K-Punk

xenogoth

looking for an exit
hi all. doing my periodic pop by the thread lol....

poetix and i made up. to be honest, the whole publishing-a-book-and-then-pouring-over-the-critical-response-in-my-lockdown-bubble sent me totally west and i'm really not proud of how i handled a lot of stuff -- here or elsewhere. i was not ready for the existential shock of putting out something so personal about someone so contentious but highly regarded and dealing with the consequences. i was expecting closure but got a load of other fingers stuck through the wound instead. i was naive, really.

anyyway, it's been a very weird few months since then with a lot less time spent online! that being said, i think there remains another mark out there who remains underappreciated and who falls between the gaps of his better known texts. i'll be continuing by vendetta to raise that mark up but tying that to my own experiences from three years ago is something i'm happy to leave behind.

re: the postcapitalist desire lectures that i saw got posted about in here -- the recordings have been floating around since Mark died but it felt like a good time to put them together and out in the world. they're not just a cash grab -- and all royalties go to mark's family anyway. i think they're important, if only because a lot of the assumptions made about what Mark was going to do with Acid Communism are made quite explicit in there. i've been quite open -- and gobshitey -- about how personally mind-numbing the whole Acid Corbynism thing was, mostly because it excavated everything that had informed Acid Communism and that Mark was talking about before his death, and then filled the husk with soft left cringe. that's an understandable sequence of events considering the phrase was a more or less empty signifier after the introduction was published but, hopefully, these lectures will rectify that.

it also makes good, i hope, on what poetix and i were arguing about in the first place a few months back. the introduction i've written connects the lectures to previous articles and blogposts Mark had written and which are already out in the world, and shows how it is very easy to track the development of his thinking after Capitalist Realism and get a sense of what Acid Communism was going to argue next if you know where to look. just a straight up archaeology that seems to have been inadvertently buried beneath the popular understanding of his "hits". i hope it'll provide the sort of clarity and objectivity that people wanted from my book about him but didn't find.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i have no interest in his insipid revisions of marxism to become an apologist for the labour party, which predated acid communism (let alone acid corbynism.)

Luke is right that he never liked black music and frankly it's weird how so many people rate(ed) him on here.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
"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."

Maybe not a pseudo-intellectual but a pop intellectual and being a popular intellectual is the antithesis of hardcore rigour.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I'm not an intellectual more an avant-hooligan, but i don't pretend otherwise, but i know what it takes to be an actual high brow academic intellectual, and in another life i could go there. Whereas Mark did end up believing his own superiority if you look at his posts from 04-05 here, but it wasn't the superiority of puncturing sensibilities, more just having read a lot, which will never cut it.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Well the popular intellectuals are the ones who can help connect the higher theories to those who may not be intellectually inclined, no? Do you think he succeeded there, or is succeeding still?

Pretty sure someone here pointed out that part of Fisher's accomplishment was his ability to express Deleuzian concepts in a way people could more easily understand. But then again, no examples come to mind, so perhaps I can't push that one too far.

edit: When I say "no examples come to mind", its more a testament to my lack of knowledge of his work.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Part of the reason Mark is interesting is that he's one of the first internet writers whose best work is underwritten, rushed, part of a wider conversation

yes, but like i never fail to say on here, he self-sabotaged it. I know you hold yourself as gluttonous and apathetic weed vegetated during that period, but that brute force or blithe indifference - telling him to join the communist party is exactly what he needed more of. He was notoriously prickly and needed some grounding in less suburban ethics. Part of Mark's appeal lies in appealing to those people who see themselves as beholden to philosophy as some kind of culturally elevated realm. I completely reverse this however, I am aware enough (like prynn) that philosophy was a johnny come lately, that literature and music are in essence the master discourse. or should I say, that discourse which encapsulates the collective labour of science, and politics - tekné as Greeks called Art.

Mark's problem was he had all the potential to become a great writer and squandered it in the service of not even the apathetic working class (that would have been a good thing, workers know politics is a mugs game!) but in the rehabilitation of countercultural authentocrats. But as @Matthew never failed to remark, his reading of counterculture was always quite rosy. Also, chief, when I'm back from Turkey I'll be reading your book, promise.

But yes, the important thing to note here is that counterculture by nature will never be concerned with the state administration of politics that Mark desired, which in any case needs private culture to perpetuate itself as the general will of citizens. And in this sense his project ended up returning to Rousseau far more than Spinoza, back to a social compact between administrators and followers. A true cold rationality requires that one accept that one will become histrionic when they are literally starving to death, not some kind of zen buddhist.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Well the popular intellectuals are the ones who can help connect the higher theories to those who may not be intellectually inclined, no? Do you think he succeeded there, or is succeeding still?

Pretty sure someone here pointed out that part of Fisher's accomplishment was his ability to express Deleuzian concepts in a way people could more easily understand. But then again, no examples come to mind, so perhaps I can't push that one too far.

edit: When I say "no examples come to mind", its more a testament to my lack of knowledge of his work.

