By this time I had already started blogging, but it made me feel like it was something worth doing, that it could be made to matter. I am far from the only person who felt this way. Douglas Murphy: ‘Without him and the other theory bloggers, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to even begin writing’. Evan Calder Williams: ‘Reading k-punk was formative to me, to why I wanted to write online, in hopes that other people who I didn't know would stumble onto something I wrote and feel like there was a shared world that could be understood and fought.’ Owen again: ‘Speaking to Mark made me a writer who took seriously what I did, as he did.’ Comments like these are the constant of the tributes, in long-form or social media, that have followed the news of Mark’s death, and speak not only of his influence but also of an incredibly generous mind. As Juliet Jacques noted in another lovely tribute: ‘He introduced many of us to each other, and gave us the confidence to combine the cultural, personal, and political in ways that felt thrilling and liberating.’ I can certainly say that, while I never met Mark in person, it was through Mark that I met a number of people whose friendship and comradeship I treasure.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/news/45139/mark-fisher-1968-2017

owen hatherley's tribute is very moving.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue here's an example of that mental health writing i mentioned, difficult tho it is to read right now

Repeater Books have tweeted this link to a page where people can donate to a memorial fund to support Fisher's wife and son

https://twitter.com/RepeaterBooks/status/821697398833553408

I missed this thread bump until this morning. This news has broken my heart. Ghosts of my Life was great and his blog pieces on the Fall were unparalleled.

I wish he had been able to continue.

reynolds

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/18/mark-fisher-k-punk-blogs-did-48-politics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Waiting for what Fisher had to say is a sensation I recall only too vividly. I remember the electric anticipation of those early-to-mid 2000s mornings when the first thing I would do after making some tea was check whether K-punk had posted. K-punk, Fisher’s online alter-ego, was the hub of a blog circuit in which I took part, and which for a glorious moment brought back the intellectual fervour of the postpunk music press.

“It wasn’t only about music and music wasn’t only about music,” Fisher once said of weekly papers such as the NME. “It was a medium that made demands on you.” More than any other blog of that time, K-punk reanimated the polymath, autodidact spirit of the golden-age rock press, where music held a privileged status – but film, TV, fiction and politics were in the mix too.

Reading through these donations has got me tearful for someone I never met but wish I had. Some people have given hundreds others two or three pounds. Amazingly, it's at £18,000 as I write this. That's just incredible.

over £24,000 now, fantastic. considering how it had only been in the last couple of years that he'd managed to get full-time work teaching there's no doubt this was necessary and will be invaluable

I'm going to buy the new book ASAP

looks like the US release is Jan 31

amazon just sent me a message saying it's eligible for day-of-release delivery

alex niven:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/mark-fisher-capitalist-realism-vampire-castle/

xpost it's already in the kindle store so i'm getting that

Man, I would love to have seen where he was going with the whole 'Acid Communism' concept...

Man, I would love to have seen where he was going with the whole 'Acid Communism' concept...

Some hints here perhaps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deZgzw0YHQI

Albeit operating at a pretty generalised level.

I feel like the 'negativity not pessimism' phrase from Adam Harper's blog post is really key to understanding Fisher's whole enterprise - it's certainly the aspect that took the longest time to 'click' for me personally.

I don't remember starting this thread but I do remember reading a lot of K Punk about a decade ago and I exchanged a few emails with Mark. A lot of his cultural obsessions were mine too and I was intrigued by the hauntology concept.

Capitalist Realism was really good although perhaps a bit overtaken by events now. We longed for the end of ne-capitalism but little did we know that it would be replaced with something even worse.

Very sad to hear of his death, and with his insistence that personalising depression is capitalism's way of absolving itself of the blame, it's hard not to see a kind of world despair in his suicide, regardless of his personal circumstances.

