## Metadata - Author: [[Mark Fisher]] - Full Title: K-Punk - Published: - Category: #books ## Highlights - But where does this tone — with its strange mixture of the middle-aged and the adolescent — come from? The quick answer is class background. The tone of light but relentless ridicule, the pose of not being seen to take things too seriously, has its roots in the British boarding school. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600755) ^rw283600755 - Tags: [[communication]] - Note: They must never appear vulnerable therefore they live broken lives - In an article for the Guardian, Nick Duffell2 argued that, from around the age of seven, boarders are required to adopt a “pseudo-adult” personality, which results, paradoxically, in their struggling “to properly mature, since the child who was not allowed to grow up organically gets stranded, as it were, inside them.” “Boarding children”, Duffell continues, invariably construct a survival personality that endures long after school and operates strategically […] Crucially, they must not look unhappy, childish or foolish — in any way vulnerable — or they will be bullied by their peers. So they dissociate from all these qualities, project them out on to others, and develop duplicitous personalities that are on the run.3 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600756) ^rw283600756 - Even if you haven’t attended boarding school yourself, you are still required to operate in an emotional atmosphere set by those who did. Andrew Neil, who came from a working-class background and attended a grammar school, attained access to the top table by simulating the mores of the privately educated elite. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600757) ^rw283600757 - In a 2013 essay for the London Review of Books, “Sinking Giggling into the Sea”, Jonathan Coe positioned Have I Got News for You in a genealogy of British satire going back to the 1950s.4 Coe argued that, back then, satire might have posed a threat to the authority of establishment politicians who expected unthinking deference from the electorate. Now, however, when politicians are routinely ridiculed and a weary cynicism is ubiquitous, satire is a weapon used by the establishment to protect itself. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600758) ^rw283600758 - The atmosphere of generalised sniggering allowed Johnson to develop his carefully cultivated, heavily mediated persona of “lovable, self-mocking buffoon”. The show allows Johnson to present himself as a hail-fellow-well-met everyman, not a member of an old Etonian elite. In this he has been abetted by his sometime antagonist Ian Hislop. Hislop always has the guffawing, self-satisfied air of a prefect who’s caught out some slightly posher kids stealing from the tuck shop. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600759) ^rw283600759 - The prevailing media culture in the UK allows the privately educated Clarkson to come off as a plain-speaking man of the people, bravely saying what he thinks in the face of an oppressive “political correctness” that seeks to muzzle him. The success of Top Gear is another testament to the power — and, sadly, international appeal — of the English ruling-class male mentality. Who, more than Clarkson and his fellow presenters, better exemplifies this bizarre mixture of the middle-aged and the adolescent? What, after all, is it safer for a ruling-class adolescent male to like than cars? [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600760) ^rw283600760 - Hopkins is allowed to get away with this because of what we might call the innate postmodernism of the English ruling class. Both she and Clarkson say hateful things, but with a twinkle in their eye and their eyebrows ever so slightly raised. There is an immense complexity at work in this ruling-class mummery. The humour allows Clarkson and Hopkins to be conduits for a racism that has very real, very tragic effects, whilst also letting them off the hook. The humour reassures them, and their audience, that they don’t really mean it. But the problem is that they don’t have to “mean” it: they help define the terms of debate, and allow migrants to be dehumanised, whatever their “true” feelings about the issue might be. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600761) ^rw283600761 - Self-educated working-class culture generated some of the best comedy, music and literature in modern British history. The last thirty years have seen the bourgeoisie take over not only business and politics, but also entertainment and culture. In the UK, comedy and music are increasingly graduate professions, dominated by the privately educated. The sophistication of working-class culture — which combines laughter, intelligence and seriousness in complex ways — has been replaced by a grey bourgeois common sense, where everything comes swathed in a witless humour. It’s long past time that we stopped sniggering along with the emotionally damaged bourgeoisie, and learned once again to laugh and care with the working class. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600762) ^rw283600762 - In a reversal of stereotype, the Soviets in The Americans seem so much more glamorous than their American counterparts. The Jenningses’ chief antagonist, FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) — who in a soap opera twist turns out to be a near neighbour — comes off as dour by comparison with the dynamic and glamorous Elizabeth and Philip, just as the FBI offices seem drab and mean when set against the intrigue of the rezidentura. