TWENTY-FIVE YEARS after it was first deposited at the University of Warwick, Zero Books has published the second edition of the PhD dissertation of its co-founder, the late English literary theorist Mark Fisher. Like the majority of Fisher’s work, I find Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism & Cybernetic Theory-Fiction both intriguing and frustrating. Fisher had an exceptional ability to sharpen the nebulous concepts of other theorists. Indeed, none of the terms associated with Fisher, such as hauntology, capitalist realism,1 or acid communism,2 were original to him. Rather, each was an already existing concept that Fisher appropriated and honed. Unfortunately, I often find that, despite his ability to develop tentative ideas into critical terminology, Fisher regularly struggled to follow through on their application.
It is unsurprising then that Flatline Constructs, as Fisher’s first major theoretical work, is an archetypical example of both his brilliance as a terminologist and his shortcomings in critical application.
Flatline Constructs is effectively a large-scale attempt to better define “hyperrealist” literature. Fisher is particularly concerned with disentangling hyperrealism from the “metafiction” associated with literary theory on so-called “postmodern” literature. This disentangling is a means to differentiating then-contemporary cyberpunk fiction, best exemplified by William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, as a unique literary development, a “new realism” that “begins to affect, rather than simply reflect” the world.3 In fact, Fisher believes that cyberpunk literature is not only quite different from metafiction, but it’s opposite. Metafiction is defined by its tendency to comment on literary conventions, heightening the reader's awareness of the fictional space by highlighting its formal boundaries. Cyberpunk, according to Fisher, is distinct from metafiction because it collapses these boundaries; it does not reinforce fiction’s status as fiction by commenting on it, but acts as an extension of reality; it is hyperreal.
As one follows his attempt to demarcate the specificity of hyperrealism, Fisher’s commitment to the Spinozist faction of the “new materialist” wave that overtook certain quarters of anglophone academia in the 1990s is on full display. As a result, his terminological apparatus is littered with explicit appeals to the work of French theorists Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, whose co-written books in the 1970s and 80s were pivotal to introducing the ideas of seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, especially his form of ontological monism, to a generation of anglophone scholars outside philosophy departments. Spinozist ontological monism is important to Fisher’s project because it provides the philosophical backing for his own claims regarding cyberpunk fiction’s hyperrealism. Simply put, the Spinozist position sees difference as an epistemological construct without ontological status.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard also looms large as Fisher’s primary source for the concept of hyperrealism. However, Fisher subjects Baudrillard to a sympathetic critique from his Spinozist perspective in an attempt to do what he did best—hone an idea—in this case hyperrealism, into an applied literary theoretical concept.
Fisher masterfully deploys a number of nested theoretical terms that slowly establish the parameters of hyperrealism in order to highlight cyberpunk’s novelty: gothic materialism, gothic flatline, anorganic continuum, and hyperrealism are the major theoretical terms that mutually constitute a framework for cyberpunk’s particularity. Gothic, as defined by Fisher, is that which destabilizes the distinction between life and nonlife, organic and inorganic, biological and mechanical, map and territory. In classic gothic literature, we are never sure where the lines between these aspects of reality lie, or if they even exist at all. In other words, gothic literature has Spinozist ontological implications.
Fisher’s macro-theoretical perspective is that of “Gothic materialism.”4 Gothic materialism goes a step further than the gothic proper by openly collapsing the ontological distinction between life and nonlife, organic and inorganic, biological and mechanical, map and territory. This “gothic flatline,” sometimes also described by Fisher as the “anorganic continuum,” is the “unnameable” ontologically monist implication of classic gothic literature; there is no meaningful difference between human beings and the world around them.
Nested within gothic materialism, the gothic flatline, and the anorganic continuum, is hyperrealism. Hyperrealist fiction is literature which does not recognize a distinction between itself and reality. In other words, hyperrealist fiction is that which acts as an extension of reality, “continuous with ‘the world’” rather than a reflection of it.5 Rather than comment on itself or the world, hyperrealist fiction extends the world as an augmentation of reality. This is where Fisher’s elaborate discussions of Spinozist monism are key, because the realism of hyperrealism is not in fictional literature’s representation of the ‘reality’ it describes, but in that literature’s ability to collapse the ontological distinction between fiction and real life. Cyberpunk makes explicit what remains implicit in classic gothic literature, so much so that the fictional in cyberpunk loses its fabricated character and becomes an extension of the world. This is what makes it gothic materialist and differentiates it from metafiction.
