Last Updated: 3/11/22; Finished the Cybernetics notes.
Mark Fisher's 20 Greatest Jungle Tracks; Part One, Part Two. Music to Accelerate to.
I really had to condense these files to host them here, so hopefully the quality isn't awful.
I have a lot to say about Mark Fisher. His project captures everything that I think theory should be: accessible, democratised, not bound up in imaginaries of high-culture and low-culture, not limited to dusty, brutalist paragraphs of Times New Roman; speculative, creative, reflective. No one captured the British zeitgeist at the turn of the century better than Mark Fisher, his K-Punk blog, his lectures, his classes were perhaps the injections of passion, speed, CULTURE, that the British left and turgid academia needed; still needs. When Capitalist Realism was released 13 years ago, a bomb went off; it was a remix of pop-reference, postmodern philosophy, and careful, consumable attacks of the state of the Western hemisphere. This was a huge departure from the bat-shit esotericism of the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (which I happen to quite like actually) wherein Fisher had his awakening as a theorist; but this was something that the British Left had been calling out for for years. Still needs. Accessible theory grounded in the geography of our time.
This, combined with his writings on film, television, music, politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health, and modernism, cemented Fisher as the figurehead for a disaffected generation of theory nerds and young academics. I've seen him derided as a pop philosopher; fine. But what's the issue with that? Fisher opened up the Ivory Tower for everyone.
So, I’m revisiting some old Mark Fisher posts and articles that I’ve read over. This was one of the first that came to mind when I thought about starting to aggregate some thoughts for some notes; it relates to a potential thesis topic that I’m exploring during my time in New York: Bodily Transformation as Result Of and Resistance To Capitalism. Fisher, here articulates a couple of key thoughts that tie in really well with this area of speculative academia that I’m interested in burrowing into. ‘Spinoza, K-Punk, Neuropunk’ is a synthesis of Baruch Spinoza’s (and Deleuze and Guattari’s) ethics with conceptions of cybernetics, and neurology. The idea here is to create an assemblage best articulating the concerns of K(uber)-Punk and an ethics of post humanism whilst shadowing the bio-chemical reality that necessitates this transformation. It’s short, it’s interesting. It’s recommended reading.
All of which, to come back to radar anomalous’ Badiou-doubts leads to another positive way in which we can wrest reason/ rationality back from what Robin Undercurrent calls, hilariously, 'boredom-mongering epistemonauts'. According to Spinoza, to be free is to act according to reason. To act according to reason is to act according to your own interests. Finally, however, we have to recognize that, on Spinoza's account, the best interests of the human species coincide with becoming-inhuman.
We start here with the Spinozist grounding that we need to add some credit to our thought here; Deleuze and Guattari, Acid Communists the both of them, are simply not the heavyweights we need - far too easy to dispel as… ridiculous. More importantly though, Spinoza is (I have not read Spinoza, all assessments I make are baseless - or at least ill-informed) a much more explicit ethicist than these two. Why is this important? Ethics are about conduct and practice; how do I act in order to act in a way that I deem to be moral? Or something like that. We do not moralise though. Not ever. So; we use Spinoza here to ground a rough kind of ethics of the posthuman. An ethics of freedom, we can construe from Spinoza, via Fisher, may be an ethics of the posthuman.
Many of the problems with Human OS [Operating System] come from its inefficient bio/neuro-packaging. By contrast with very simple organisms that are set up to be attracted to what is beneficial to them and to flee from what is hostile to them, human beings have a convoluted system for processing exogenous and endogenous stimuli, routed/ rooted in the arborescent central nervous system running out of the spine and overseen by the brain.
This is where some of Fisher’s Deleuzian mysticism seeps through the code. We’re very receptive to that here — but only in the most purely destructive terms. Fisher is referencing two things: 1) The capacity of simple organisms to be creatures of pure desiring (verbal) by way of a mainly impulse-based [similar to parasympathetic systems perhaps?] existence. 2) The way in which human biology is necessarily set up to prevent such unrestrained existence. He colours it with some Deleuzian arborophobia but he does proceed to reference some concrete science regarding the ‘three brains’: ‘reptilian’, ‘mammalian’, ‘hominid’. The presence of the hominid brain is useful for Fisher is discussing the work of Burroughs (who crops up a LOT here). This is because “it provides an account of why humans are so endemically prone to addictive behaviour. […] there are actually two separate circuits, one for motivation and one liking. In the latter stages of addiction, you want to consume the drug, but it is improbable that you will also like jacking up. Add all this up, and you pretty much have a neuronic recipe for the unremitting misery, hatred and violence that have characterised human history.Nietzsche said that if animals could describe the human species they would call it 'the sad creature.’”.
Fear not though friends, for Mark will save us!
Yet, precisely because of this hideously collocated morbid assemblage, the human contains a potential for destratification which the functionally streamlined simple organism lacks. This is where Spinoza converges with cyberpunk, and hence with Deleuze-Guattari, cyberpunk's main theoretical program. One of the consequences of Spinoza's analysis, as I said before, is that human beings' emotion-generating hardware can be understood using the same causal framework that is applied to the so-called natural world. In the twentieth century, cybernetics will make the same discovery.
Fisher takes the opportunity here, and I will too, to point out that cybernetics is not a word that is about robots, cyborgs, and aliens. It is a study applied to all complex systems; stemming from the Greek kybernetikos (“good at steering”); it has far more to do with homeostatic actions than anything else. I think more accurately it’s about systems of automatic control rather than necessarily installing equilibrium. Cybernetics is all about feedback; that is a system’s ability to assess its contents and make a decision about its performance. The tide is stronger on the starboard, turn the wheel to the right. Fisher quotes Wiener: “the study of control and communication in animals and machines”. He makes the critical observation too, that nothing is more or less cybernetic than another - there are systems that simply allow for more or less feedback, and different types of feedback. He finishes the paragraph with a wonderful quote.
