K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) PDF
Preview K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)
k-punk Mark Fisher (1968 – 2017) was a co-founder of Zer0 Books and, later, Repeater Books. His blog, k-punk, defined critical writing for a generation. He wrote three books, Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie, and was a Visiting Fellow in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Darren Ambrose is a freelance writer and editor from the North-East of England. Simon Reynolds is the author of Retromania and Rip It Up and Start Again. k-punk The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004- 2016) Edited by Darren Ambrose Foreword by Simon Reynolds CONTENTS Foreword by Simon Reynolds Editor’s Introduction by Darren Ambrose Why K? PART ONE Methods of Dreaming: Books Book Meme Space, Time, Light, All the Essentials — Reflections on J.G. Ballard Season (BBC 4) Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan A Fairground’s Painted Swings What Are the Politics of Boredom? (Ballard 2003 Remix) Let Me Be Your Fantasy Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s “State of Emergency” The Assassination of J.G. Ballard A World of Dread and Fear Ripley’s Glam Methods of Dreaming Atwood’s AntiCapitalism Toy Stories: Puppets, Dolls and Horror Stories Zer0 Books Statement PART TWO Screens, Dreams and Spectres: Film and Television A Spoonful of Sugar She’s Not My Mother Stand Up, Nigel Barton Portmeirion: An Ideal for Living Golgothic Materialism This Movie Doesn’t Move Me Fear and Misery in the Third Reich ‘n’ Roll We Want It All Gothic Oedipus: Subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins When We Dream, Do We Dream We’re Joey? Notes on Cronenberg’s eXistenZ I Filmed It So I Didn’t Have to Remember It Myself Spectres of Marker and the Reality of the Third Way Dis-identity Politics “You Have Always Been the Caretaker”: The Spectral Spaces of the Overlook Hotel Coffee Bars and Internment Camps Rebel Without a Cause Robot Historian in the Ruins Review of Tyson “They Killed Their Mother”: Avatar as Ideological Symptom Precarity and Paternalism Return of the Gift: Richard Kelly’s The Box Contributing to Society “Just Relax and Enjoy It”: Geworfenheit on the BBC Star Wars Was a Sell-Out From the Start Gillian Wearing: Self Made Batman’s Political Right Turn Remember Who the Enemy Is Beyond Good and Evil: Breaking Bad Classless Broadcasting: Benefits Street Rooting for the Enemy: The Americans How to Let Go: The Leftovers, Broadchurch, and The Missing The Strange Death of British Satire Review: Terminator Genisys The House that Fame Built: Celebrity Big Brother Sympathy for the Androids: The Twisted Morality of Westworld PART THREE Choose Your Weapons: Writing on Music The By Now Traditional Glasto Rant Art Pop, No, Really k-punk, or the Glampunk Art Pop Discontinuum Noise as AntiCapital: As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade Lions After Slumber, or What is Sublimation Today? The Outside of Everything Now For Your Unpleasure: The Hauter-Couture of Goth It Doesn’t Matter If We All Die: The Cure’s Unholy Trinity Look at the Light Is Pop Undead? Memorex for the Kraken: The Fall’s Pulp Modernism Scritti’s Sweet Sickness Postmodernism as Pathology, Part 2 Choose Your Weapons Variations on a Theme Running on Empty You Remind Me of Gold: Dialogue with Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds Militant Tendencies Feed Music Autonomy in the UK The Secret Sadness of the Twenty-First Century: James Blake’s Overgrown Review: David Bowie’s The Next Day The Man Who Has Everything: Drake’s Nothing Was the Same Break it Down: DJ Rashad’s Double Cup Start Your Nonsense! On eMMplekz and Dolly Dolly Review: Sleaford Mods’ Divide and Exit and Chubbed Up: The Singles Collection Test Dept: Where Leftist Idealism and Popular Modernism Collide No Romance Without Finance PART FOUR For Now, Our Desire is Nameless: Political Writings Don’t Vote, Don’t Encourage Them October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder What If They Had a Protest and Everyone Came Defeating the Hydra The Face of Terrorism Without a Face Conspicuous Force and Verminisation My Card: My Life: Comments on the AMEX Red Campaign The Great Bullingdon Club Swindle The Privatisation of Stress Kettle Logic Winter of Discontent 2.0: Notes on a Month of Militancy Football/Capitalist Realism/Utopia The Game Has Changed Creative Capitalism Reality Management UK Tabloid