What does Veeky Forums think of kpunk/Mark Fisher?

>The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.

Massively overrated

Him and Reynolds are insufferable twats who did one to many Es back in the day.

When I read Capitalist Realism, I felt like I understood what the "big other" meant: a recognised hegemony . but then when I read more about the Big Other from lacan and others it became so confusing.

Go back to /pol/ we at Veeky Forums are far too smart for you

>the right act on this insight more effectively than the left does. The bourgeois-identitarian left knows how to propagate guilt and conduct a witch hunt, but it doesn’t know how to make converts.
And so I was not the only one that noticed.

wew the comments are some of dumbest shit I've ever read.

you're not the only one at all, it's practically all that /leftpol/ talks about

I read the first section, but I didn't give a fuck about a lot of the music he gushes over. The section on Jimmy Savile and Belbury Poly/FOcuse group were pretty good, but I'd rather read Capitalism Again.

Fuck me that's good. What book?

Capitalist Realism, the essay that's now making the rounds following Fisher's death. It has deep roots in Deleuze/Guatarri's work, though.

Really liked that article, thanks.

Why the fuck is this dude obsessed with EDM?

any other recommendations for someone who enjoyed CR? Is Deluze/Guaterri worth reading or should I wikipedia it?

Jungle music was central to early CCRU philosophy. Ever heard the story of old Nicky rolling on the ground like a snake?

>This is the article that started the fuss

Nick Land on that article:
>There has been lots of discussion about Mark Fisher recently, where his position ends up being extremely and seemingly unambiguously leftist. There’s a boring psychobiographical story that would see my relation to him as a simple antonym. It’s not that there’s nothing to that, because it had something to do with this fissile reaction of the CCRU, where he takes one side of it and I take the other side, so I don’t want just to deride that interpretation. But if we look at his Exit the Vampire Castle piece, it consistently goes through the class basis of the dominant leftist culture, which had already been a target of CCRU’s deep critique. Evidently we can make the same point from the far Left and the far Right. Which is to say: yes, they are the bourgeoisie. I have always been in a relation of antagonism and remain in a relation of antagonism to the bourgeosie. I think it’s just self-evident that the breeding ground of this is primarily the elite universities. [...] We are looking at a deep ideological, absolutely traumatic crisis of the late modern, late-Cathedral ruling elite, because they’ve built their whole lives and sense of what they should be doing, their etiquettes, their notions about credibility, credentials and institutional authority around a particular, very distinct social and historical structure that had seemed absolutely invulnerable and which now looks to be toppling into the abyss.

:(

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Yes, but please Americans, stop calling jungle "EDM"

EDM is an umbrella term that includes jungle in it.

i've been scouring through the k-punk archives and the guy seems to be an insightful cultural commentator and musical analyst. think i'll pick up a copy of capitalist realism soon.

EDM is a term invented by Americans about 8 years ago to sell dance music to Monster Energy swilling masses.

just be glad they do not say electronica anymore

At least that was when acts like The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy and Fatboy Slim were being pushed to the states.

EDM is dubstep stripped entirely of connection the hardcore continuum, house removed from it's roots, all churned into a horrible maximalist mess, a Top 40 pop song from hell. All for the benefit of frat boy redneck douchebags who would have slammed disco for not being cockrock music in the 70s and disregarded house and techno for being too gay and black in the 80s.

>This requires a social and political explanation
No it doesn't, such an explanation will likely result in finding some extremely simplistic fantasy to sit with and then stop all further inquiry into the matter. Which is what happens with everything, time and time again. I'm speaking of the practices of those who give "social and political" explanations, of course. Best leave it to biology to continue subsuming the social and political. It's already such a large field and already takes into account those two things. Also, they're all more or less different aspects of the same thing, social and political and not distinct from anything else, to break them into limiting borders is crippling.