RIP Mark Fisher, we need more thinkers like him

neoliberalism I meant

This was beautiful

http://siobhanmckeown.com/goodbye-dear-friend/

Didn't see this posted yet, but here's Fisher speaking about designer communism at Digital Bauhaus last year: https://vimeo.com/171577013

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article/in-memoriam-mark-fisher/

In fact, I think it’s that effort to establish a new radical public that will be remembered as Mark’s animating objective, and his successes in doing so which will be remembered as his greatest and most important achievement. It’s a common thread in his endeavors from the days of the CCRU, through his curatorship of the “Dissensus” internet forum (an early incubator of the blog scene, which I think was launched in the early 2000s), up to his last activities of recent years. His books were as much as anything adverts for the very idea of critical thought, aimed mainly at an audience that had no prior access to cultural studies or radical philosophy — invitations to a mass of often isolated and oppressed individuals to come and join a great community of liberated thought.

longer version of LARB's jeremy gilbert entry here: https://jeremygilbertwriting.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/my-friend-mark33.pdf

at least i think it's longer, i only checked very quickly: i don't agree with all of it but as well as being very personal and affectionate it's good on some of the flaws in MF's thinking and approach as it evolved

(tho much too uncritical, as everything i've read has been, on his music-writing and thinking, which is absolutely his weakest work -- tho of course also the area i am going to be most territorial about) (one day i might write this up, but not without a lot of thought and self-examination)

we'd kind of fallen out, not bitterly but it felt a bit irreparably, for reasons it seems otiose to rehearse here and now… i've thought about him every day since he died

i should read (and reread part) of that when home from work

on a related note, i was especially queasy at the idea of a need for "left accelerationism" someone was arguing for on twitter the other day. just, no

http://blissout.blogspot.com/2017/10/leaving-some-signs-now-legend.html

In a way, it's a shame Burial stopped doing the interviews - he was almost born to do them, even more than make music! He's better at describing his own music and motives than any of his critics, except K-punk himself. I remember Mark telling me after he'd done the interview that he couldn't believe his own ears - the stuff that Burial was coming out with was so poetic and evocative, too good to be true almost. A dream of an interview. Anwen Crawford told me of a similar experience: as I recall it, it was like she was hypnotized, sent into a trance by his voice over the phone. But at same time he was completely real and genuine - somehow down to earth and an ethereal being floating out there at the same time....

pete wolfendale

https://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2017/12/22/transcendental-blues/

When I found out Mark Fisher had finally been cornered by the black dog, I was standing at a bus stop on a chill morning in Ryhope. I could see the sea from where I was, and I could hear the pain in my friend’s voice, but I couldn’t connect with either of them. I couldn’t connect with anything. My life had unravelled around me. I’d recently admitted to myself and others that I couldn’t return to my postdoctoral position in South Africa. I couldn’t write or read. I couldn’t even understand my own work. I couldn’t enjoy anything. Not music. Not food. Not the morning sea. I could barely stand to be in the same room as people who cared about me. All because I was being chased by the same black fucking beast.

I was dragging myself out of bed every morning and walking a tooth grinding forty-five minutes to the nearest swimming pool in order to get the thirty minutes of exercise that was supposed to keep the beast at bay. The path follows the route of an old colliery railway line, over a bridge my great-grandfather helped build more than a century ago. Every day, once on the way there, and once on the way back, I’d think about throwing myself off of that bridge. It would never quite rise to the level of volition. I could consider the burdens I’d lift from others, the anxieties I’d finally be free of, even the bleak poetry of it. What I couldn’t do was ignore it. This was the first time this had ever happened to me.

I couldn’t process the significance of Mark’s death. I was too numb. Deep depression washes all the colour out of the world, turning the contrast down until you can’t tell the difference between real loss and mundane misery. It’s leaked in slowly, bit by bit over the last year, as I regained enough sensitivity to properly feel it, and enough understanding to properly mourn it. It’s the sort of thing you get periodically reminded of, discovering new layers of response each time, be it wistful sadness or blistering anger. I don’t think this process is finished, it won’t be for a while, but I hope that writing this post will help it along. Back then, there was one meaningful signal that cut through the depressive noise: this fucking thing shouldn’t have been allowed to take him from us, and I shouldn’t let it take me too.

...

