Libidinality is in danger

About Mark Fisher's book “k-punk”

At the end of last year, a posthumous collection of texts by Mark Fisher, a philosopher, cultural theorist and music critic, was published in Russian. After reading the publication, Artem Rondarev discovered a rather unexpected reason for the popularity of this author among domestic music lovers.

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

Mark Fisher. k‑punk. Favorites. M.: Ad Marginem Press, 2024. Translation from English by Lena Son, Anna Sotnikova, Lev Levchenko.Content

For some time now, I have become interested in the phenomenon of popularity among our inquisitive music lovers of the works of music journalist Simon Reynolds, the author of a number of very lengthy books on the history of pop music, three of which have been translated and published here, while such luminaries of pop music research as Simon Frith, Allen Moore or - if you absolutely need the left - at least the Marxist Adam Krims are practically unknown among us. Moreover, it is not to say that Reynolds’ text and approach were somehow significantly simpler than those mentioned above, and therefore more accessible to readers and translators: Reynolds’ books are a very dreary reading for a different taste, a third of their volume is merciless name-dropping and listing of dates, names of styles, genres, scenes, clubs, raves, and so on; between this there are lengthy quotes from the gentleman's collection of so-called left cultural studies - Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Althusser, you name it, in places attached to the reasoning almost with wire; and, finally, all this is ruled by his favorite idea that modern pop music has lost the ability to renew itself and, stamp after stamp, reproduces samples of the music of the past - an idea that at least does not shine with novelty and to which we will return here. However, after reading the book that will be discussed here, I began to better understand the reason for this popularity.

k-punk is a collection of essays, interviews and posts on the eponymous (and very famous) blog of Mark Fisher, a philosopher, cultural theorist, music critic and founder of two publishing houses, who committed suicide in 2017. Fisher was a colleague, friend, and in some ways a student of Reynolds, as you might guess without even looking at Wikipedia: he quotes Reynolds on any subject with the same obsessiveness as Perry Anderson Jameson. In ideological terms, of course, everything is the same here: again Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Althusser plus, of course, Zizek and Nick Land, as well as psychoanalysis - Freud, Lacan, the disintegration of the object of desire, the “libidinization” of everything and everyone ( “my official position now is that instead of “desire” we should say “libido””; “...if not for the quantitative scale of Arctic Monkeys’ success. The fastest-selling debut album in the UK in history! This speaks of a libidinal deficit both among the audience and the good old media observers” etc.).

Despite the “musical” title of the book, there is little about music in it - three articles from a blog, a couple of interviews and rare illustrations in texts on other topics. There are lengthy discussions here about depression (as is to be expected from someone who has committed suicide during a depressive episode) and about the nature of the various kinds of stress and inability to assume an appropriate social role that characterize the neuroticized self-consciousness of the post-Fordist precariat. He believes his depression is more a social, economic, and even class-based phenomenon: “ For me, the biggest impact was on class, although, of course, gender, race and other forms of oppression give rise to the same feeling of ontological inferiority, best expressed in the idea that I formulated above: you will never be able to fulfill the role that is prescribed to the group that dominates you.” This kind of hypostatization of it in the social and economic space allows him to use depression as a lens applicable for social, class and even cultural analysis: its presence is clearly felt in his judgments about cinema and music, giving them a rather melancholic tone.

There are quite interesting things here - discussions about “capitalist realism” (by analogy with socialist realism), that is, about such a media and political idea, within the framework of which it is postulated that nothing but capitalism not only does not exist, but is also impossible in principle; about the “privatization of stress,” that is, about the idea transmitted by media capitalism that all stress is the responsibility of the individual, since he can always get rid of it with the help of psychotherapy, coaches, meditation, and so on. There is a short but succinct overview here (more like a digest - Fisher constantly quotes someone) of the problems faced by the precariat in the modern digital world, the autonomist model of the reconstruction of society, and so on: in general, it can be stated that the main goal of the collection is criticism of capitalism, and various kinds of cultural criticism adapt to it. Nevertheless, I will leave this part of it aside: firstly, because reviewing yet another critique of capitalism in our time is even somewhat absurd, and secondly, it is not the most interesting thing here. So next we'll focus on pop music themes.