>Mental illness rates skyrocket
>Happiness rates become lower and lower
>It must be biology!
Good goy

That’s basically the belief of most contemporary young communists and socialist.

The fundamental division is between a belief in enlightenment universalism or not. Is there something common among humanity or not. Are we pushing towards a common future for all humanity, or are we proceeding towards absolute atomization around all possible difference. This is the basis of the left critique of identity politics. From the view of this critique we see something like patriarchy as a social formation which has implications for all people living in it. The destruction of patriarchy is not the affirmation of ‘woman’ but the destruction of gender. You cannot ask white men people to negate all identity and just exist as pure negativity, while also affirming all previously suppressed identities. The logical consequence of the politics of ‘cultural appropriation’ critique is identical to white nationalism because it fundamentally revolves around the logic of maintaining purity. Many non-white activists have confided in me that they feel pressured to perform an ethnic identity they don’t identity with because they identify with the more cosmopolitan identity of mainstream America/Canada. They want to just wear jeans or be a bit goth, but those are now both ‘white’ things and instead they feel compelled to dress ‘Basque’ or ‘Mexican’ or ‘Nigerian’ or ‘Korean’ out of a sense of duty to ‘perform resistance’ to white supremacist capitalist society. Of course this does nothing to restore union strength or increase wages, or improve access to healthcare, housing, or work to abolish prisons, but in the pessimistic left after the end of history that’s apparently all we got.

Honestly, Marx. He’s the basis of all of this, Fisher, and D&G. D&G’s work together is another iteration of Freudian-Marxism, specifically critiquing Lacan and their style is ‘notorious’. There is an illustrated audiobook video of the first few chapters of A Thousand Plateaus on YouTube, I’d check it out just so you get a sense of what I mean stylewise.

The other theorist who is hot in certain circles and whom you can hold over people’s head is Jodi Dean. Her book’s Blog Theory and Crowds And Parties are both fantastic, especially the former. She also has a book called Zizek’s Politics which is a good expositions. She is the most like Fisher without being him that I know of.

Lacan is the big man for a lot of contemporary communist left thinking. The man himself is impossible to read, even if you could get ahold much of his works, but Bruce Fink’s Lacanian Subject is a great entry point. Zizek’s Looking Awry is another. Other than that I’m not sure, he’s a hard one to learn about.

Easily the most insightful paragraph of analysis written in the last decade, Christ, the first time I read that it hit me like a dump truck. It’s so obvious once it’s been said out loud, but all the same.

I mean to say D&G are notorious for being ‘difficult’ and they come as part of tradition, and are a part of a very active intellectual scene with a lot of players.

The easiest place to start is Deleuze’s books on other philosophers, mainly his book on Nietzsche and ‘Spinoza and Practical Philosophy’. He’s not trying to do straight explications of these thinkers but rather use them as a jumping off point for his own thought. After that you can move around his work a bit freer. I’d try to read Anti-Oedipus before A Thousand Plateaus, but both are essential. Other than that, Deleuze’s first two treatises ‘Difference and Repetition’ and ‘Logic of Senses’ are important, many regard the former as his magnum opus.

Having a PDF of The Deleuze Dictionary can be helpful. To my knowledge there is no single volume which is universally regarded as giving a clear and coherent overall exposition, and Deleuze’s thought by it nature (attempting to be rhizomatic rather than arbouresant) resists easy exposition. If you are at a university see what the library has. People, especially in film studies, love to use his terms (territorializtion, lines of flight, rhizomatic, becoming, being-minor, assemblage, Body without Organs and so on) but it’s not always obvious what these terms mean.

I’ve found the Cambridge Companion helpful. The Routledge Critical Thinkers book on him is helpful, though neither of which are worth purchasing.

>yfw /pol/‘s stupidity is dangerous in ways most people can’t even imagine

You say that but as a student of neuroscience, as much as there is talk of a biopsychosocial nexus, in practice this is lip service most of the time. Complex social phenomena are never going to be reducible down to audiovisual inputs affecting neural networks.

