I hadn’t heard of Andy Wright, but it sounds like he was a fine chap. A pity about him.
There’s a lot to be said for Eno’s Scenius theory (thank you for introducing me to it!).
I think about many of the leading lights of the 60s and 70s (Godard, Bowie etc) who struggled to rise above mediocrity in the 80s. The counterculture they’d thrived in had by then dissipated, along with the somewhat mysterious energies that’d animated that culture.
Also Mark Fisher. The dissolution of what I call the Fishersphere (the British left-wing blogging milieu of the 2000s, of which he was the central figure) seems to have taken its toll on his creative energies. After Capitalist Realism all of his books, while certainly offering writing of very high calibre, were merely rehashes of K-Punk posts he’d made in the 2000s. And I think the intellectual collapse of the wider Left in the 2010s was another blow for Fisher.
I liked tWatE, but since reading it I’ve reached the conclusion a pure Critical Theory approach to this kind of subject matter is insufficient. You have to at least engage with theology and esotericism (even if only to reject them). Of course such engagement is something that’s always been eschewed by Marxist writers, a few notables excepted (eg Walter Benjamin).
The Postcapitalist Desire lectures were engaging, though I was disappointed that Fisher seemed to have retreated from his strong anti-woke stance of Escaping the Vampire Castle.
Another great article! The COVID definitely hasn't resulted in brain fog!
I hadn’t heard of Andy Wright, but it sounds like he was a fine chap. A pity about him.
There’s a lot to be said for Eno’s Scenius theory (thank you for introducing me to it!).
I think about many of the leading lights of the 60s and 70s (Godard, Bowie etc) who struggled to rise above mediocrity in the 80s. The counterculture they’d thrived in had by then dissipated, along with the somewhat mysterious energies that’d animated that culture.
Also Mark Fisher. The dissolution of what I call the Fishersphere (the British left-wing blogging milieu of the 2000s, of which he was the central figure) seems to have taken its toll on his creative energies. After Capitalist Realism all of his books, while certainly offering writing of very high calibre, were merely rehashes of K-Punk posts he’d made in the 2000s. And I think the intellectual collapse of the wider Left in the 2010s was another blow for Fisher.
Yeah, Weird and Eerie is not great, but Post-Capitalist Desire lectures showed promise.
I liked tWatE, but since reading it I’ve reached the conclusion a pure Critical Theory approach to this kind of subject matter is insufficient. You have to at least engage with theology and esotericism (even if only to reject them). Of course such engagement is something that’s always been eschewed by Marxist writers, a few notables excepted (eg Walter Benjamin).
The Postcapitalist Desire lectures were engaging, though I was disappointed that Fisher seemed to have retreated from his strong anti-woke stance of Escaping the Vampire Castle.
Agree.
I guess you have to make some concessions to the vampires to lecture in a university nowadays.
Of course it was Exiting, not Escaping (the latter sounds like some 1985 ZX Spectrum epic coded by some lone, full-bearded bedroom genius.