Fischer writes well - succinctly, mostly briefly and figuratively. His applied discussions about pop music and the subcultures surrounding it are insightful and effective, primarily because he does not mince words (which is natural when it comes to blog posts). He dispenses sarcastic characterizations of performers and bands (with some particular dislike for The Birthday Party). His short analysis of the ideology and aesthetic preferences of the hippies, whom he considers a patriarchal misogynistic subculture of majors, preoccupied with their inner world and therefore expelling all sensuality from “their” music, is ferocious, beautiful and accurate. His observation that punk directly stemmed from glam and that glam is, in fact, already punk, was quite a fresh idea for the time of its appearance (2004) (two years later this topic would be developed by Philipp Ausländer in his book about glam). His dislike of postmodernism and his belief that true art-pop, as he calls it, must be modernist are, to say the least, peculiar.

However, then from pragmatics he moves on to the actual analysis of pop music phenomena. This analysis, with almost no options, is done through the prism of psychoanalysis and represents, as is usual in such cases, a stream of statements, which, in addition, are obvious only to those who are, as they say, on the same wavelength with him: the first and most obvious problem with them is that they are not verifiable in any way and are completely useless as tools. Among his messages there are at least interesting ones: for example, the reasoning that women of the post-glam scene (he cites the example of Grace Jones and Susie from Banshee) are objects that objectify themselves, who thus avoid becoming objects of male desire, is amusing, but it is completely unclear what follows from this - most of Fisher’s statements of this kind are hermetic and self-sufficient, no conclusions are drawn from them, with the full feeling from his intonation that there should be conclusions. Judgments of this kind, in fairness, look much more intelligible or at least comprehensible to him than passages of the same kind from the same Reynolds, on the one hand, or the same Zizek, on the other, or, on the third, from a whole cohort of like-minded British journalists and cultural experts, whom he quotes a lot: he, as a rule, knows how to stop at the very edge of that notorious rabbit hole of endless stringing of concepts and epithets, from which it is quite difficult resist, as soon as you have mastered a certain way of reasoning, which quite quickly degenerates into a kind of academic bullshit. Nevertheless, these are all adventures of words: it’s interesting to read, ok, but it has very little to do with music.

Very persistently (as they would say in blogs of a different kind - with a “selling” intonation), both Fisher and Reynolds, who soon also appears on the pages of this book, refer to the idea of “huntology”: a term they and Reynolds borrowed from Derrida, from whom he described “the study of what repeats without ever being real ”, and reinterpreted as the nostalgia of the contemporary media space and the space of popular culture for a past that, in essence, never existed, and, as a consequence, a future that never came. In music, according to Fisher and Reynolds, this concept describes the state of loss by producers of a musical product of a certain model of the future and, as a consequence, their loss of vitality and ability to self-renewal: this topic is discussed in detail in Reynolds’s “Retromania” translated from us, Fisher touches on it little and carefully, but the idea of erosion of the idea of the future and, as a result, an anemic reproduction of the forms and aesthetics of the past by pop music is built into the general narrative of the collapse of modern society and the inability of its participants have more control over your own time. (Of course, all this is generously flavored with the theme of the loss of “libidinality” by producers and consumers of music, but since the loss of “libidinality” explains everything here, there is little sense in this statement about the process of music production: if everything is due to the loss of libidinality, then the problems of music, of course, too, and therefore, why repeat.)

That is, it all looks good on paper: however, for the sake of the idea, a very local problem is scaled up and generalized, and some subjective and sometimes literally crazy arguments are given to justify this generalization. “ To say that pop music was better twenty-five years ago is NOT being nostalgic; on the contrary, it means resisting the ubiquitous, hermetic, total nostalgia that not only tolerates, but enthusiastically accepts the latest burps of the indie conveyor belt ” - in this phrase one can find fault with literally every word. Revivalism in pop music is a long-standing and venerable thing: ska revival, neo-swing, modern Dixieland - the list is endless. In order to postulate that at some point (according to Fischer, in the late 90s) the completely healthy practice of reproducing old forms and genres mutated into some fundamentally different, pervasive and total state, you still need to have something more solid and practical than “loss of libidinality.”