For the moment, I want to pay my respects to Mark through pale imitation. I want to talk about my mental health and what it means. Mark eloquently explained the difficulty of being public about depression, and how secrecy can eat away at you when you’re in its grasp. As I’ve slowly come back into the light, I’ve tried to be open about it, but I haven’t been as open about it as possible. This is an attempt to do that in such a way that it can’t eat away at me the next time I’m lost in the dark. In case the introduction wasn’t sufficient warning, this is going to get personal. It’s also going to be long, and in some parts technical and wildly speculative. If you don’t want any neuroscience, skip §2.1, if you don’t want any logic skip §3.2, and if you don’t want any computer science, skip §4. I’ll reference some of this in the conclusion, but you should be relatively safe.

http://thequietus.com/articles/23832-take-care-it-s-a-desert-out-there-in-memory-of-and-for-mark-fisher-the-caretaker

https://ninapower.net/2018/01/13/in-memoriam-mark-fisher-january-13th/

i think one of the people in that picture round the tree might be me!

I've just finished the Red Riding quartet and have been re-reading Mark's writing on Peace (on the blog and in Ghosts of My Life), which is patchy ad brilliant in all the usual ways. It led me to a bunch of places (Owen Hatherley's blog, Padraig Henry's blog, various excellent Peace interviews) and christ do I mourn the passing of that little milieu and its world of possibilities. Has it simply ceased to be, become more diffuse, or is it happening somewhere, and I'm missing it?

it still just-about exists but yes, it's quite diffuse now -- i guess repeater books is its central nexus if anywhere, but no, it has no real conversation space now*. ppl now have jobs and families, and various sharp political splits have taken their toll (i'm on-line acquaintances with a number of people who have become mutual foes -- of one another not me -- and will i imagine never speak to one another again).

*actually someone recently told me that dissensus also still rumbles on but i haven't checked

this has been interesting reading
I always assumed this was a thread about Korean punk rock

It isn’t?

I always assumed this was a thread about K records K Punk imprint

^That’s what I assumed when I clicked just now

so glad NRQ and Dom are gone

For real

Wow, hadnt known he passed away. Ive been a big admirer of his article on the "pulp modernism of The Fall", for years now. Reread it a few times. Great stuff indeed! Think i will imagine him badgering old man MES with his theories, in the great hereafter. RIP.I will miss them both.

yeah.

with regard to what mark s said about beefs you'd have hoped that one good thing that could have happened after mark f's death is that people would put those behind them and moved on.

xpost

I was with a friend on Saturday who teaches at Goldsmiths and he intimated that part of the issue with Mark was that Gs were wary of legitimising his research and kept him on a part-time contract, accordingly. Which is kind of staggering, but makes sense all the same.

Which specific aspects?

I'm not sure of the specifics. The intimation was more a general response to his writing, ideas and research. It does sort of make sense from an academic institution, I suppose, but it looks more short-sighted by the year. And what it must have done for a general sense of precarity is immeasurable.

An article by? about? with? How To Dress Well, in which they mainly talk about Mark Fisher

https://www.talkhouse.com/how-to-dress-well-on-mark-fishers-theory-of-capitalist-realism/

jeremy gilbert and pals have released a mark fisher-inspired podcast abt radical/leftist culture

https://soundcloud.com/novaramedia/acfm-trip-1-out-of-the-box

Interesting - will have a look.

I'd like to read a few reviews of the book.

there's one in the wire by some fool

lol I need to get myself to an actual shop that stocks it.

I was just chatting the other day about how (as someone who was addicted to checking the blog bitd) his recent semi-lionisation seemed to come out of nowhere - this is a case of me not being switched on probably. Anyway there is never enough talk about how classic it was when he would call ppl “smugonauts”

I fell asleep while reading the new anthology and had unsettled, f-ed up dreams. Serves me right.

Kinda always wanted him to do more dialectical-ish historical accounts on popular music culture (modern, post-modern, post-post-modern type of deal) instead of so much personal critique, much of which I found a bit contrived. The hauntology stuff is underrated, though.

Also, what does the opening statement of this thread mean?

start of this thread is relatively scathing

<3

aye <3

Otm

Hold your loved ones close, believe in a better world, read loads of k punk pic.twitter.com/ojKmghKBCr

— Ellie Mae O'Hagan 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@MissEllieMae) January 13, 2019

i love the sentiment of that quote but it badly needed an edit to trim it down :(

booooooooo

xp fair

i love you, k-punk but that quote is so garbled i'm amazed that someone thought it should go on a wall.