Deleuze is more poetic than actually analytical. that is what makes him fun to read, but theoretically he's way too overrated. Like, a land tiller would not make rhizomes a significant plank of their theory.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
But as @Matthew never failed to remark, his reading of counterculture was always quite rosy. Also, chief, when I'm back from Turkey I'll be reading your book, promise.

not being deliberatly awkward/annoying but i can't remember saying that. it's certainly not impossible. i hope you enjoy the book when you get round to it mr.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
@thirdform are you saying his (deleuzes) theory is primarily useful to other theorists? Didn't want to assume that was what you're saying, but yeah I can see that.

Do you believe in any kind of layered buckets-handed-down-the-line dynamic here, where someone like Deleuze is primarily concerned with trafficking at/near the higher ledges, rather than traversing all the wya back down to deliver the messages? That is, some people are better geared to keep their operations up in the clouds, while others are better geared to climb up, grab the cloudy fruit, and bring it back down, thus rendering it useful to everyone, including the farmers.

Even if it isn't "true", it can be useful way of thinking about things, no? In that it can outline two very different tasks, each asking for different skills.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
not being deliberatly awkward/annoying but i can't remember saying that. it's certainly not impossible. i hope you enjoy the book when you get round to it mr.

The blog post that stuck in my mind was the acid communism one you wrote, which i don't think is available anymore? In that you postulated that the liberation that the counter-culture hinted at was not *necessarily* of the collective, socialist-realist kind. I'm not sure if you've changed your view since then, though I'd be surprised if you did. This is not to discount the counter-culture, just not to overinvest it with the same dynamism which animated new left gnostic revolutionaries of the 60s-70s, though they did cross over occasionally, Amon Duul, some Italian prog, etc.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
@thirdform are you saying his (deleuzes) theory is primarily useful to other theorists? Didn't want to assume that was what you're saying, but yeah I can see that.

Do you believe in any kind of layered buckets-handed-down-the-line dynamic here, where someone like Deleuze is primarily concerned with trafficking at/near the higher ledges, rather than traversing all the wya back down to deliver the messages? That is, some people are better geared to keep their operations up in the clouds, while others are better geared to climb up, grab the cloudy fruit, and bring it back down, thus rendering it useful to everyone, including the farmers.

Even if it isn't "true", it can be useful way of thinking about things, no? In that it can outline two very different tasks, each asking for different skills.

sure, I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with this stuff being held up as academic rigor for paid study though. But that's cultural studies in general, it's certainly a worthwhile avenue of enquiry but paying £3-9 grand for it is a massive con trick. Capitalist realism was never really fully able to get at this, even if he criticised the bureaucratisation of the uni, the need to invent degrees of dead weight was never fully interrogated - politics, journalism, advertising being others, near useless for a career on their own as the sealing gets higher and higher. Heck I studied proper Anglo empiricist facts and figures history and anything resembling a long haul job would have required me to pay around 100k to said unis in question.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I also don't think Deleuze really tackles the Kantian problematic, but that's a technical discussion I'd rather not get bogged down in.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Well I certainly can't disagree with you there, at least from personal experience. It seems people are catching on, that what you are paying ludicrous amounts for isn't education but prestige. But maybe thats wishful thinking on my part. After all, its been a more or less successful con so far, why would it stop now? Maybe it has reached, or will reach, some critical mass, the tuition ceiling breaking, unemployed graduates, etc.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Yeah I don't know my Kant, as interested as I'd be in hearing your points.

in sum: for Kant the self is all appearance which is the limit point of empiricism even if you consider all there is to be the immanent subject. which then begs the question of what *the subject* or *thing in itself* is? I.E: how do we know the self without the mediation of appearance? this is the limit point of philosophy without history, in short. Many philosophers prior to Hume grounded the self in God. Kant pushed at the limit of rationalism in that regard. Hegel of course himself was quite religious and tried to ground God as spirit being itself revealing world history. Science of logic quite clearly reveals he was no atheist.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
So is that what people mean when they say that Kant attempted to lay out the limits of reason? The reason couldn't get past that empirical surface of appearance/phenomena, and that anything beyond that was the jurisdiction of metaphysics?

If you don't wanna continue this, seeing as it is off topic, no problem. Just saw a way into understanding some of this.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
The blog post that stuck in my mind was the acid communism one you wrote, which i don't think is available anymore? In that you postulated that the liberation that the counter-culture hinted at was not *necessarily* of the collective, socialist-realist kind.

oh yeah. that's true. as much to with libertarian politics which partially explains the 80s swing to the right (ie it didn't come out of nowhere) i think i was polite about it fwiw. it's in the "bbow". i'm pretty sure jeremy gilbert must have read it and that's why he very kindly gave me an endorsement for retreat.
 

version

Well-known member
Maybe not a pseudo-intellectual but a pop intellectual and being a popular intellectual is the antithesis of hardcore rigour.
Just to clarify, I was quoting some random on ILM. I don't have an opinion on whether or not Mark was an intellectual.
 
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