From that clique it seems like Simon Reynolds was a much MUCH better writer. But I guess he didn't have a strong a background in philosophy to position himself like a prophet, like Fisher did.
Accelerationism certainly has/has had more shelf life and influence on thought than concepts like hauntology and capitalist realism which seem to be aging out in relevancy
I think he is better at cultural criticism and interpretation of the media and arts than he is a philosopher in the general sense, capitalist realism works better as an aesthetic concept, a languorous mood, than an ontological system.
I mean yeah, Capitalist Realism was basically a YouTube video essay about movies etc. A good one, don't get me wrong, but not the groundbreaking philosophical masterpiece leftists who haven't read it make it out to be.
Many leftists hate him, what are you talking about? Outside of Britain they are either to ingorant to know of him or too engaged with wokeness to consider what he said. And this isn't about what his idea of any of the recent conflicts would have been.
Again, the left rarely engages with his ideas.
I've come up with an icebreaker: "David Graeber was the last good leftist, and Mark Fisher was the second-to-last good one." I'm not sure if this is exactly true but it doesn't seem far off the mark, and I always get interesting replies for saying this.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
I barely encounter people who'd know either one around here, but I can see how it would get you interesting replies. To me it would be more like a check of what they are on about.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Neither were particularly great. Fisher especially. Being the fact he and Nick Land were bigger drug pushers than the Central Intelligence Agency.
>the left rarely engages with his ideas
That was sort of my point really. But the ones who do (I'm thinking of the pseudo-intellectual Novara crowd, or literally any university's socialist society) elevate his ideas far beyond their actual value, mostly out of ignorance. It's a bit like /misc/ people worshipping Evola without actually having read him, because if they did, they'd realise he's not what they imagine him to be.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>Novara crowd
Do they make it out be be something more? I'm talking about people who are building the
annex to the vampire castle today.
I think he can't be overappreviated if taken seriously. But it's okay to disagree on that, IÄm just a biit over heels about what he said.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
From my own experience with the (British) left, Mark Fisher is seen as some sort of profoundly deep esoteric prophet. Granted I might just be grafting my own experience (which was from like a decade ago) onto a wider culture, but I've definitely seen a similar sentiment echoed online (including on IQfy, come to think of it) since then.
Just to be clear, I do really like his work, especially Capitalist Realism, despite me saying it was basically just a good YouTube video essay in book form.
I just think a lot of people try to overanalyse both him and Land because "woah dude acceleration and cybernetics is so deep you just wouldn't get it man, dude synthetic neo-mescaline lmao".
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
I can confirm a similar sentiment today at liberal arts colleges both in the US and Western Europe. Young pseudo-socialists who talk about the genius of capitalist realism. Deeply cringe
Both Land and Fisher are moronic. Land is just a failed sci fi author who sacrificed a promising career to the crack pipe and has spent the past two decades larping as a shadowy dark spooky philosopher when he's just a copywriter with kids. Fisher is a hypocrite of the highest order and all of his famous ideas are just ripped from other places and rebranded so as to seem new. Land was at least interesting to read and entertaining. Fisher isn't even that. Both are examples of ivory tower isolationism taken to ridiculous extremes such that you loose all connection from reality and start filtering the world through your narrow ideological lens.
>Land is just a failed sci fi author who sacrificed a promising career to the crack pipe and has spent the past two decades larping as a shadowy dark spooky philosopher when he's just a copywriter with kids.
What's your criticism of Crypto-Current? I'm sure you have read this highly dense book and thoughtfully examined the substance of its arguments.
>Both are examples of ivory tower isolationism taken to ridiculous extremes such that you loose all connection from reality and start filtering the world through your narrow ideological lens.
What I’ve been saying all this time
Right... People have not started being replaced by AI... vast technological acceleration in artificial intelligence research has not been observed in the last year ... has nothing to do ... with anything Nick Land has been writing about for decades. Haha, what a moron.
How is he guilty of ivory tower isolationism, considering the convergence of reality and his writings?
