this is the interview that Mark Fisher mentions in his essay.
the interview begins with a question that seems innocent but sets the tone of the interview, that is, to de-weaponize Russell Brand’s pro-immigrant, pro-communist, anti-homophobic position: “who are you to edit a political magazine?” opens Paxman.
Russell Brand doesn’t exist in isolation — he is known, a member of a specific society, in a specific world on Earth, so the question is intended to bring up this very social matrix associated with this dividual labeled Russell Brand.
this is why in the essay Fisher makes mention of a f@c3b00k post someone made that said Brand is “clearly extremely unstable […] one bad relationship or career knockback away from collapsing back into drug addiction or worse.”
and that is why Paxman follows up with: “is it true you don’t even vote? well, how do you have any authority to talk about politics?”
implying of course that anyone who does not vote has no say in politics.
parenthetically, if anyone is interested in exploring why this thinking/behavior of Paxman materially exists, check out Bruce Cohen’s “Psychiatric Hegemony.” there he explains how dissent is pathologized via the media machine, medical machine, family machine, and school machine.
anyway, to Paxman’s stupidity, Brand replies:
well Paxman, i don’t get my authority from this pre-existing paradigm which is quite narrow and only serves a few people. i look elsewhere for alternatives that might be of service to humanity. alternative as in alternative political systems.
and because the Spectacle is on the move here, Paxman tries to corner Brand by asking, “them [these alternative political systems] being?” suggesting that he has to have it figured out if he is to know what he’s talking about.
again, Brand dances beautifully:
well i haven’t invented them yet Jeremy, i had to do a magazine last week, i’ve had a lot on me plate, but i say, here’s the thing it shouldn’t do:
shouldn’t destroy the planet, shouldn’t create massive economic disparity, shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people.
the burden of proof is on the people with the power, not people doing a magazine for novelty.
Paxman the bloom has no idea what to do with this. he’s off script, he’s glitching: “you get power by being voted in.”
Paxman returns to the message they’re trying to get across: “i’m saying if you can’t be arsed to vote, why should we be asked to listen to your political point of view?”
of course we all know who don’t vote: the majority minority — a majority in numbers but minority in visibility, a minority in the Spectacle.
here they attempt to negate the authority of our indignance.
but Brand is championing for us at this moment:
i’m not-voting out of apathy, i’m not-voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies and treachery and deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations now, and which has now reached feverpitch when we have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that are not being represented by that political system — so voting for it is tacit complicity with that system.
Paxman, sitting cross-legged, invoking an air of paternalism, tries to trap Brand and the viewer to a circular logic: “why don’t you change it then… by voting?”
Brand breaks a smile.
this smile says, “are you really that fucking stupid? did you listen to any fucking word i just said to you? what do you think ‘disenfranchised’ fucking means?”
the interview goes on and then Paxman introduces the second dyad: “you don’t believe in democracy, you want a revolution don’t you” which is to say, “revolutions aren’t democratic.”
of course, we know this isn’t true. revolutions are democratic: the will of a people is finally imposed.
Brand disarms Paxman with compliments and jokes, breaks the tenseness. he’s serious about this but he’s a light character, there’s playfulness to him. it’s serious in that all these negatives are happening due to a political system that assumes the existence of infinite resources while existing in a finite planet, which benefits only a few; but it’s not to serious that it keeps him from cracking a joke and enjoying life.
a revolution, after all, is a life-affirming event, it is the positive affirmation of negativity: we negate everything not for the sake of Destruction but for the sake of Creation.
Paxman tries to push Brand into revealing a scheme, “what’s the scheme, how are you going to bring this about?” this places Brand in a tough situation because for one, there is no particular scheme only general ones; and two, more importantly, because Brand can’t offer a plan of action right then and there, Spectacle frames the Imaginary as one without a plan of action.
which is true, there isn’t one — not because it doesn’t exist though, but because it’s already in action. every negative event that disrupts order and business as usual, however small, should be positively comprehended as the work of negativity (TIP11).
“stop voting, stop pretending, wake up, time to be in reality now.”
they dream of 100% voter participation as representation of a democracy; i dream of 0% voter participation as representation of a democracy.
the interview goes on, we recommend a watch because what Paxman continues to exhibit is discussed in Fisher’s essay, notes from which are written below.
some notes and comments on Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle.
after the interview between Paxman and Brand came out, this is how it was received by the Tw!tter and mainstream left, according to Fisher:
The moralizing left quickly ensured that the story was not about Brand’s extraordinary breach of the bland conventions of mainstream media ‘debate’, nor about his claim that revolution was going to happen.
In the febrile McCarthyite atmosphere fermented by the moralizing left, remarks that could be construed as sexist mean that Brand is a sexist, which also meant that he is a misogynist. Cut and dried, finished, condemned.
Class consciousness is fragile and fleeting.