So if the word 'cybernetics' calls up only gleaming steel you have the wrong association.
This is where we get a true conceptualisation of Cyberpunk; an insanely provocative paragraph.
If cyborgianism is oriented towards a maintenance and reproduction of the organism and its homeostatic control circuitries, Cyberpunk or k-punk (one of the motivations for the 'k' btw is the origin of the word 'cyber' in the Greek 'kuber') flees towards a cybernetics of organic disassembly. Again, let's be clear here. You don't disassemble the human organism by replacing its parts with metal or silicon components. (That's why the term 'cyborg' - or 'cybernetic organism' is misleadingly redundant. All organisms are already cybernetic). What matters is the overall organization of the parts. Do the parts operate as hierarchically organized and functionally-specified 'organs' within a cybernegatively construed interiority or do they operate as deterritorialized potentials pulling from/ towards the Outside?
Fisher goes on to suggest that this latter construction is what Deleuze and Guattari (of course. They're back. You will literally never escape them on this website ever.) term the Body Without Organs. I think I see what Fisher is getting at here; the Body Without Organs - such a nebulous concept - I think can be best understood as a plane of immanence upon which molar concentrations inter-connect via transient folds; as opposed to a full/territorialised body upon which flows are channeled in limiting organisation. Deleuze and Guattari decry at lengths the limiting structure of the human body; a human body in unstructure "plugging an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole" has far more revolutionary potential for them.
Mark segues quickly into a discussion of Aliens, Predators, Shoggoths: one of their "sublimely ruthless (=machinically efficient)" behaviours being "their readiness to ditch body parts when they are damaged or redundant". This is something that the organ(ised)ism is naturally opposed to - almost feeling like an impossibility. For Fisher though, this mirrors the same neuromechanisms that enable addictive behaviour in the human: 'motivation' overcoming 'pleasure'; maintenance of organisation. "The BwO quickly dispenses with any features that either inhibit its flatlining slide towards the zero intensity of pure potentiality or which draw it back towards the closed-down depotentiation of the organism. (I have sometimes wondered about the k-punk potential of 'If thine own eye offend thee, pluck it out.')". This is all Spinozist reasoning apparently.
We can now see why becoming inhuman is in the best interests of humanity. The human organism is set up to produce misery. What we like may be damaging for us. What feels good may poison us.
I've had a bit of an issue assembling some sense towards the end of the article, the point gets a little confused. Honestly, this feels like vintage Fisher, still a bit Landian, still a bit CCRU... The main point is incredibly interesting to me, it's just not all that easy to extract from the body of the text. I won't quote too much from the last sections, but I will do my best to try and synthesise the material. As far as I can tell we have got this far: human brain is bad because it is wired in such a way as to perpetuate our misery through a circuitry geared up to create a Death Drive (Freud). We can escape the limits of human existence by becoming posthuman. This requires a disorganisation of the human organism.
Neuroeconomics shows that humans are exploitable little flesh-sacks stuck in the Death Drive by our propensity for emotion to overcome thought in any opposition between the two; this supposedly is analagous to the "idiot-repetition-compulsion" that Burroughs delineates. So then we are all repressed desiring-machines; not at all free, intentionless phenomena. The Spinozist body without organisation is supposedly aimed at reversing this channeling of desire. "So k-punk is also neuropunk: an intensive rewiring of humanity's neural circuits." The interests of the body, apparently, paradoxically lie in becoming disorganism; "in having no particular interests at all". The rest of the article turns into a half-baked application of post-humanism to blogging (sorry Mark) and a bit of beef with Marcello Carlin over his readings of Spinoza (read the comments on the original link, Marcello is such a self-righteous tit).
I'm not sure if I can offer much of an insightful commentary to tie this article back together. But I'll suggest a few thoughts; what Mark really does here is attempt to suggest a necessity for disorganisation of the organism. He highlights the propensity for humans to become limited by their own biology. The first solutions appearing to this kind of problem might be to reach inside, move the stomach to the chest, sew an ear to the anus, a foot on a shoulder; but that's not really what we're getting at. I think Mark's discussion of blogging gets towards this; by plugging the mind into a new matrix we can form new bodies. The most obvious of such would be hyperspace, the internet, become a ghost in the machine: code and networks are my new body. But also think of collectivity: the rave; the ceremony; sex; the wilderness; plugging the mind into new environments such as these reconstitues the biological machine in new and revolutionary ways. As Mark suggests, religion has always been geared towards creating a Body Without Organs. The goal is not to get trapped. To be human is to be limited. We should always look for more.
I think, for now, I'll put the CCRU content I've collected here as well, but the material is so rich that at some point; likely another Saturday night when I am doing nothing of note; I will make a separate knot for them.
K-Punk; Mark Fisher's blog. Still being hosted in his memory.
Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit; Related Material
Collected Writings of the CCRU 1997-2003 of which Fisher was a part. 'CCRU datastream3: Katasonix & Calendric Continuism' by Katasonix (presumably, in this case, Iris Carver). This is a speculative fiction/media-criticsm hybrid; weird and all sorts of cool. All about the K-Goths. 'RENEGADE ACADEMIA: THE Cybernetic Culture Research Unit'; director's cut of unpublished feature for Lingua Franca, Simon Reynolds1999.