"we can have better things and the people who tell you otherwise have reasons"

i love the sentiment of that quote but it badly needed an edit to trim it down :(

i love you, k-punk but that quote is so garbled i'm amazed that someone thought it should go on a wall.

http://mattiswiedmann.co.uk/how-many-have-we-lost-due-to-our-failure-to-treat-them-as-comrades/

The main takeaway from the lecture was an emphasis on the importance of comradeship. How many have have we lost due to our failure to treat them as comrades? This does not mean, as Dean emphatically said during the Q&A, that justice for wrongdoing goes out of the window, merely that it is important for us to acknowledge that people change, and that we should be more willing to allow people a path back to the movement, not to simple “cancel” individuals for good once they say something slightly out of line, the credo of the twitter call-out, the social media whirlpool of knee jerk and absolutist moral judgements which forms the heart of so much modern politicizing.

It was stirring stuff, despite her concession that her deeply apocalyptic framing of capitalism may not have made anyone feel good about themselves, and the lecture left off on distinctly positive sentiments. It may have been divisive to some, but the message of comradeship, of abstract political belonging, is one that feels apt to any emancipatory desire, for how can we hope to get anything done if we hole up inside our cocoons, so assured of our importance as individuals? To create we must act, to act we must think we act, and to act and think effectively we must think and act relationally. We must in Spinozist terms generate encounters of joy, and to do this we must work together, as Comrades, not as the mythic hero acting alone to save the planet. For the collective is the embodiment of action, the action of embodiment. It seems like a painfully obvious point, but it is when we act for and with others that may reach for the communist horizon and find our way out of the murk of Capitalism.

The above K-Punk quote seems a bit overtaken by events now. I think he originally applied it to neo-liberalism, and how neo-liberal capitalism presented itself as some sort of "natural order". Of course, in the brexit/trump era, we're seeing neo-liberalism replaced with something even worse

https://k-postpunk.blogspot.com/2019/01/and-jesus-said-follow-me-and-i-will.html

an epigone! bloomian!!!

Neoliberal capitalism still positions itself that way tbh

His ideas of cyberspace-time and the dominant mood of modern capitalism being anxiety, not boredom as in the past, are beyond vital. I’m happy there is still such interest in his work.

excellent long review of the collected works:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2019/02/28/long-read-review-k-punk-the-collected-and-unpublished-writings-of-mark-fisher-2004-2016-by-mark-fisher-edited-by-darren-ambrose-with-simon-reynolds/

in my (not so long) review i also forgot to say "why doesn't this 800-page book have a fkn index?" even tho it is literally the book's biggest and most obvious failing

While some of the distinctive qualities of the blog are indeed absent, the book compensates for this by providing a clearer sense of continuity than is available from posts accessed individually via a web browser.

Show your workings...it doesn't sound like the collection is giving a lot more than what Capitalist Realism does.

Reading through the review I have a feeling of not wanting to read anymore around that brand of anglo anti-middlebrow culture like Joy Division/The Fall/Ballard/Cronenberg. It never reckons with the limitations that kind of escapism provided and the reviewer doesn't address how that stuff totally bypasses the younger left ppl he connected with.

all that stuff maybe not but KP also raves abt moloko!

i want fizzles to explain why the three-part fall essay is bad not good

i'm not sure i'd say it was bad not good. i remember reading it and thinking it was great that someone was going in deep on The Fall in ways that I also found interesting. There were things that I disagreed with iirc, but that may just have been hair-splitting. I'll give it a re-read and report back.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-necessity-of-being-judgmental-on-k-punk-the-collected-and-unpublished-writings-of-mark-fisher/

"The lack of index is frustrating"

k-korrekt as we used to say

also sorry, MF decided he liked coldplay and you have to also: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/001181.html

Reading Jenny Turner's piece last night and it was hard agree on his dismissal of Sebald.

I think this could've been reviewed alongside A Hidden Landscape.