The petit bourgeoisie which dominates the academy and the culture industry has all kinds of subtle deflections and preemptions which prevent the topic even coming up, and then, if it does come up, they make one think it is a terrible impertinence, a breach of etiquette, to raise it. I’ve been speaking now at left-wing, anti-capitalist events for years, but I’ve rarely talked – or been asked to talk – about class in public.
Fisher points to two libidinal-discursive configurations which have brought this situation about:
Vampires’ Castle
Neo-anarchism
the first libidinal configuration: the Vampires’ Castle
the Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognized by a bourgeois big Other.
that is to say, the structure of plurality afforded by queer, gender and race critical theories in rejection of fixed binaries provided by the cultural wing of the State, was itself subsumed by this culture, creating economic spaces to capitalize on a plurality of identities.
this created the conditions for people, in all their multiplicities, to assert themselves in the Spectacle, thereby seeking recognition by this bourgeois big Other.
economically this was easy-breezy; politically not so, but of course, it contributed to the Spectacle — let people think they’re fighting for it, indeed let them fight for it within the constraints of the stage, our stage.
hence, the Vampires’ Castle specializes in propagating guilt.
it is driven by 3 libidinal forces:
a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn
an academic-pendant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake
a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd
to protect itself, the Vampires’ Castle does everything to reinforce the thought that if one is attacking it, they are also attacking struggles against racism, heterosexism, transphobia, etc.
all to say, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of all these movements.
in practice, instead of seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps (vegan, spiritual, tantric, goth, trans, bisexual, gay, straight, white, african-american, asian-american, x-american, etc) all of which are categories set by the dominant power.
as a result of this i.e. because it is a bourgeois inversion projection-disavowal mechanism, the mention of class is automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender — in turn, because the Vampires’ Castle uses a liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class.
this libidinal assemblage called the Vampires’ Castle was formed to deal with the problem of holding immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional.
the answer was already present in the Christian church: thus the recourse to infernal strategies, dark pathologies, psychological warfare — all instruments created by the Christian church, which Nietzsche describes in the Genealogy of Morals.
the Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups — the more ‘marginal’ the better — into academic capital.
the most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering — those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.
the Vampires’ Castle is held together by 5 laws:
individualize and privatize everything
“in theory claims to be in favor of structural critique; in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behavior”
“conspiracies are the ruling class showing class solidarity.”
“the Vampires’ Castle as the dupe-servant of the ruling class pay lip service to solidarity and collectivity while always acting as if the individualist categories imposed by power really hold.”
“because they are petit-bourgeois to the core, members of the Vampires’ Castle are intensely competitive, but is repressed in the passive aggressive manner typical of the bourgeoisie.”
“what holds them together is not solidarity, but mutual fear — the fear that they will be the next one to be outed, exposed, condemned.”
make thought and action appear very, very difficult
propagate as much guilt as they can
essentialize
think like a liberal (because they are liberal)
“the Vampires’ Castle work of constantly stoking up reactive outrage consists of endlessly pointing out the screamingly obvious: capital behaves like capital; repressive state apparatuses are repressive.”
…like the academic meme researchers and online political subculture researchers, the podcasters, the Hasanbros and Soytarellas.
the second libidinal configuration: Neo-anarchy
by neo-anarchy Fisher doesn’t mean the syndicalists and anarchists involved in actual workplace organizing.
he means precisely those people who identify as anarchists but whose involvement in politics extends little beyond student protests, occupations, and commenting on Tw!tter.
they are informed by a narrow historical horizon because they have experienced nothing but capitalist realism.
what is to be done about this?
these libidinal configurations have come to the fore for two reasons.
firstly, they have been allowed to prosper by capital because they serve the interests of capital.
capital subdued the organized working class by decomposing class consciousness, viciously subjugating trade unions while seducing ‘hard-working families’ into identifying with their own narrowly defined interests instead of interests of the wider class.
secondly, because of communicative capitalism i.e. the capitalist cyberspace. the Vampires’ Castle moralizing has been impossible to escape from because of social media — there is little protection from the psychic pathologies propagated by these discourses.
so what can we do now?
off rip, reject identitarianism and recognize that THERE ARE NO IDENTITIES, ONLY DESIRES, interests, and identifications.
this can only be achieved by the re-assertion of class: “a left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group.”
Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience; and knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure.
it must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even destruction of the bourgeoisie itself.
it is class structure — a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it — that must be destroyed.
the interests of the working class are interests of all: the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one.
our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital.
this might seem like a daunting task — because it is.
but as Fisher suggests, we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. that is why we have said we are not speaking to them anymore, to Empire — we are not looking toward the Spectacle: we look to each other and speak to each other.
we ask ourselves, how can we plan our escape, let’s suppose a myth just for fun.
but then we actually do it.
Fisher goes on:
we need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other.
this doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree — on the contrary, we must create the conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.
we need to think very strategically about how to use social media — always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital.
but this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness.
we must break out of the ‘debate’ that communicative capitalism in which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate in.
the goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate — and transform — itself.
outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.