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600763) ^rw283600763 - This no doubt contributes to the series’ subversive flourish, which consists in the fact that the audience not only sympathise with the Jenningses, they positively root for them, dreading their discovery, hoping that all their plans come to fruition. The Americans’ message is not that the Jenningses share a common humanity with their American enemies and neighbours, but just happen to be on the other side. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600764) ^rw283600764 - Has any cultural event of any significance ever happened whenever a juggler is within a hundred mile radius? [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600765) ^rw283600765 - when culture demands respect, when respect is the appropriate response to culture, you know it’s either died in its sleep or been killed [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600766) ^rw283600766 - The East Midlands accent, lacking urban glamour, lilting lyricism or rustic romanticism, is one of the most unloved in the UK. It is heard so rarely in popular media that it isn’t recognised enough even to be disdained. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600767) ^rw283600767 - The English bourgeoisie speak in more or less the same accent wherever they come from. The insistence on retaining a regional accent is therefore a challenge to the machineries of class subordination — a refusal to accept being marked as inferior. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283600768) ^rw283600768 ---## New highlights added November 12, 2022 - The development of cheap and readily available sound production software, the web, blogs means there is an unprecedented punk infrastructure available. All that is lacking is the will, the belief that what can happen in something that does not have authorisation/legitimation can be as important — more important — than what comes through official channels. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772636) ^rw412772636 - Is it possible to reproduce, later in life, the impact that books, records and films have between the ages of fourteen and seventeen? The periods of my adult life that have been most miserable have been those in which I lost fidelity to what I discovered then, [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772637) ^rw412772637 - Both Bennett and Kafka understand that, no matter how absurd their rituals, pronunciations, clothes might appear to be, the ruling class are unembarrassable; that is not because there is a special code which only they understand — there is no code, precisely — but that whatever they do is alright, because it is THEM doing it. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772638) ^rw412772638 - The world of Millennium People is ruled, “for the first time in history” (but not for the first time in Ballard’s work), by a “vicious boredom”, “interrupted by meaningless acts of violence”. At first glance, the novel can look like a long overdue savaging of the middle class, in which the reader can revel in the brutal destruction of bourgeois sacred cows. Tate Modern… Pret A Manger… the NFT… all of them burn in Ballard’s Bourgeois Terror. “I’m a fund raiser for the Royal Academy. It’s an easy job. All those CEOs think art is good for their souls.” “Not so?” “It rots their brains. Tate Modern, the Royal Academy, the Hayward… They’re Walt Disney for the middle classes.”3 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772639) ^rw412772639 - Believe me, the next revolution is going to be about parking”4, one character announces, echoing the petrol blockades of four years ago and anticipating the Ikea riots of 2005. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772640) ^rw412772640 - Blairism has consolidated and outstripped the ideological gains of Thatcherism by ensuring the apparently total victory of PR over punk, of politeness over antagonism, of middle-class utility over proletarian art. It manages the tricky ideological dodge of reducing everything to instrumentality whilst at the same time dedicating all resources to the production of cultural artefacts of no possible use or function. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772641) ^rw412772641 - In histories of punk, much is made of the role of the middle classes, but the crucial catalytic role of that particular kind of middle-class refusal remains under-thought. The middle-class defection from reproductive futurism into scarification and tribalisation did nothing more than state the obvious — middle-class careers and the privileges they bring are empty, tedious and ennervating — but, now more than ever, it is this obviousness that cannot be stated. The interesting thing is that they’re protesting against themselves. There’s no enemy out there. They know that they are the enemy.15 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772642) ^rw412772642 - What better way to destroy something than send in Martin Amis to praise it [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772643) ^rw412772643 - The technique of flying picketing that Scargill had pioneered so successfully in the late Sixties and early Seventies (and which had contributed to the humiliation and collapse of the Heath government) was combatted by a comprehensive range of strategies (including a highly-organised counter-subversion operation run by MI5) that were designed while the Tories were still in opposition. The aim was to fragment miners’ solidarity and to prevent support from sympathetic workers in other industries. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772644) ^rw412772644 - Yet the question the reader cannot help but pose is: what would have happened if the miners had won? (A question that has added piquancy since subsequent revelations have shown that the government was much closer to defeat than was ever suspected at the time.) The narrative in which the strike is now embedded — the only narrative in town, the story of Global Capital — has it that it was part of a receding ebb tide of organised working-class insurgency. Defeat was inevitable, written into the historical passage from Fordism to post-Fordism. The hard left are outflanked, fighting under the banner of the Past for “the history of the Miner. The tradition of the Miner. The legacies of their fathers and their fathers’ fathers.”6 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772645) ^rw412772645 - The songs that Peace dredges up for the final phase of the strike are “Careless Whisper” (“guilty feet have got no rhythm”) and, for the 84-85 winter that was cold, but not cold enough — the power cuts never come — Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas”. Characters speculate that Band Aid is a government-backed scheme to distract from the plight of the miners, and the line that Peace selects for sampling is, naturally, “There’s a world outside your window, and it’s a world of dread and fear.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772646) ^rw412772646 - Part of the reason that 1985 seemed like the worst year for pop ever was that it was the beginning of the restoration. Up to 1984, British popular and political culture was still a battleground. 1985 was the year of Live Aid, the beginning of a time of the fake consensus that is the cultural expression of global capital. If Live Aid was the non-event that happened, the strike was the Event that didn’t. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772647) ^rw412772647 - Veblen argues that “leisure class society” is founded on the “barbarian” distinction between exploit — “the conversion to his own ends of energies previously directed to some end by another agent” — and industry (or drudgery) — “the effort that goes to create a new thing with a new, (‘brute’) material”.5 The Masters must always vampirise, never produce. The performance of productive work, or employment in personal service, falls under the same odium for the same reason. An invidious distinction arises between exploit and acquisition by seizure on the one hand and industrial employment on the other. Labour acquires a character of irksomeness by virtue of the indignity imputed to it.6 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772648) ^rw412772648 - Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772649) ^rw412772649 - Note: Read - Oxford”, as Nigel observes in his somewhat too histrionic style, “where nothing really matters”, where a dissolute, ironic detachment is the mark of a gentleman, and where Nigel’s very passion marks him out as not quite right [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772650) ^rw412772650 #### stand up, nigel barton1 #### this movie doesn’t move me1 - This narrative of disillusionment belongs to a genre that has become familiar: the postmodern parable. To look at the old Doctor Who is not only to fail to recover a lost moment; it is to discover, with a deflating quotidian horror, that this moment never existed in the first place. An experience of awe and wonder dissolves into a pile of dressing up clothes and cheap special effects. The postmodernist is then left with two options: disavowal of the enthusiasm, i.e. what is called “growing up”, or else keeping faith with it, i.e. what is called “not growing up”. Two fates, therefore, await the no longer media-mesmerised child: depressive realism or geek fanaticism. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772653) ^rw412772653 - Television was itself both familiar and alien, and a series which was about the alien in the familiar was bound to have particularly easy route to the child’s unconscious. In a time of cultural rationing, of modernist broadcasting, a time, that is, in which there were no endless reruns, no VCRs, the programmes had a precious evanescence. They were translated into memory and dream at the very moment they were being seen for the first time. This is quite different from the instant — and increasingly pre-emptive — monumentalisation of postmodern media productions through “makings of” documentaries and interviews. So many of these productions enjoy the odd fate of being stillborn into perfect archivisation, forgotten by the culture while immaculately memorialised by the technology. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772654) ^rw412772654 - Julie Burchill’s endlessly reiterated polemic in favour of Big Brother — that it allows working-class people opportunities to break into a media otherwise dominated by the privileged — is baseless for three reasons. First, because the real beneficiaries of Big Brother are not the contestants, whose “career” is notoriously short-lived, but Endemol, with its coterie of smug graduate producers. Second, because Big Brother trades in a patronising and reductive image of the working class, the dominion of Celebreality relies upon the mediocrats inducing the working class into corresponding to — and “identifying with” — that image. Third, because Big Brother and reality TV have effaced those areas of popular culture in which a working class that aspired to more than “wealth” or “fame” once excelled. Its rise has meant a defeat for that over-reaching proletarian drive to be more, (I am nothing but should be everything), a drive which negated Social Facts by inventing Sonic Fictions, which despised “ordinariness” in the name of the strange and the alien. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772655) ^rw412772655 #### we want it all1 - Batman has contributed more than its fair share to the “darkness” that hangs over contemporary culture like a picturesque pall. “Dark” designates both a highly marketable aesthetic style and an ethical, or rather anti-ethical, stance, a kind of designer nihilism whose chief theoretical proposition is the denial of the possibility of the Good [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772657) ^rw412772657 #### gothic oedipus: subjectivity and capitalism in christopher nolan’s batman begins1 - Autonomist theorists have referred to a turn away from factory work toward what they call “cognitive labour”. Yet work can be affective and linguistic without being cognitive — like a waiter, the call-centre worker can perform attentiveness without having to think. For these non-cognitive [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772659) ^rw412772659 #### notes on cronenberg’s eXistenZ1 - Bush’s linguistic incompetence, far from being an impediment to his success, has been crucial to it, since it has allowed him to pose as a “man of the people”, belying his privileged Harvard and Yale-educated [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772661) ^rw412772661 - Class power has always depended on a kind of reflexive impotence, with the subordinate class’ beliefs about its own incapacity for action reinforcing that very condition. It would, of course, be grotesque to blame the subordinate class for their subordination; but to ignore the role that their complicity with the existing order plays in a self-fulfilling circuit would, ironically, be to deny their power. “[C]lass consciousness”, Jameson observes in “Marx’s Purloined Letter”, turns first and foremost around the question of subalternity, that is around the experience of inferiority. This means that the “lower classes” carry around within their heads unconscious convictions as to the superiority of hegemonic or ruling-class expressions or values, which they equally transgress and repudiate in ritualistic (and socially and politically ineffective) ways. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772662) ^rw412772662 - I’ve had more mail about the reflexive impotence post than any other; mostly, actually, from teenagers and students who recognise the condition but who, far from being further depressed by seeing it analysed, find its identification inspiring. There are very good Spinozist and Althusserian reasons for this — seeing the network of cause-and-effect in which we are enchained is already freedom. By contrast, what is depressing is the implacable poptimism of the official culture, forever exhorting us to be excited about the latest dreary-shiny cultural product and hectoring us for failing to be sufficiently positive. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/412772663) ^rw412772663 ## New highlights added March 29, 2023 - In Children of Men, public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and to stalking animals (one especially resonant scene takes place inside a derelict school, through which a deer runs). But, contrary to neoliberal fantasy, there is no withering away of the State, only a stripping back of the State to its core military and police functions. In this world, as in ours, ultraauthoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/499300375) ^rw499300375 #### coffee bars and internment camps1 - In P.D. James’ original novel, democracy is suspended and the country is ruled over by a self-appointed Warden. Wisely, the film downplays all this. For all that we know, the Britain of the film could still be a democracy, and the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic. The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalisation of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?). Democratic rights and freedoms (habeas corpus, free speech and assembly) are suspended while democracy is still proclaimed. Children of Men extrapolates rather than exaggerates. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/499300377) ^rw499300377 - The third reason that Children of Men works is because of its take on cultural crisis. It’s evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. (If the sterility were to be taken literally, the film would be no more than a requiem for what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism”, entirely in line with mainstream culture’s pathos of fertility.) For me, this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises? Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbours only reiteration and re-permutation. Could it be, that is to say, that there are no breaks, no “shocks of the new” to come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the “weak messianic” hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen. The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing to the last big thing — how long ago did it happen and just how big was it? [◊](https://readwise.io/open/499300378) ^rw499300378 - A culture which takes place only in museums is already exhausted. A culture of commemoration is a cemetery. No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/499300379) ^rw499300379