Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction
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F L A T L I N E C O N S T Flatline Constructs: R U C Gothic Materialism and T S Cybernetic Theory-Fiction Mark Fisher Forward by exmilitary Flatline Constructs Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction Mark Fisher Forward by exmilitary Exmilitary Press New York, New York Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, Mark Fisher ISBN 978-0-692-06605-8 (print) Contents Forward i Introduction 2 Screams_Screens_Flatlines: Cybernetics, Postmodernism, 11 and the Gothic How an Android Must Feel — Cybernetics, Postmodernism, Fiction — Flatlines — Constructs — Second Naturalism Body Image Fading Down Corridors of Television Sky: 49 The Media Landscape and the Schizophrenic Implosion of Subjectivity Te Body without Image — Te Body without Organs and Intensive Quantities — Intensive Voyages and Cyberspace — Te Mediatized Body — Jumping out of our Skin — From Narcissism to Schizophrenia — Stim- ulating the Gothic Body: Videodrome — Tactile Power — Te Atrocity Exhibition — Atroci-TV — Catastrophe Management — Beyond the Pleasures of the Organs Xeros and Xenogenesis: Mechanical Reproduction 98 and Gothic Propagation Let Me Tell You About My Mother — Te Simulacrum’s Revenge — Sam- uel Butler and Surplus Value of Code — Nuptials Against Nature: Sorcery and propogation — Te Wasp Factory: Neuromancer — Capitalism and Isophrenia: Ashpool — Wintermutation: Neuromancer as Sorcerous Narrative Black Mirror: Hypernaturalism, Hyperreality, 138 and Hyperfction Never Mind Metaphor — Borges Doesn’t Make it into Cyberspace — Hyperreality and Postmodernist Fiction — Social Science/Social Science Fiction (How the True World Became a Simulation) — The Decline of the Shadow (or, the End of the Marvelous) — Mechanism and Animism (or, Gremlins in the Hyperreal) — Capitalism as Toy Story: Hyperfction, Strange Loops and Rhizomes — A Closing Parable: Hyperfction and In the Mouth of Madness Forward by Mark Fisher clicked send in 1999. The unpromising year - of forecasted occurrences, appearances and happenings - hosted the reception of his PhD dissertation at the University of Warwick - a site notorious today for a select cohort and non-tradition that Fisher continued to unearth and fabulate until his death last year. The disclosures of Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction are manic, stimulative and depressive; a glimpse into a previous and insular era of f ction and theory that was, to be thought of, at its peak in the 1990s and yet colossally archaic in 21st century hindsight. Hysteria of the year 1999, and Y2K as a foundational hyperstitional event, should come at no surprise as a contagious and memetic inspiration for cyberpunk theory-f ction. The chronological prophecy from 19991 to 2000 is either entirely a fabrication suspect to illusions of ends or an underlined portrayal of the ongoing climatological yet air-conditioned disaster in progress both hiding the conceit that contemporary (of Fisher’s time and ours) culture is a ruinous disaster, vacuously invaluable. Optimistic postulates to the contrary are relapsed simulations of Minervian owls, serpentine coils, twittering birds, redemptive angels facing forward. Fisher never printed Flatline Constructs; it remained dispossessed from any material form. But, it lied archived and formatted for anyone’s immediate search, side by side with the many web 1.0 radical informational hubs as it still 1. November 1999: Anarchists in Seattle spread over crowning downtown accomplishments of Empire and globalism, broadcast live from the select Seattle public broadcast stations with astonishment. Anarchists in bloc ripping concrete from the pavement, f nding nothing beneath but a portability and effective weapon. Welcoming to the new millennium of trade, vandals confront corporate downtown properties. Beneath the pavement, the street - a site of commerce and logistics to be blocked off, partitioned by formations in black. Delegates abandoned their hotels, police cordon the intersection, the New York Times writes an article, then apologizes for fucking up the story. The medium rebels against the real event, amplif ed and jacked straight into the war at home; an accident in coverage, a coincidence in public relations that lead our favorite acronyms (CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS) to air it vertically central in the news cycle for 48 hours. Widely seen as the f rst time domestic implications of media as confused, the non-gulf war scenario where its oil and libido on the mind - these are American citizens throwing “molotov cocktails” (NYT) at police. For maybe the last time, the protesters were correct in saying the whole world was watching, by