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Most academics are by mere association. Philosophy should be the rhetoric of the common man
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
To quote Land: >To presume that language allows us to think is a leap of faith. Radical distrust is the more rigorous default. To promote ‘clarity’ as an obvious ideal, needing no further justification, is a demand that language - as such - can be trusted, that it is competent for all reasonable communicative tasks, and ‘reason’ can be defined in a way that makes this assertion tautological (such a definition is eminently traditional). There is no general obligation to write in order to attack language, but that is what Xenosystems does, and will continue to do. Language in not a neutral conveyor of infinite communicative possibility, but an intelligence box. It is to be counted among the traps to be escaped. It is an Exit target - and exit is difficult.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Incredibly lazy writing, or it is arrogance, or he is doing it deliberately. Pretty much every sentence there can use at least one more to draw it out, but he just can't be assed.
It's doubly bad because he knows pseuds will defend writing like this that they're drawn to difficult writing. What an butthole
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Well, if you've reached the insight yourself you know what he is saying. If not, possibly not. That is deliberate. He has written about using style and language as a filtering system to exclude readers who are not up to it. It's deliberately elitist. What he is saying is fairly simple though. He's describing the difference between language as a means of communication and language as a means of expression. Communication demands claritiy, even if it distorts the subject. Expression demands doing justice to the subject itself, even if it means being unclear. ('How dare this mathematical treatise be unclear to me?') The notion that language can and should always be clear is simply naive and itself camouflaged obscurantism.
>Fisher is a hypocrite of the highest order and all of his famous ideas are just ripped from other places
It was pretty funny that the editor's introduction to his blog collection ends with a passage that implies his biggest intellectual moment was finding Jameson's ideas.
Who else brought Jameson's ideas to such a concrete and direct practical conclusion? Reception can be worthwhile, his views on the British Class divide were seminal and he did what he liked.
>concrete and direct practical conclusion
I'm really not convinced he did. Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree here but to me it seems like Fisher found in Jameson something he felt but couldn't articulate. But even seeing something in Jameson's ideas he still couldn't really do anything with it. Because all he could do was hype things up, he wasn't capable of anything else.
I don't think it is an accident that these people are all attached to music. They're all about hype. They feel something, they get excited about it, they use writing to get other people excited about it, but fundamentally they can't articulate why they are excited. That means they can't do anything with the ideas.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
If we're talking about music primarily, I'd argue that his critique of how pop(ular) music isn't able to collectively engage people anymore outside of concerts (and these days even there just barely) is very important to a Yotuh living with under the conditions of Digitality as well as what corporate pop aims to do.
Sometimes a vague feeling an be enough for a change if many feel it. He did give it his all to articulate what he felt, it was just something unheard of between nostalgia, cultural pessimism and a hope for the future (of other people too!). And after all, in most real-socialist countries, you had people in the system called agitators or straightout propagandists, whose job it is to hype people up. Not that Mark Fisher necessarily thought about it that way, but I can see how he fit the role. If not out of institutional pride, but concern for the left movement, where it's headed and what kind of a Youth, influenced by what culture/art, will surpass it later.
Personally I think the mixture of genres, the retromania in music (I have a different idea about this, but that's another topic) he talked about might just be the defining marker of this musical generation if you will. And that is okay, we take time to consider everything that popped up, we actually take the time to digest the corpus of culture to not fall into the trap of being overburdened (which is what enabled the postmodern condition in the first place I believe, unable to collectively agree on culture, because there was just too much). Also, nowadays music is quite often accompanied with an aesthetic atmosphere, with ideas and sometimes is used for these purposes but sometimes spurrs people to get excited about, say futurism or reactionary politics, whatever.
Yes, I am convinced that nobody else (that I know of) gives better examples to what Jameson described. Made people aware of it, hyped people on to seek more, to seek better and to demand what was, as he stated, taken from them, not only monetarily and socially, but also culturally. And I support him in kind of concluding that people, young people especially, deserve good culture and they deserve t enjoy it collectively and they deserve to be able to make memories they think back to, they deserve a difining little era to whic they can nostalgically look back to, because all this is, I'd suggest, the prerequisite for a 'revolution'.
I can agree to disagree, don't mean to argue relentlessly or anything, these are just my thoughts, but maybe I romanticise all this way too much because his concerns mean a lot to me. Sorry for writing so much, I'd be pleased to read again form you.
I am working my way through k-punk, I like the majority of the essays, I mean blog posts. Maybe it's ultimately just the illusion of substance and meaning and half baked philosophical meanderings cribbed from better authors, as a philistine in matters of philosophy I still find it edifying
No he was a dangerous cult leader
Both are moronic
From that clique it seems like Simon Reynolds was a much MUCH better writer. But I guess he didn't have a strong a background in philosophy to position himself like a prophet, like Fisher did.
