On Egress

This is a touching, reflective book about the life and afterlives of Mark Fisher and his work — above all about Fisher’s relationship to “the Outside,” a concept that runs through everything he wrote, from his dissertation Flatline Constructs to his final book The Weird and the Eerie. Even after reading it I can’t say I fully grasp the Outside. It seems nearly equivalent to the Lacanian Real — existence unordered by human thought — and yet there’s something profoundly human about it too.

It’s no surprise Fisher was so drawn to it. His CCRU colleague, and one of his most important influences, was Nick Land, who was obsessed with reaching the Outside; as another CCRU colleague, Robin Mackay, points out in “Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism,” Land went so far as to auto-induce schizophrenia in the attempt, and still failed. That attempt is what Colquhoun and others call a “limit-experience,” a confrontation with the boundary of what’s even possible for human experience — Foucault sought his through psychedelics, as Colquhoun notes. Fisher’s approach was different, and I’m not sure I fully understand it yet. He wanted to let the Outside in rather than push against the boundary, and to do it mostly through the strength of community. From the outside that sounds like anime-hero logic — defeating evil through the power of friendship — but there’s a reason those stories resonate: there’s real power in it, the kind that lets us take on large systems we couldn’t touch as individuals.

I can’t claim to understand the argument much further than that. Colquhoun works through a series of thematic chapters that are long and unwieldy, to the point where I had trouble following them — that structure is the book’s real weakness, and it makes the point hard to reach. The writing is weakest when he turns to the individual thinkers — Bataille, Blanchot, Simone Weil — not that he handles them badly, but it feels tangled. He’s much better on cultural material, whether Westworld, The OA, The Walking Dead, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; his chapter on the American West, “Unconsciousness Raising,” was particularly good.

But the best of the book is none of that. Colquhoun is strongest on his own experience — his grief, the community he found at Goldsmiths, his search for meaning after Fisher’s death. This is powerful, and it balances the embodied experience of Fisher’s work against the theoretical side of it. It probably helped that I was in graduate school at the same time as Colquhoun; I started in 2016, and my institution felt similar to Goldsmiths. I don’t want to draw a one-to-one parallel — I’ve never been to their university — but there’s something there, and he captures the Zeitgeist of being a student in 2017–18.

As the first secondary work ever published on Fisher, it does the man justice. Approaching him through his relationship to the Outside is a fine way in, and it’s obvious how much Fisher meant to everyone involved. I never met him, but his writing has shaped my own life in countless ways from thousands of kilometers off. There was something especially raw about it, and it had the power to inspire — unlike so many thinkers, his work was, in his own term, “libidinizing,” and Colquhoun captures that well.