Egress

This is such a touching, reflective book on the lives (and afterlives) of Mark Fisher and his work. More than anything, Colquhoun's discussion of the relationship between Fisher and "the Outside," a concept that pervades his thought--from his dissertation, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, to his final book, The Weird and the Eerie, as well as everything that came in between.

Even after reading this book, I can't say that I fully get "the Outside" just yet. It seems to be (nearly) equivalent with the Lacanian Real: the idea of existence unordered by human thought. But, at the same time, there seems to be something profoundly human about it.

It is no surprise that Fisher is so curious about the Outside. His colleague in the Ccru, and one of his single most important influences, was Nick Land, who was obsessed with reaching the "Outside." As Fisher's other Ccru colleague, Robin Mackay, points out in his essay, "Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism," Land went so far that he auto-induced schizophrenia in his attempts to reach it, yet he didn't succeed. Land's attempt here is what Colquhoun--and other philosophers--would call a "limit-experience," a confrontation with the boundaries of what is even possible according to human experience. Michel Foucault is one thinker who also sought out limit-experiences through psychedelic drugs, as Colquhoun points out.

Fisher's tack was different, and I'm not sure that I fully get it just yet. He sought to "let the Outside in," rather than push against the boundaries of what is possible. More than anything, he sought to do this through the strength of community. From the outside, this sounds like anime-hero logic, fighting evil through the power of friendship. Yet, there is a reason why these stories resonate so much with us: there is a strength and power to be found there, and it allows us to take on larger systems in ways that we cannot as individuals.

I can't say that I fully understand the argument much more: Colquhoun dives into a series of thematic chapters, which are long and unwieldy to the point where I had difficulty following them. This is why I took off one star--the structure of the book made it challenging to get the point. Moreover, the weakest parts of the writing are when Colquhoun goes into some of the individual thinkers involved: Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Simone Weil, and so on. That isn't to say that he does a bad job with it; it just feels a bit tangled.

Colquhoun is much better in his discussion of cultural material, whether it be Westworld, the OA, the Walking Dead, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or something else entirely. His chapter on the American West--"Unconsciousness Raising"--was particularly interesting.

But, the best of the book is none of these things. Colquhoun's strength is when he talks about his personal experiences with grief, finding community at Goldsmith's, and his search for meaning in the wake of Fisher's death. This is really powerful stuff. It balances well the embodied experience of Fisher's work with the theoretical side of it. It probably helped that I was in grad school the same time as Colquhoun--I began in 2016, and I think that my institution was very similar to Goldsmith's. I don't want to make a 1-to-1 parallel, because I've never been to Colquhoun or Fisher's university, but there's something there. He also captures the Zeitgeist well of being a student in 2017-18.

As the first secondary work ever published on Fisher's work, I think Colquhoun does the man justice. A focus on Fisher's relationship to "the Outside" is a great way to approach his work, and it's obvious how much Fisher meant to everyone involved. I've never met him, but I think that his body of writing has shaped my own life in numerous ways from thousands of kilometers away. There's something about the guy's writing that was especially raw, and he had the quality to inspire. Unlike so many other thinkers, his work was "libidinizing," in his terms, and Colquhoun captures this well.