Accelerationism certainly has/has had more shelf life and influence on thought than concepts like hauntology and capitalist realism which seem to be aging out in relevancy
I think he is better at cultural criticism and interpretation of the media and arts than he is a philosopher in the general sense, capitalist realism works better as an aesthetic concept, a languorous mood, than an ontological system.
I mean yeah, Capitalist Realism was basically a YouTube video essay about movies etc. A good one, don't get me wrong, but not the groundbreaking philosophical masterpiece leftists who haven't read it make it out to be.
Many leftists hate him, what are you talking about? Outside of Britain they are either to ingorant to know of him or too engaged with wokeness to consider what he said. And this isn't about what his idea of any of the recent conflicts would have been.
Again, the left rarely engages with his ideas.
I've come up with an icebreaker: "David Graeber was the last good leftist, and Mark Fisher was the second-to-last good one." I'm not sure if this is exactly true but it doesn't seem far off the mark, and I always get interesting replies for saying this.
I barely encounter people who'd know either one around here, but I can see how it would get you interesting replies. To me it would be more like a check of what they are on about.
Neither were particularly great. Fisher especially. Being the fact he and Nick Land were bigger drug pushers than the Central Intelligence Agency.
>the left rarely engages with his ideas
That was sort of my point really. But the ones who do (I'm thinking of the pseudo-intellectual Novara crowd, or literally any university's socialist society) elevate his ideas far beyond their actual value, mostly out of ignorance. It's a bit like /misc/ people worshipping Evola without actually having read him, because if they did, they'd realise he's not what they imagine him to be.
>Novara crowd
Do they make it out be be something more? I'm talking about people who are building the
annex to the vampire castle today.
I think he can't be overappreviated if taken seriously. But it's okay to disagree on that, IÄm just a biit over heels about what he said.
From my own experience with the (British) left, Mark Fisher is seen as some sort of profoundly deep esoteric prophet. Granted I might just be grafting my own experience (which was from like a decade ago) onto a wider culture, but I've definitely seen a similar sentiment echoed online (including on IQfy, come to think of it) since then.
Just to be clear, I do really like his work, especially Capitalist Realism, despite me saying it was basically just a good YouTube video essay in book form.
I just think a lot of people try to overanalyse both him and Land because "woah dude acceleration and cybernetics is so deep you just wouldn't get it man, dude synthetic neo-mescaline lmao".
I can confirm a similar sentiment today at liberal arts colleges both in the US and Western Europe. Young pseudo-socialists who talk about the genius of capitalist realism. Deeply cringe
Both Land and Fisher are moronic. Land is just a failed sci fi author who sacrificed a promising career to the crack pipe and has spent the past two decades larping as a shadowy dark spooky philosopher when he's just a copywriter with kids. Fisher is a hypocrite of the highest order and all of his famous ideas are just ripped from other places and rebranded so as to seem new. Land was at least interesting to read and entertaining. Fisher isn't even that. Both are examples of ivory tower isolationism taken to ridiculous extremes such that you loose all connection from reality and start filtering the world through your narrow ideological lens.
>Land is just a failed sci fi author who sacrificed a promising career to the crack pipe and has spent the past two decades larping as a shadowy dark spooky philosopher when he's just a copywriter with kids.
What's your criticism of Crypto-Current? I'm sure you have read this highly dense book and thoughtfully examined the substance of its arguments.
>Both are examples of ivory tower isolationism taken to ridiculous extremes such that you loose all connection from reality and start filtering the world through your narrow ideological lens.
What I’ve been saying all this time
Right... People have not started being replaced by AI... vast technological acceleration in artificial intelligence research has not been observed in the last year ... has nothing to do ... with anything Nick Land has been writing about for decades. Haha, what a moron.
Not really the point I was making, PhDboy.
How is he guilty of ivory tower isolationism, considering the convergence of reality and his writings?
Most academics are by mere association. Philosophy should be the rhetoric of the common man
To quote Land:
>To presume that language allows us to think is a leap of faith. Radical distrust is the more rigorous default. To promote ‘clarity’ as an obvious ideal, needing no further justification, is a demand that language - as such - can be trusted, that it is competent for all reasonable communicative tasks, and ‘reason’ can be defined in a way that makes this assertion tautological (such a definition is eminently traditional). There is no general obligation to write in order to attack language, but that is what Xenosystems does, and will continue to do. Language in not a neutral conveyor of infinite communicative possibility, but an intelligence box. It is to be counted among the traps to be escaped. It is an Exit target - and exit is difficult.