Fisher’s primary critique of Baudrillard emerges as he constructs his argument for gothic materialism. Despite adapting Baudrillard’s terminology, gothic materialism embraces the hyperreality of the gothic flatline/anorganic continuum, something Baudrillard resists. Fisher describes this resistance as a type of “primitivism.” According to Fisher, Baudrillard wants to maintain a state in which fiction can continue to reflect reality and map it. In other words, Baudrillard stands against a world in which “map and territory are… confused,”6 while gothic materialism welcomes it.
From a literary theoretical perspective, Fisher’s gothic materialism was a tour de force, in which he drew from numerous strands of then-contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and sociology to produce a meticulous, systematic definition of what he believed to be a novel literary development. Yet, Fisher’s practical deployments of gothic materialism fall utterly short of the framework’s brilliance and specificity.
The climax of Fisher’s description of his theoretical edifice comes in chapter four, when he reintroduces hyperrealism, newly framed in the context of gothic materialism. His key example of the hyperreal, however, is not a piece of cyberpunk literature, but the 1995 Disney-Pixar animated film Toy Story:
Take this example of Disney’s Toy Story… Here, in a film that was entirely generated by computer animation, digitised versions of old toys are presented next to new, ‘fictionalised’ toys. But fictionality has a new sense here: it no longer has anything to do with a fantastic unattainability: on the contrary, the toys onscreen are available, immediately, as consumer objects, as soon as you leave the cinema. The toys really are toys. In an increasingly familiar pattern, the film functions as an advertisement for the toys, which function as an advertisement for it, in an ever-tightening spiral. The fictional is immediately real, in the most palpable sense: it can be bought. This, then, is hyperfiction: a process whereby fiction and reality are radically smeared.7
In the concluding section of Flatline Constructs, Fisher pivots to a discussion of the hyperrealism of John Carpenter’s 1994 horror film In The Mouth Of Madness. For those readers who do not know this film, In The Mouth Of Madness is metafiction par excellence. The plot follows insurance investigator John Trent, who is hired to locate Sutter Cane, a world-famous horror novelist who has recently gone missing. Trent’s investigation takes place against a backdrop in which Cane’s billions of fans are increasingly unable to distinguish between reality and the world of Cane’s novels. As Trent’s investigation deepens, a part of which included his having read Cane’s corpus, his own ability to distinguish reality from Cane’s fictional universe also begins to break down. Eventually, the line collapses entirely and Cane’s fictional horrors 'break into’ the ‘real world.’
In The Mouth Of Madness is, quite clearly, an explicit commentary on the hyperrealist state of horror literature and cinema, rather than being hyperrealist itself. In fact, the film is the opposite of what Fisher describes as hyperrealist, since it loudly proclaims itself as a reflection on the then-current condition of horror fiction. Despite having described it as hyperrealist,8 on the final page of his dissertation, Fisher, in a shocking about-face, admits that In The Mouth Of Madness, unlike Toy Story, is not:
Ultimately, of course, In the Mouth of Madness is stopped from spiralling into schizo-implex by the fact that it depicts rather than constitutes… It goes as far as it can go, implexing the film into itself, by presenting In the Mouth of Madness, the movie, as a part of the promotion of Cane’s novel. But when we leave the cinema, we cannot buy Sutter Cane’s novels (in the same way that we can buy the Toys of Toy Story — a fact which, when we reflect upon it, might make the Disney film the more terrifying of the two…
It is unclear whether Fisher is aware of how damaging this statement is to the basic thesis of Flatline Constructs. What Fisher admits regarding In The Mouth Of Madness is equally applicable to almost every piece of literature and cinema he discusses, especially William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the archetypical cyberpunk novel and key text through which Fisher builds much of his literary analysis. Neuromancer, unlike Toy Story but similar to In The Mouth Of Madness, is a speculative commentary on hyperrealism, rather than hyperrealist itself.
Fisher’s strange reversal on In The Mouth Of Madness serves as a synecdoche for all the literature and cinema discussed in Flatline Constructs. It is a substitute for the whole of Fisher’s applied project. If none of these works, such Gibson’s Neuromancer, J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, actually exhibit hyperrealism as defined by gothic materialism, what exactly are they doing and why is Fisher interested in them? Fisher has an answer, but it is deeply disappointing. In the dissertation’s second to last sentence, Fisher commits a massive blunder which undermines his project entirely. He states that these works are “‘guide book[s]’ to the increasingly strange terrain of capitalism.”9
If Gibson’s Neuromancer and the many other pieces of fiction Fisher discusses are guide books, then the gothic materialist ontological collapse that Fisher claims has destroyed the map-territory distinction, produced the anorganic continuum, and allowed for the emergence of hyperrealism has not actually occurred, or at least not on the scale Fisher implies. If the purpose of these works is to map capitalism, have we not returned to the position of so-called “primitivist” resistance to gothic materialism exhibited by Baudrillard? Have we not abandoned the gothic materialist embrace of the radical monism implied by the anorganic continuum? And doesn’t the fact that numerous pieces of fiction are still capable of making a distinction between reflection and reality undermine the whole of Fisher’s project? These are questions which explode into the open on the final page of Flatline Constructs, but are left unanswered. Like in so much of Fisher’s work, the brilliant theoretical apparati developed in Flatline Constructs disintegrate in the process of actual application, when Fisher’s own conceptual specificity comes back to haunt him.