The Future is Still Ours: Autonomy and Post-Capitalism Aesthetic Poverty The Only Certainties are Death and Capital Why Mental Health is a Political Issue The London Hunger Games Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era Not Failing Better, but Fighting to Win The Happiness of Margaret Thatcher Suffering With a Smile How to Kill a Zombie: Strategising the End of Neoliberalism Getting Away With Murder No One is Bored, Everything is Boring A Time for Shadows Limbo is Over Communist Realism Pain Now Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming) For Now, Our Desire is Nameless Anti-Therapy Democracy is Joy Cybergothic vs. Steampunk Mannequin Challenge PART FIVE We Have to Invent the Future: Interviews They Can Be Different in the Future Too: Interviewed by Rowan Wilson for Ready Steady Book (2010) Capitalist Realism: Interviewed by Richard Capes (2011) Preoccupying: Interviewed by the Occupied Times (2012) We Need a Post-Capitalist Vision: Interviewed by AntiCapitalist Initiative (2012) “We Have to Invent the Future”: An Unseen Interview with Mark Fisher (2012) Hauntology, Nostalgia and Lost Futures: Interviewed by Valerio Mannucci and Valerio Mattioli for Nero (2014) PART SIX We Are Not Here to Entertain You: Reflections One Year Later… Spinoza, k-punk, Neuropunk Why Dissensus? New Comments Policy Comments Policy (Latest) Chronic Demotivation How to Keep Oedipus Alive in Cyberspace We Dogmatists London Litened No Future 2012 Ridicule Is Nothing to Be Scared Of (Slight Return) Break Through in Grey Lair Real Abstractions: The Application of Theory to the Modern World No I’ve Never Had a Job… Fear and Misery in Neoliberal Britain Exiting the Vampire Castle Good for Nothing PART SEVEN Acid Communism Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction) Notes Acknowledgements foreword The strange thing is that I encountered Mark’s mind long before I actually met him. In a way, I knew him before I even knew of him. Let me explain. In 1994, I wrote a piece for Melody Maker about D- Generation, a concept-laden outfit from Manchester whose line-up included Mark. But I only ever spoke on the phone with another member, Simon Biddell. Because I was so interested in D-Generation’s ideas, it never even occurred to me to do the basic journalistic procedure of asking who else was in the group. So it was a full decade later that I learned I’d effectively written about Mark, when he shyly revealed this fact in an email to me. And sure enough, digging out the yellowing clip — D-Generation as “Pick of the Week” in the Advance section of Melody Maker — there was Mark right in the centre of the photo: his hair in a vaguely Madchester-style bob, his eyes staring out at the reader with a searching, baleful intensity. D-Generation were one of those groups that are grist for the mill of the music press, catnip to a certain kind of critic: the conceptual framing was piquant and provocative, the sound itself lagged slightly behind the spiel. Rereading the piece and listening for the first time in many years to D-Generation’s EP Entropy in the UK, it’s fascinating just how many of Mark’s signature fixations were already in evidence. There’s the centrality of punk in his worldview: D- Generation described their music as “techno haunted by the ghost of the punk” (literally, in “The Condition of Muzak”, which sampled Johnny Rotten’s Winterland 1978 kiss-off “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” and turned his bitter jeering laugh into a riff). There’s the love-hate for Englishness: hating the hale ‘n’ hearty, artless and anti-intellectual side of the national character (“Rotting Hill” sampled “Merrie England? England was never merry!” from the film version of Lucky Jim), loving a darkly arty deviant tradition that included the Fall, Wyndham Lewis, and Michael Moorcock (all referenced in D- Generation’s press release). There’s also early evidence of Mark’s virulent contempt for retro: “73/93” targeted what D-Generation dubbed the “Nostalgia Conspiracy”. And there’s even flickering ectoplasmic portents of hauntology, that twenty-first century current of music and thought and sensibility that Mark championed so compellingly. Beyond those specifics, though, it’s the structure of the encounter itself that is revealing and prefiguring. Here’s a music journalist (in this case, me) hungrily on the look-out for a group with ideas, and, having found one (in this case, D-
Description:The list of books you might like