Incredibly lazy writing, or it is arrogance, or he is doing it deliberately. Pretty much every sentence there can use at least one more to draw it out, but he just can't be assed.
It's doubly bad because he knows pseuds will defend writing like this that they're drawn to difficult writing. What an butthole
Well, if you've reached the insight yourself you know what he is saying. If not, possibly not. That is deliberate. He has written about using style and language as a filtering system to exclude readers who are not up to it. It's deliberately elitist. What he is saying is fairly simple though. He's describing the difference between language as a means of communication and language as a means of expression. Communication demands claritiy, even if it distorts the subject. Expression demands doing justice to the subject itself, even if it means being unclear. ('How dare this mathematical treatise be unclear to me?') The notion that language can and should always be clear is simply naive and itself camouflaged obscurantism.
>Fisher is a hypocrite of the highest order and all of his famous ideas are just ripped from other places
It was pretty funny that the editor's introduction to his blog collection ends with a passage that implies his biggest intellectual moment was finding Jameson's ideas.
Who else brought Jameson's ideas to such a concrete and direct practical conclusion? Reception can be worthwhile, his views on the British Class divide were seminal and he did what he liked.
>concrete and direct practical conclusion
I'm really not convinced he did. Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree here but to me it seems like Fisher found in Jameson something he felt but couldn't articulate. But even seeing something in Jameson's ideas he still couldn't really do anything with it. Because all he could do was hype things up, he wasn't capable of anything else.
I don't think it is an accident that these people are all attached to music. They're all about hype. They feel something, they get excited about it, they use writing to get other people excited about it, but fundamentally they can't articulate why they are excited. That means they can't do anything with the ideas.
If we're talking about music primarily, I'd argue that his critique of how pop(ular) music isn't able to collectively engage people anymore outside of concerts (and these days even there just barely) is very important to a Yotuh living with under the conditions of Digitality as well as what corporate pop aims to do.
Sometimes a vague feeling an be enough for a change if many feel it. He did give it his all to articulate what he felt, it was just something unheard of between nostalgia, cultural pessimism and a hope for the future (of other people too!). And after all, in most real-socialist countries, you had people in the system called agitators or straightout propagandists, whose job it is to hype people up. Not that Mark Fisher necessarily thought about it that way, but I can see how he fit the role. If not out of institutional pride, but concern for the left movement, where it's headed and what kind of a Youth, influenced by what culture/art, will surpass it later.
Personally I think the mixture of genres, the retromania in music (I have a different idea about this, but that's another topic) he talked about might just be the defining marker of this musical generation if you will. And that is okay, we take time to consider everything that popped up, we actually take the time to digest the corpus of culture to not fall into the trap of being overburdened (which is what enabled the postmodern condition in the first place I believe, unable to collectively agree on culture, because there was just too much). Also, nowadays music is quite often accompanied with an aesthetic atmosphere, with ideas and sometimes is used for these purposes but sometimes spurrs people to get excited about, say futurism or reactionary politics, whatever.
Yes, I am convinced that nobody else (that I know of) gives better examples to what Jameson described. Made people aware of it, hyped people on to seek more, to seek better and to demand what was, as he stated, taken from them, not only monetarily and socially, but also culturally. And I support him in kind of concluding that people, young people especially, deserve good culture and they deserve t enjoy it collectively and they deserve to be able to make memories they think back to, they deserve a difining little era to whic they can nostalgically look back to, because all this is, I'd suggest, the prerequisite for a 'revolution'.
I can agree to disagree, don't mean to argue relentlessly or anything, these are just my thoughts, but maybe I romanticise all this way too much because his concerns mean a lot to me. Sorry for writing so much, I'd be pleased to read again form you.
I really liked him sperging out about Toy Story in Flatline Constructs. Can't say I care for much else of his.
I would read it for comedy purposes
I am working my way through k-punk, I like the majority of the essays, I mean blog posts. Maybe it's ultimately just the illusion of substance and meaning and half baked philosophical meanderings cribbed from better authors, as a philistine in matters of philosophy I still find it edifying