Text page
WRAP Theses Fisher 1999
A theory-fiction text that refuses the border between conceptual writing, scene construction, and speculative narrative.
Archive condition
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Core idea
The central move of theory-fiction is to treat style and concept as inseparable. Fiction is not illustrative garnish placed on top of theory; it is one of the ways theory begins to operate materially.
These texts work by montage, compression, fictional carriers, and unstable voices. They build scenes, entities, markets, or atmospheres that behave like conceptual machines rather than like examples waiting to be decoded.
That matters because a great deal of the archive's originality lies in form. The writing does not merely report on cyberculture and modernity; it engineers new ways of sensing and narrating them.
How to read this text
Read the title, opening burst, and recurring terms before trying to flatten the text into a normal argument. Orientation comes from motifs and relays, not from a single thesis statement.
Track where journalism, fiction, market language, and philosophy contaminate each other. That contamination is the method.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 20
“Necrospection.”8 Another of the features Deleuze-Guattari share with Baudrillard is the importance they place on fiction. Which leads us to the second term of this study’s subtitle - Cybernetic Theory-Fiction - a phrase it is worth unpacking a little now.
Definition · paragraph 19
But this - simple - opposition, whilst schematically useful, is ultimately misleading. Baudrillard, we shall see, can make a contribution to Gothic Materialism, whilst Deleuze-Guattari’s work can certainly be described as Theory-Fiction.
History · paragraph 7
FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS: GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY-FICTION Mark Fisher Presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Warwick July 1999
Style · paragraph 23
This involves a discussion of Samuel Butler’s important work of theory-fiction. “The Book of Machines” (in his Erewhon), which offers numerous ingenious arguments contradicting the idea that machines are unable to reproduce themselves.
Style · paragraph 19
Baudrillard, we shall see, can make a contribution to Gothic Materialism, whilst Deleuze-Guattari’s work can certainly be described as Theory-Fiction. Baudrillard's interest in cyberpunk fiction and film, his fascination with automata and simulacra, make him both the object of a Gothic Materialist theory, and a contributor to it.
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.