Text page
Fisher - Gothic Materialism (Pli 2001)
A Fisher essay that turns gothic writing into a way of thinking materialism, agency, and the breakdown of secure human-centered realism.
Archive condition
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Core idea
Fisher argues that the gothic is not simply a literary taste for darkness but a mode for registering material agencies that exceed liberal common sense. Gothic materialism names a world in which the eerie is objective rather than merely subjective.
The essay works by using gothic motifs to rethink what materialism can mean once agency, atmosphere, and nonhuman causality are taken seriously. Style becomes a route into ontology.
This matters because it links the CCRU orbit to Fisher's later public-critical vocabulary. The gothic becomes a way of carrying difficult ontological claims into cultural writing.
How to read this text
Read for how the essay defines the gothic against simpler notions of mood or genre. The strongest move is the conversion of atmosphere into ontology.
Notice how Fisher keeps materialism open to eeriness rather than policing it away. That tension is the point.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Pli 12 (2001), 230-243. Mark Fisher 231 Gothic Materialism MARK FISHER Poc. The begilllling I But where is the beginning?
Definition · paragraph 1
Mark Fisher 231 Gothic Materialism MARK FISHER Poc. The begilllling I But where is the beginning? Vankirk You know the beginning is GOD.
Definition · paragraph 2
232 Pli 12 (2001) Mark Fisher 233 no matter how technically rigorous - could ever count as 'philosophy'. The cUITently dOllunant mode of State thought - phenomenology in all its various guises - actually concurs with Marx' s notorious claim that a materialist philosophy is a contradiction in terms.
Definition · paragraph 4
236 P/i 12 (2001) Mark Fisher 237 and the crowd become identified -- the plague is a crowd, the crowd a plague. 'The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple individualities, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities' (Foucault, 1987, 201).
History · paragraph 3
234 Pli 12 (2001) Mark Fisher 235 retreats before its limits - allegedly apnoflStlc, auto-singing "nihil ltlterius" (Grant, 1998, 101). This interdiction is blatantly (antlu'o)political and not 'purely philosophical' at all; it derives from a libidinal, not a categorical, imperative: the Horror must be kept at bay.
Appears in sections
Theory-Fiction and Cyberstyle Primary section
How theory-fiction, cyberpunk prose, and anti-academic style became part of the archive's method.