Fishers point isn’t that we jettison the biological account. He’s merely calling for there to be work towards an authentic biopsychsocial account of mental illness. We can’t merely write prescriptions to heal mental illness. Fisher is arguing that pharmaceuticals are meant to balance unbalanced neural chemicals, but this can be the only approach because unbalanced chemicals isn’t what “cause” depression, they are only the biological instantiation of it.

There has been a dramatic uptick in mental illness in the recent past. Your biological reductionism suggests that we either need to believe we’ve always been this depressed just didn’t realize it until now, or that there is some chemical in the air or water which are causing us to fall out out whack. Because if it’s not that then it’s things like the increasingly precarious economy, the destruction of traditional sources of meaning and purpose, the destruction of community, the alienation of the worker from the products of their labour, the hyperreality of contemporary media, cultural guilt over the recognition of continually unaddressed historic crimes, the displacement of child rearing from community to family to the individual, the greater and greater numbers of people having to act as care providers in isolation for the slow decline of their parents towards death, the existential threat of a warming climate, and so on. All of these are fundementally political problems which can’t be addressed with better generations of drugs.

And Fisher is trying to highlight this because the cultural and economic logic refuses to recognize this. Political discourse for the elites can only be understood in terms of dollars and stock returns, anybody who read Fire and Fury sees how marriage for the Bourgeoisie is a purely instrumental function. There is no monetary incentive for a doctor to say ‘it’s not a pill they need, it’s a reconstruction of the political order they live in’, and it’s that which Fisher is there to address.

>While I do like Simon [Reynold's] new book [Rip it Up and Start Again], my one qualm is that he found it necessary to include a section on U2 in there. I mean, for christ's sake, is there a bigger group of sanctimonious twats on the planet than Bono and his talentless schoolmates. I'm being entirely serious here. What in the hell such a pompous and sterile pop act like U2 has anything remotely to do with the post-punk movement has yet to be revealed to me. Last I checked the likes of the The Durutti Column weren't a corporate brand masquerading as music. I think he'd do well to excise that in the paperback edition.

Good stuff

Damn good post desu

>They want to just wear jeans or be a bit goth, but those are now both ‘white’ things and instead they feel compelled to dress ‘Basque’ or ‘Mexican’ or ‘Nigerian’ or ‘Korean’ out of a sense of duty to ‘perform resistance’ to white supremacist capitalist society.
It becomes more tragicomic with the hijab and variations thereof, where women in Iran etc. want to get rid of it, and those in the West are made to believe they need it to resist the West or similar bullshit.

>zero books

It would be good if we could do a group reading on Veeky Forums of Marx's Capital. Would anyone be interested in that?

Parallel to this is discourse over things like makeup or presenting as ‘femme’ in general. Though the whole ‘bra burning’ is a bit of an untrue stereotype, that notion, of rejecting the object of culture which have come to define what it means to ‘be-woman’ be it bras, high heels, lipstick, or shaving body hair, this was something radical since it was indeed rejecting the cultural pressure towards what it means to be woman. Later feminism is focused around ‘choice’, it’s a very liberal, rather than radical feminism, because it acts as if things which are symbols of female oppression can be not oppressive if they are williningly chosen, but it ignores the fact that if these cultural pressure aren’t totally eliminated then those traditional structures of oppression are going to act as Attractors (in the mathematical sense) for behaviour.

I do recognize the radicalism of North America’s Muslim women wearing a hijab, it genuinely does put them at a far greater risk of violence and is a political statement. What needs to be recognized is that the hijab isn’t inheretly anything, its political meaning exists only relationally to the society it’s being worn in. And a society which treats Muslims as a social Other, while ostensibly supporting ‘freedom’, utilizing that freedom in a way that makes people uncomfortable is a political act, much in the same way these so-called free speech activists do. The big difference here is that in effect most of the free speech activists punch down and don’t come out to bat for seriously unpopular opinions (see the ‘white genocide’ Drexel U prof who loves Venezuela, and had to leave his job from white supremacist threats, not many Free Speechers defending him, and really, who else in America comes out to bat for Venezuela of all places?).

