FISHER, Mark
Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction

!8? The first printed publication of Mark Fisher’s 1999 PhD thesis on cybernetics in literature, cyberpunk fiction, capitalism, and gothic literature.

“Mark Fisher clicked send in 1999. The unpromising year – of forecasted occurrences, appearances and happenings – hosted the reception of his PhD dissertation at the University of Warwick – a site notorious today for a select cohort and non-tradition that Fisher continued to unearth and fabulate until his death last year. The disclosures of Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction are manic, stimulative and depressive; a glimpse into a previous and insular era of fi ction and theory that was, to be thought of, at its peak in the 1990s and yet colossally archaic in 21st century hindsight. Hysteria of the year 1999, and Y2K as a foundational hyperstitional event, should come at no surprise as a contagious and memetic inspiration for cyberpunk theory-fi ction. The chronological prophecy from 19991 to 2000 is either entirely a fabrication suspect to illusions of ends or an underlined portrayal of the ongoing climatological yet air-conditioned disaster in progress both hiding the conceit that contemporary (of Fisher’s time and ours) culture is a ruinous disaster, vacuously invaluable. Optimistic postulates to the contrary are relapsed simulations of Minervian owls, serpentine coils, twittering birds, redemptive angels facing forward.”
— from the Forward by exmilitary

“One of the aims of Flatline Constructs is to play off Deleuze-Guattari and Baudrillard against each other on the question the Meyrinck’s passage poses. In developing theories radically antipathetic to subjectivity, Deleuze-Guattari and Baudrillard have occupied parallel trajectories, sometimes closely intermeshing,
sometimes radically diverging. One common feature is the – cybernetic – emphasis on code (as we shall see, one major difference between them concerns the role of decoding).”
— Mark Fisher

Chap. 1 Screams_Screens_Flatlines: Cybernetics, Postmodernism, and the Gothic
Chap. 2 Body Image Fading Down Corridors of Television Sky: The Media Landscape and the Schizophrenic Implosion of Subjectivity
Chap. 3 Xeros and Xenogenesis: Mechanical Reproduction and Gothic Propagation
Chap. 4 Black Mirror: Hypernaturalism, Hyperreality, and Hyperfiction

Published by Exmilitary Press
Essays / Politics / Science/Fiction