This phenomenon is not particular to Flatline Constructs. Throughout his career, Fisher repeatedly defined hard-hitting theoretical terms only to jettison their specificity when it came time to apply them. This is best-represented by a concept that Fisher is well-known for and that some readers may know as well; hauntology.
Jacques Derrida first coined hauntology in the early nineties as a temporal play on ontology and a placeholder term for a theory of the relation between past, present, and future.10 Fisher’s adaptation of hauntology makes good on Derrida’s tentative term by specifying its meaning. The hauntological, according to Fisher, is an aesthetic mode by which art exhibits a nostalgia for a past during which the idea of a future,11 with all of its utopic connotations, was possible. Fisher’s version of hauntology makes the abstract ontological relation articulated by Derrida concrete. The ontological relationship between past, present, and future is instantiated in art that, literally, brings them into a relation by yearning in the present for a past in which there was a future. The hauntological aesthetic exhibits not merely nostalgia, but “nostalgia for the future.”12
Despite his brilliant adaptation of Derrida’s concept, Fisher’s actual applications of this term often failed to live up to the standards of his own definition. The works of literature, music, television, and cinema that Fisher describes as hauntological often do have haunting qualities, but rarely do they exhibit the extremely specific mode of nostalgia he initially outlined. In the second chapter of Fisher’s 2014 work, Ghosts of My Life, which presents a series of case studies in hauntology, the specificity of the term disappears almost entirely. Only in his approach to the music of experimental musician James Leyland Kirby,13 around which he first developed his definition of the term, does Fisher seem to make a real case that the aesthetic products in question actually exhibit hauntological qualities.
In the course of analyzing Kirby’s 2006 project, Death of the Rave, Fisher claims the tracks, produced to “sound like they are being heard from outside a club,” are a “horribly accurate sonic metaphor… of our current state of exile from the future-shocking rate of innovation that dance music achieved in the 80s and 90s.”14 In other words, the strategic use of a low pass filter to simulate the experience of hearing electronic dance music through a wall is meant to articulate a nostalgia for a time in the history of this musical milieu when the future of the music existed as a positive category. Yet even here it is unclear whether the music itself exhibits this aesthetic mode or if Fisher is actually describing his own affective reaction to Kirby’s music. Of course, these are neither mutually exclusive nor even necessarily different phenomena, but Fisher fails to meaningfully engage with the question.
How can we account for Fisher’s inability to make good on critical terminology? Throughout Flatline Constructs, it’s difficult to distinguish between what Fisher actually believes the literature he’s analyzing is doing and what he wants it to be doing. For most of the work, Fisher seems to be describing what cyberpunk literature is already doing, rather than making prescriptions. But while cyberpunk is initially presented as novel, even revolutionary, Fisher eventually admits that the literature and cinema he’s analyzed is far more mundane in its project; it doesn’t collapse the border between fiction and reality, it merely maps capitalism, something Fisher initially dismisses as Baudrillardian primitivism. Fisher seems to want it both ways. Cyberpunk must be both a revolutionary aesthetic development in fiction and have practical utility to those of an anti-capitalist persuasion, which necessitates a contradiction: it must be both hyperrealist and social realist. In other words, cyberpunk must both collapse the border between fiction and reality, as well as reflect social reality in a typical realist, allegorical style. Importantly, Fisher doesn’t tell us any of this; it must be painstakingly extracted from the text.
Fisher’s desire to have it both ways, as well as his unwillingness to state such openly, is a direct result of the proscription on prescription in anglophone academic left literary theory. In Flatline Constructs, as in much anglophone left academic literary theory, this proscription emerges in the form of a well-worn bugbear; socialist realism. Fisher uses “socialist-realist” and “social-realist” interchangeably to refer to a nebulous literary theoretical approach that is incompatible with his theory of gothic materialism. The only example Fisher provides of this “socialist-realist” approach is the work of critical theorist Douglas Kellner, a surprising choice given Kellner is an acolyte of Frankfurt School figures opposed to socialist realism as a politico-aesthetic project. What Kellner does do in his own writings on literature, however, is make prescriptions. Kellner’s work at the turn of the millennium focused on how to use literature to build critical media literacy, which he believes is a prerequisite of effective socialist organizing. For much of left literary theory, including Fisher, this is one step too far. One cannot openly state a literary theoretical prescription because such action is the first step on the road to Stalinism and aesthetic dogmatism.