>What needs to be recognized is that the hijab isn’t inheretly anything, its political meaning exists only relationally to the society it’s being worn in. And a society which treats Muslims as a social Other
Speaking of which, regardless of how "willing" the woman wearing the particular article of clothing, Muslim women are Othered in both societies, where there is agreement that they should wear it in order to be fully part of them. You can't simply be allowed to happen to be a human being that identifies as female, whose ancestry is rooted in a Muslim-majority country, and who believes in God - you gotta have your hair wrapped. Nobody bothers with facts such practice predating Islam, or the substantial amount of women not wearing the thing at all in MENA countries after over a century of fighting over it.
Dress codes have a very long history of class segregation as well, you'd think the great emancipators of the current year would know better than have the clothes make the man, or woman in this case.

I would love to but I don’t think it’s possible on lit. There is so much /pol/ tourism now that every attempt would be instantly derailed,

Mushroom at the End of the World is a good supplement to Capitalist Realism.

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If this is real you belong on a cross

>remember when students didn't shop at urban outfitters

Funny enough I finished capitalist realism a couple of days ago and it blew my fucking mind. I actually have downloaded most of the works they have on Zero Books and subscribed to their youtube channel which is fucking great. I remember Angela Nagle in Kill All Normies being bitter as fuck about how many of the so called "twitter leftists" laugh about his suicide. For my capitalist realism opened the door so I could escape the fucking cynicism and fear. It is really refreshing to see him being appreciated around here.

youtube.com/watch?v=7QFZWXtEwLw

>twitter leftists
perhaps in nagle's dreams she may happen to call herself mark fisher, but she really is one of those
>I've noted before that the way this mainstream socialist milieu treats people to their left reminds me a lot of the way Clintonites smeared them as "berniebros."
libcom.org/blog/do-marxian-academics-dream-affluent-larpers-17082017

I don’t have a twitter so I wouldn’t know. At any rate, I never compared Nagle with Fisher. I just shared the story because she goes in to detail on the way these fucking cunts reveled at the suicide of Fisher. I enjoyed Nagle’s book and her articles in Jacobin are usually pretty good.

Thank god the era of blogging is over so we don't have insufferable pseuds like Fisher running their mouth ad nauseum as if anyone but Simon, a few fringe academics, and dubstep DJs gave a fuck

GTFO

>era of blogging is over
There will soon be a blog revival if Reynolds' theories of Retromania have anything to say. Youtube is saturated with meme vlogger shitheads and social media is incredibly limiting for halfway intelligent expression nowadays.

WOW, fucking WOW. I thought I was all caught up on leftist in fighting but somehow I missed Libcom, or more precisely "Comrade Motopu" declaring that the fucking antifa anarkiddies were a sacred cow of leftism and that even criticising them was "concern trolling"

Just looking at that libcom article, it's literally "you criticised Antifa, therefore you support nazis and therefore you are a nazi".

What are the philosophical and ideological roots of this ill-logic on the left, this "you're either with us or against us" binary logic?

People like Freddie D Boer, Adam Proctor, Angela Nagle are all reasoned and insightful, the exact sort of people who can help create a mass movement, not these larping assholes.

>Thank god the era of blogging is over

What is Medium?

trying too hard

Where do I go from Capital Realism and Ghost of My Life? I'm reading some Jameson at the moment since Fisher continually references him.

Slavoj Zizek, Herbert Marcuse, Max Weber, Perry Anderson, Edward Thompson, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel Bell and ya boy Marx.

trying to hard to do what?

Nobody takes Medium seriously. It's clickbait for 30 year stay at home moms.