K Punk: classic or dud?

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.