Ultimately, this whole idea of ​​“huntology” begins to sound suspiciously like the squeak that the grass was greener before, and in general, this seems to be one of the reasons for its popularity among, so to speak, “young people”: Reynolds and Fisher seem to reappropriate the, um, “age” trope of a brighter past and make it an object of criticism. If the old people dream about it, then the militant youth fights it, armed with Derrida, Lacan, autonomism and libidinality. Fischer finds a class approach here too: “ What distinguishes the left from the right is their commitment to the idea that liberation is in the future, not in the past .” Criticism of the cult of the past is criticism of capitalism: who, at twenty years old, would not subscribe to such a struggle, if he, of course, has a heart? Here it is easy to see that what is problematic in this case is the very fact (and act) of appropriating the trope of the “bright past”: before you fight it, you need to believe in it, and here, as was said, it is not far from “the grass was greener” (and Fischer’s quoted above phrase “To say that pop music was better twenty-five years ago does NOT mean nostalgia” sounds here as a rather helpless attempt to fight off such an accusation).

At the same time, it is characteristic that in discussions about music there are sometimes statements that are extremely strange in their somewhat loud banality for a person who is certainly smart and well-read (“ The revolutionary storm of the post-punk era raged with anxiety, anxiety, uncertainty, rage, severity, injustice, that is, it was imbued with an atmosphere of tireless criticism. And on today’s pop scene the ball is ruled by lethargy, complacent acceptance, passive hedonism, pretentious self-satisfaction (just look at ALL THESE music awards!), in a word - PR "), although, of course, I repeat, we need to make allowances for the fact that this is all written on a blog. Nevertheless, in the end, as such (rather rare, to be fair) mistakes appear, one gets the impression that when Fischer goes beyond his usual mode of speech with copious quotations and hermetic reasoning, largely associated with psychoanalysis, into the territory of direct statements and value judgments, it becomes problematic for him to communicate something new or at least impressive.

In addition, at some point the ghost of a clan, claque, or combat cell begins to clearly loom here. In a joint interview with Reynolds, both Fischer and Reynolds sound completely indistinguishable from each other at times: “ But overall the idea of ​​the future seems to have lost its libidinal charge for electronic producers and fans alike ” - which of them is this quote from? (answer: Reynolds). Nevertheless, in this interview, Fischer is much more effective than Reynolds - he speaks less and argues more, while Reynolds, even here, continues to throw out the names of styles, genres, clubs, and so on, like a routine - there is a feeling that he simply cannot write or speak differently, because this, in fact, is his main method ( "... similar trajectories unfolded in Europe, with the advent of gabba, trance and the evolution minimal techno"; "At a certain point, London hardcore/jungle took a sharp turn, slowed down and absorbed the sensuality of house music, starting with speed garage in 1997 and continuing with even slower and sexier two-step" - and there are five pages of text there). However, this conversation in unison, constant cross-references to each other (mainly on the part of Fisher as a “junior” employee of the department) and friendly defense of not entirely self-evident and not very carefully formulated postulates create the impression of some kind of collective and even partly sectarian sermon of people broadcasting the correct teaching.

Nevertheless, as a result, a certain kind of hype around Fisher - and, by extension, Reynolds - becomes clearer. Although the texts in this book are written in a traditionally irresponsible “academic” language, this language is easy, precise and charming: people for whom this language is familiar will, of course, find this book understandable and, as they say, their own. If they are then asked to interpret the messages contained in it and draw from them any conclusions that have even remote pragmatics, they, of course, will not be able to do this, because this language is self-sufficient and self-referential. But who needs pragmatics when libidinality is in danger?