On K-Punk

This took me the better part of three months, because I kept getting lost in chapters that — being largely blog posts — vary a lot in quality. The best, to my mind, are the ones on politics and the “reflections,” which brings me to a weakness: the organization. Splitting the book into “literature,” “film and television,” “music,” “politics,” “reflections,” and so on works well if you mean to use it as a reference. But if you read it the way I did, to get a sample of Fisher’s thought between 2003 and 2016, the structure is rough; it would have been far better chronological. Arranged that way, we’d watch his post-CCRU blitzing style give way to more expository, reflective writing — you see it somewhat within each section, but each new section starts the clock over — and we’d see how events in his life and in the world shaped his thinking. Outside of politics, Fisher’s most prominent writing is on music, and it looms large here, but it’s my least favorite of his work: good, certainly, but I simply lack his reference points.

The conclusion, the introduction to his unwritten Acid Communism, is a fascinating piece, and it’s a real shame it stayed a draft while the rest of the book was never written — a reclamation of counterculture for its post-capitalist potential. There’s so much good here that I just want more. The odd one out in his body of work is The Weird and the Eerie, which harks back to his earlier interest in the Gothic while staying distinct from hauntology; I’d hoped to find more on the weird and the eerie here, but no luck. It’s well worth reading, just better in small doses.