accident. ii Flatline Constucts is: https://web.archive.org/web/2008032501 3155/http://www.cinestatic. com/trans-mat/Fisher/FCcontents.htm. The hyperlinks fowing outwards from the dissertation directed readers into a rhizomatic network specifc to the lo-f blogosphere of the early 2000s. The production and circulation are not afterthoughts of the work or the text, added hermeneutic suspicions, but central and formative conditions of its own readership. Against the ideological claims of more mainstream cyberspace advocates, Fisher (and his hypertext) knew that the last frontier of emancipatory potential was in cyberspace. The next colonization after globalization, the proverbial “end of geography,” positioned in the wild west of RealMedia radio streams, IRC, listservs, blogroll-communes of cultural critics. This is why Fisher’s optimism is not: restless in the rupturing counter-hegemonic space ardently positioned against the capital-infused digital spaces of Silicon Valley - Paypal, Google, Microsoft. Now, Fisher’s counter-cultural diasporic sphere remains primarily in web archives, but the dream of fssure, free zones has continued: the internet underground - the dark net, The Pirate Bay, private trackers, Photoshop cracks, Megaupload, proxy sites, VPNs, pastebin, defacements of government websites, hackers of all kinds - persistently continues in the margins of an always more total presence of surveillance, social media and licensed content. Subsequently there is an archive of Fisher’s blog k-punk that circulates information and distributes content, and there is the medium that made transcultural and experimental demands: to be transparent, produce more, create new value, fnd the/a self. It should not be surprising that the emphasis on new ‘subjectivity’ that came out of a certain moment of post-structuralism is now the event horizon of silicon valley - post-humanizing toward and of nature and ostensibly not against. If there was a way out via posthumanism, it would have already happened, and Fisher’s Flatline Constructs demands to be read against this silicon-multiplier of neoliberal consent. Silicon, concrete, glass against the gothic, acidic: as much a fctitious plague as they are inorganic bodies, “we live in overstimulated times” (Cronenberg), abstract and intense - or as Fisher writes in his essay Gothic Materialism, “It is not a matter of speaking the unspeakable, but of vocalising the extra-linguistic or the non-verbal, and thereby letting the Outside in. Admit it, count zero, get out.” J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (the RIYLs are numerous...) are literary maps of these schizoid relations; mapping their coordinates as cartographies of control societies, revealing new dystopian constellations formative in the coming politics – or, civil war – of Thatcherite memorandums of the future alternatives. The constant refrain towards immediate connectivity prequels these dystopian fctions, which interlink a proftable imagination with a drive towards a distinct complicity of their own capture. This desert is thoroughly diagnosed and theorized in Flatline Constructs: and as this wasteland grows, tertiary apparatuses condense into insignia’s of the old, latent sequels and disasters. Sequelization processes Preface iii of recursive submersion proliferate the screen with a stale drama. And at this point in our current Disney nightmare it seems vital to hold this text, outside of the screen, in proximity with the apparent body, scanning its pages, creasing its corners, underlining. We hope the text becomes soiled, damp, torn - stolen even - that which underlies its fatality in the world and dispossessed immateriality. The redress for the retromaniacal nostalgia-machine requires the acidic qualities of a gothic contagion at the porous borders of entertainment. If the gothic is an instantiation of a certain oneiric uncanniness, the false promise of any aesthetic-transgressive diatribe empties out the aesthetic object of choice, becoming transparent, communicating ecstasy. This is the movement of the ‘avant-conservative,’ its unwavering repetitions - denoting stylistic differing iterations, yet continually regurgitating the same pulsating form. Some fnd it transiently impassive, others latently reactionary and others imminently intense - regardless, Flatline Constructs comments on the indeterminate tendency, the falling rate of aesthetics, which starts from the crevasse of the abyss and still looks down. Fisher’s work was devoted to explaining, disseminating and delineating the concept of capitalist realism through criticism, amounting to decades of k-punk, which typed lines of criticism on innumerable prolifc and mass-mediated trends, phenomena, events, etc. Claims made throughout Fisher’s most commercially