We are repeatedly sold the same message: that individual action is the only real way to solve social problems, so we should take responsibility. We are trapped in a neoliberal trance by what the education scholar Henry Giroux calls a “disimagination machine”, because it stifles critical and radical thinking. We are admonished to look inward, and to manage ourselves. Disimagination impels us to abandon creative ideas about new possibilities. Instead of seeking to dismantle capitalism, or rein in its excesses, we should accept its demands and use self-discipline to be more effective in the market. To change the world, we are told to work on ourselves — to change our minds by being more mindful, nonjudgmental, and accepting of circumstances.
Extract from Ronald Purser’s new book, McMindfulness, at Teh Graun. It’s a hopeful sign that critiques of the neoliberal paradigm like this are creeping into more mainstream outlets — though it’s probably worth noting that Purser is published by Repeater, who also published the Mark Fisher collection, and the “privatisation of stress” thesis running through this piece is pretty much pure Fisher.
I bought the K-Punk collected works of Mark Fisher late last year, and have slowly been working my way through it, going through phases of reading a few pieces a night before bed when I haven’t been reading fiction. I think I’m maybe ¾ through the thing now, factoring in for the notes and references; it’s a huge breezeblock of a book, the sort of thing that makes a Neal Stephenson novel look like a pamphlet by comparison.
Aside from the actual content of the pieces themselves, which are almost invariably stimulating, the book as a whole has a vibe to it, which one must assume is driven in some part by my knowing its provenance. One aspect of the vibe is a sense in which it shames me: Fisher was an incisive thinker and an astonishingly productive writer, and this book represents merely a selection of his non-professional extra-curricular writings, much of it produced while he was struggling to support a young family as a casualised lecturer in a minor FE college. I look at the quantity and the quality and the continuity of it, and I look at my own output in recent years, and I wonder what the hell my excuse is, when this guy was cranking it out relentlessly, building up a body of thought, an edifice of theory and observation and insight. His elevation to a sort of secular sainthood since his suicide is thus as understandable as it’s unsettling. I find the constellation-face image that they used for the cover tasteless and mawkish, almost exploitative. I wonder if he wouldn’t have found it contemptible himself, even as I wish he were still around to have an opinion on it.
(I should note here
that although I know that I read a few K-Punk pieces on the blog
circuit “back in the day”, having recognised a few of them in the
course of reading this book, I was not a regular reader of Fisher,
and had only become aware of him as a significant figure around 2014
or so, probably due to his reinvigoration of the notion of
hauntology, which was – and still is – very influential among a
lot of people I still follow and read today.)
The other aspect of the vibe of the book is what I’m calling a “contact low”. It’s probably exacerbated by the curation of the collection, and also by the fact that I’m deep into the specifically political-theoretical section of the book at this point, but the exhaustion and enervation of the man just pours off the page, like writing had become a habitual method of exorcism for channeling away some of his fury and frustration at the circumstances. He looked deeply and critically into the abyss, but he was always looking for lights in its darkness, and I think that’s where my contact low is coming from at the moment: reading his posts about the student uprisings of 2010, the riots of 2011, reading his hopes that they marked a turning point, or at least the first hints of a turn, away from the relentlessly festering mulch of capitalist realism – hopes I shared at the time, though I couldn’t have expressed them in the same terms, or with the same incisive clarity. And I think of all that’s happened since, and how I struggled with it, likewise looking for any light in the darkness… and rather than a turn to the left, we ended up with fucking Brexit. In the absence of any personal connection to him, it would be reductive and crass to assume that it was some sort of final straw for Fisher, but I remember clearly my own experience of the first few months after the referendum, and to call it a massive psychic trauma would not be to understate things at all. I was all out of hope; I guess that maybe he was, too.
Three years later, here we are, staggering into what we must presume is the third and final act of this surreal piece of political theatre, with all the themes and major characters having clarified themselves down to caricatures of the grotesques that they began as, but still no sense of how the thing might end, or if indeed there will ever be any resolution to this seemingly hopeless shit-show of a situation. I’ve been struggling psychologically this last couple of weeks, after a nine-month period of mental stability and relative contentment that’s almost without precedent in my life to date, and which presumably has a very great deal to do with finally having a decent income that results from doing work I actually believe in, among other factors. Indeed, my life is better than it ever has been, in almost every respect; I am both privileged and fortunate, though I decline to downplay the role of hustle and effort on my part in getting me here. We’re all running hard in this Red Queen’s Race; I was lucky to have people around who picked me up when I tripped and fell. Would that everyone was so fortunate.
I’m not blaming Fisher’s writing for my little turn to the bleak, to be clear – but I think it’s surely in the mix, alongside a weird viral lurgy I picked up a few weeks back, the dismal dynamics of this week’s weather, and the reactionary carnival freak-show of the Tory party trying to determine who among them can best rally their dementia-adjacent membership of 1950s cosplayers and authority-fetishists. It’s OK to be low from time to time, particularly when there’s so many things to feel low about. We are victims of the privatisation of stress; the tragic gift of Fisher’s work was to identify, describe and give a name to the thing that destroyed him, in order that we might eventually destroy it in return.
There are reasons to be hopeful, if not optimistic, about the bigger picture; you just have to look away from the big-top clown-show to see them, and then you have to write and talk about them, because hope is a flame, and if you blow on it enough, it might start to catch. I’m wary of making promises to myself, or to the imagined public that is whatever audience remains for this here blog – but I also want to try to alchemise my experience of the times we’re living through in the way that Fisher did, to turn the shit into gold. I think it will help me to stay upright if I document my hopes and fears, and I hope it might be helpful to others as well.
There IS an
alternative. There are many alternatives, and we can explore them.
But I think one of Fisher’s most crucial, if under-discussed points, was that we can’t explore them alone.
So it’s time to step outside again and find the others, and to begin the work, despite the terrible weather.
The evolution of a society is an arms race between the fragile evolution of false consciousness myths and the robust evolution of mutually assured mediocrity equilibria. That’s how you slouch towards utopia.
Venkatesh Rao, one of the most genuinely original and iconoclastic thinkers there is. If you wanted to write a story about a consultant who cheerfully and openly undermines the litany of assumptions about how the consultancy business — and indeed all business — works, and yet continues to to be a pretty successful consultant, this is your source material. (And boy, is there a whole lot of it, too.)
