Mark Fisher

Donna Haraway's celebrated observation that "our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert" has given this issue a certain currency in contemporary cyber-theory. But what is in- teresting about Haraway's remark - its challenge to the oppositional think- ing that sets up free will against determinism, vitalism against mechanism - has seldom been processed by a mode of theorizing which has tended to reproduce exactly the same oppositions. These theoretical failings, it will be argued here, arise from a resistance to pursuing cybernetics to its limits (a failure evinced as much by cyberneticists as by cultural theorists, it must be added). Unraveling the implications of cybernetics, it will be claimed, takes us out to the Gothic flatline. The Gothic flatline designates a zone of radical immanence. And to theorize this flatline demands a new approach, one committed to the theorization of immanence. This thesis calls that approach Gothic Materialism.

Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction

Flatline Constructs

Lily

Mark submitted this thesis to the University of Warwick in 1999 and earned his PhD. In it, he explores a radical plane of immanence, namely "the Gothic flatline" on which the anthropocentric tendency to give agency to inanimate objects is subverted, so that everything —animate or inanimate —is seen as 'dead'. Following Donna Haraway’s remark that "our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert", Mark sets out to pursue this notion to its theoretical cybernetics limit: "What if we are as ‘dead’ as the machines"?
As with his later published work, Mark adorns his theories with familiar media. This thesis contains his explorations of cybernetic themes in postmodern approaches and terms within the language of Horror [Deleuze-Guattari] such as vampirism, zombification, etc., Baudrillardian notions of "Science Fictional" body and what makes cyberpunk Gothic Materialist with its departure from an instrumental view of technology and the organs, analysis of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, Samuel Butler's Erewhon and Gibson’s Neuromancer in lieu of Deleuze-Guattari's reconstructive arguments in Anti-Oedipus. The final chapter of the thesis focuses on the meaning of hyperfiction and establishes its position as a plane of radical immanence.
While it is an enjoyable read —especially as it portrays a primary sketch of what later became Mark's signature prose and style of writing—it is not always easy and smooth, and gets quite technical at times; this is a thesis, after all. Being at least familiar with the numerous works of philosophy and literature that Mark draws from is helpful, if not necessary, for following his colorful train of thought.

Flatline Constructs Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction

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