K Punk: classic or dud?

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.