I've also been reading around what Nina Power is up to these days and there is an added bit of sadness. The connections with Nick Land begin to get at the progressive and reactionary nature of this group and it's projects.

I think this could've been reviewed alongside A Hidden Landscape

SO DO I

I must not be looking right, but can't find the piece and playlist (?) on the site, even though Turner tweeted it should be there by now?

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6aoCiRc4psD2TV0KM1Y6EN

Thanks Ogmor

dare I ask for an explanation of wtf is going on with Nina Power?

Sebald is best read as migrant literature, with all the mythologizing – both positive and negative – of host cultures that experience of estrangement entails. His take on Suffolk is bound to be different from Fisher's, and to speak of 'mittelbrow' strikes me as an unnecessary dig at Sebald's German roots. Anyhow, I have nothing but respect for Fisher, I'm just not sold on the Sebald-as-reactionary trope – there are plenty of other factors to consider, including the generational one.

As for Nina Power:

https://write.as/7v8fbjq9ekoaxl3z

That letter is kind of barmy. Here's NP's response https://ninapower.net/2019/03/14/248/

Oh right, so I guess that's cleared everything up.

Hmmm, can't say I'm reassured by her using the "trans activists" dogwhistle or unapologetically attending a Women's Place meeting.

"Sebald is best read as migrant literature, with all the mythologizing – both positive and negative – of host cultures that experience of estrangement entails. His take on Suffolk is bound to be different from Fisher's, and to speak of 'mittelbrow' strikes me as an unnecessary dig at Sebald's German roots"

Agree the pun is weak but I think he has point on Sebald's lack of attention.

a weird argument i remember with MF -- on a vanished iteration of the k-punk blog in maybe 2005-ish, in the comments, and so i think doubly long-lost to web-rot -- was cheerfully throwing at him the criticism that he was terrible at dialectics. i forget even why -- it was probably a pop-cultural discussion, i never engaged him abt politics

anyway he came back (disarmingly in the sense that i had no comeback, and memorably in the sense that i knew there and then that this was a big thing to say, and never forgot it): "i'm glad i'm not -- dialectical thinking is a bad thing!"

well, it turns out -- i didn't find this out for years -- that nick land loathed dialectics, and he was still involved with CCRU at that time (and i don't think land had made his break for the grimmer neo-reactionary shores yet) (accelrationism was also a few years off). but the funny thing is -- as i realised when i was reading this book to review it, and as jenny t has much more space to say nore about it, he *is* a dialectical thinker, in the sense that he has two contradictory sides to his thought which he uses to work on one another. the gentle attention to small intimate subtleties and the world-bestriding cyber-amplified world of implacable historical momentum. he spoke both languages -- and they did operate on one another -- but i'm not sure how much he consciously decided to explore this as it was happening, or even (actally) how much he was aware of it as a forked tendency in him. war and scission were modes he chose, i think knowingly submitting to the flawed perceptions that come with them -- and they gave him his reach, but i don't actually think they were the best of him.

Is yr review online anywhere mark?

it's in the wire, so i guess yes if yr a subscriber and can access their archive but basically no

did zero get up to some more bullshit?

Could all those who continue to confuse @RepeaterBooks with Z*ro please read this note of clarification, and also share as widely as possible pic.twitter.com/7h5aNCYbRI

— Alex Niven (@Alex_Niven) June 5, 2018

(that tweet is old but was just retweeted by Niven)

I work in further education, like k-punk did, and I once printed a quote from one of his blogs and stuck it on all the noticeboards at work, because it described exactly our situation:
" lecturers are conscripted into performing endless bureaucratic procedures which and have nothing to do with their ostensible function (to improve teaching and learning) and everything to do with the concealed function of improving the representation of the college through the abstract mechanisms of paperwork and statistics. This has served to create a virtual college, which is prioritised over the real college in every conceivable way."

https://www.residentadvisor.net/reviews/24137

Since Mark Fisher's death in 2017, his acolytes have cemented his legacy in philosophy, literature and music. They've done so through anthology books, public talks and now, with the release of On Vanishing Land, vinyl records. The album comes courtesy of Hyperdub's Kode9, who has launched a spoken-word sub-label called Flatlines. The label's first release is this audiovisual essay, made in 2006 and exhibited in 2013, which Fisher worked on with the philosopher, writer and sound artist Justin Barton.