The kernel of the original socialist realist project was an attempt to outline social goals for communist writers. Politically committed literature, seen as a pedagogical tool, needed to be oriented around the pursuit of producing a specific affect in the reader. This type of prescription for literature, i.e. that it have a social goal, is not necessarily mutually exclusive with aesthetic pluralism. But in the crux of the Cold War, prescribing any goal for literature (as well as other artforms) became conflated in left academic literary theory with the official imposition of aesthetic guidelines. Outlining a goal for literature came to be seen as either mutually constitutive of or even identical with imposing aesthetic limits.
Fisher, unable to clearly tell the reader what cyberpunk does or what he believes it should do, provides a confused, contradictory mix of both; a consequence of the proscription on explicit statements of subjective literary purpose. This proscription is still in force today. Socialist theorists and critics of literature (and other arts) rarely go beyond the realm of descriptive analysis. But bold theories of literature’s social goals are necessary if we want to build a dynamic socialist movement. Indeed, the capitalist realism of the present, described by Fisher as a state in which the future no longer exists as a positive category, has much to do with the proscription on prescription. If we are not allowed to make claims regarding what literature should be doing, then literature will effectively do nothing.
As discussed earlier, this review is in response to the recently-published second edition of Fisher’s Flatline Constructs. The first edition was published by the NYC-based small press exmilitary in 2018. Unfortunately, Zero Books has not made significant improvements to the text and, in certain cases, decisions were made that have negatively affected the reading experience.
In exmilitary’s edition, Fisher’s footnotes were maintained as such. This was extremely helpful to the reader as, like many dissertations, Flatline Constructs contains numerous footnotes that include lengthy commentary on sources. Zero Books, however, made the decision to transform Fisher’s footnotes into endnotes, meaning that a reader is now required to constantly flip back and forth in the book. More damningly, partway through the fourth chapter,15 a mistake in endnote order has created a situation in which in-text superscript numbers and endnotes no longer match one another. As a result, the reader is directed by the superscript to incorrect endnotes for a significant portion of the work’s final section.
In the first edition of Flatline Constructs, exmilitary made the strange decision to not include Fisher’s “Notes on References,” which can be found following the table of contents in his original dissertation manuscript. This section provided information on in-text citation abbreviations for eighteen sources. The failure to include it created a situation in which Fisher’s numerous in-text citations were incomprehensible to the reader. The inclusion of these two pages would have improved readability immensely, but Zero Books has made the bizarre choice to again exclude this in-text citation key.
The only real improvement Zero Books has made is the addition of Adam C. Jones' introduction. The introduction to exmilitary’s edition provided interesting contextual-biographical information on Fisher’s graduate work at University of Warwick and concurrent participation in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, but was much too long and included lengthy quotes of Flatline Constructs in its attempts to summarize Fisher’s project, an annoyance to a reader who is about to read the dissertation for themselves. Jones presents largely the same contextual-biographical information on Fisher, but is able to summarize Fisher’s project and introduce the dissertation’s key ideas succinctly, without reference to large quotes of the text.
However, this discussion prompts the question of why, exactly, Zero Books has decided to produce a new edition of Flatline Constructs? If not to make significant improvements or, at the very least, changes to the available existing edition, why republish this work? I imagine that part of the answer is financial. Fisher is a beloved figure in certain quarters of the Left and there is likely some (though comparatively not much) money to be made in producing a new edition of his dissertation.
But I find it difficult to believe there is an impetus behind this publication outside the financial logic. Flatline Constructs is a fascinating work, but is very much of its time and does not speak very deeply to the current moment. In fact, it is Fisher’s failures that are the most constructive aspect of his dissertation for socialists today, but those are buried deep within the text and necessitate intensive, time consuming close reading to extricate. Publishing a new edition of the dissertation for its own sake is, in my opinion, perfectly legitimate. Indeed, Flatline Constructs is a worthwhile read for those solely interested in gaining a better understanding of Fisher’s work. But to do this right would mean taking seriously the need to publish a version of the text that made significant improvements over the already existing edition. Unfortunately, Zero Books has not done this.