On Vanishing Land is a 40-minute narration of a walk Barton and Fisher took along the Suffolk coast. It also includes snippets from interviews they conducted that introduce themes of long-lost societies and the machinations of capital to the piece's main subject: the idea of the eerie. These voices accompany an ambient score that features contemporary experimental musicians such as Gazelle Twin, Raime, Skjølbrot, Baron Mordant and Ekoplekz. But unless you're familiar with the artists' hallmarks, it won't likely be clear whose music is playing when.

In W.G. Sebald's footsteps? Either way, I'm very curious to hear this, thanks for the link.

KP deeply disliked sebald, so no (but yes)

unless you're familiar with the artists' hallmarks, it won't likely be clear whose music is playing when

as a way of glossing "it all sounds exactly the same" this made me lol a bit

You're right, I hadn't remembered that. From the Wire:

Rob Turner writes of Mark and his hauntological partner-in-crime Justin Barton:

The pair’s wonky tour guide, shifting from nerdy digressions on Brian Eno to enthusiastic riffs on TV horror shows, is a reply to WG Sebald’s celebrated study of the same coastline The Rings of Saturn. In a 2011 essay for Sight & Sound, Fisher described that book as a trudge through Suffolk that entirely failed to look at the place, offering instead “mittel-brow miserabilism, a stock disdain, in which the human settlements are routinely dismissed as shabby”. Here, in apparent solidarity with the humans trapped in this realm, the narrator is gripped by the features of the landscape, reading lost poems of late capitalism in the stacked iron containers of Felixstowe terminal.

I agree that Sebald's Suffolk 'trudge' wasn't about Suffolk or that coast per se, but that wasn't really Sebald's point to begin with. Either way, I'm looking forward to this.

He is kinda right. Austerlitz > Rings of Saturn in my book. Though I must say, after spending a few days in Great Yarmouth this summer, it was kinda funny reading his description of Lowestoft. But also really harsh.

Harsh is ok, though.

Just listened to the record. It wasn't off putting - it was rather special to hear Mark's voice in this way - but as a spoken word album, well, it is what it is, and nothing more: you hear it once, enjoy it, but probably will never listen to it again. I hate that this is how it goes, but it is how it goes.

I've been really enjoying On Vanishing Land and have listened to it repeatedly. It reminded me a bit of Patrick Keiller's films, Robinson in Space particularly.

RIP Mark Fisher on the anniversary of his death. I taught Capitalist Realism this fall, and was pleasantly surprised how much students connected with Fisher's ability to connect the ongoing crisis of capitalism with depression and anxiety. He saw something.https://t.co/vONLSBLuSA

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 13, 2020

I liked him as a lecturer.

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/mark-fisher-blogosphere/

:(

man, really feels like these trajectories have sped right up pic.twitter.com/j2ZV0G2ESf

— michael (@Sisyphusa) July 6, 2020

nina power is now writing in the telegraph about cancel culture

lol, didn't click yr link before posting

honestly fisher would have been on her side

this isnt a big development, nina has been on youtube with some very dodgy people over the last couple of years, she always has that look on her face where she's just said something a bit naughty,

only a finite amount of books you can read in a lifetime, and an infinite amount of tedious and horrible writers!

^^^ truth.

Still working my way through “Capitalist Realism,” so grateful for his provocations. https://t.co/N19DxsR7Dp

— Zoé (@ztsamudzi) July 12, 2020

https://crackmagazine.net/2023/01/kode9-releases-previously-unheard-conversation-with-mark-fisher/

Kode9 has shared a previously unheard recording of a conversation between himself and the late Mark Fisher, 6 years after his passing. The recording is from a conversation between the producer and theorist from 1998.

According to a note shared on Kode9’s Instagram, the conversation “was the first of a series of recorded conversations whose aim was to explicate/clarify/transmit the embryonic mythos.”

He continued: “Due to the mnemonic fade and/or nonrecovery of other minidiscs, it is unclear whether subsequent recordings existed”.