I think you’re saying something here but I’m going to factor it a bit to be sure.
“not exactly hard-hitting”
“not… at all novel”
“not… even interesting”
“not even criticisms of the humanities”
One and three I’m just going to call ‘subjective’ (and I think I would just agree with you if the Wikipedia article were actually representative of the contents of the book, which it is not).
Re 4: The book itself is actually largely about his experiences as a professor, being subjected to the forces of elite coordination and bureaucracy, and reads a lot like Yarvin’s critiques of the Cathedral (although Fisher identifies these as representative of a pseudo-left).
Re 2: The novelty comes from the contemporaneity of the writing. Fisher is doing a very early-20th century Marxist thing of actually talking about one’s experience of the world, and relating that back to broader trends, in plain language. The world has changed enough that the work has become tragically dated, and I personally wouldn’t recommend it to people who aren’t already somewhat sympathetic to his views, since its strength around the time of its publication (that contemporaneity) has, predictably, becomes its weakness.
The work that more does the thing testingthewaters is gesturing toward, imo, is Exiting the Vampire Castle. The views expressed in this work are directly upstream of his death: his firm (and early) rebuke of cancel culture and identity politics precipitated rejection and bullying from other leftists on twitter, deepening his depression. He later killed himself.
Important note if you actually read the essay: he’s setting his aim at similar phenomena to Yarvin, but is identifying the cause differently // he is a leftist talking to other leftists, so is using terms like ‘capital’ in a valenced way. I think the utility of this work, for someone who is not part of the audience he is critiquing, is that it shows that the left has any answer at all to the phenomena Yarvin and Ngo are calling out; that they’re not, wholesale, oblivious to these problems and, in fact, the principal divide in the contemporary left is between those who reject the Cathedral and those who seek to join it.
(obligatory “Nick Land was Mark Fisher’s dissertation advisor.”)
I think you’re saying something here but I’m going to factor it a bit to be sure.
“not exactly hard-hitting”
“not… at all novel”
“not… even interesting”
“not even criticisms of the humanities”
One and three I’m just going to call ‘subjective’ (and I think I would just agree with you if the Wikipedia article were actually representative of the contents of the book, which it is not).
Re 4: The book itself is actually largely about his experiences as a professor, being subjected to the forces of elite coordination and bureaucracy, and reads a lot like Yarvin’s critiques of the Cathedral (although Fisher identifies these as representative of a pseudo-left).
Re 2: The novelty comes from the contemporaneity of the writing. Fisher is doing a very early-20th century Marxist thing of actually talking about one’s experience of the world, and relating that back to broader trends, in plain language. The world has changed enough that the work has become tragically dated, and I personally wouldn’t recommend it to people who aren’t already somewhat sympathetic to his views, since its strength around the time of its publication (that contemporaneity) has, predictably, becomes its weakness.
The work that more does the thing testingthewaters is gesturing toward, imo, is Exiting the Vampire Castle. The views expressed in this work are directly upstream of his death: his firm (and early) rebuke of cancel culture and identity politics precipitated rejection and bullying from other leftists on twitter, deepening his depression. He later killed himself.
Important note if you actually read the essay: he’s setting his aim at similar phenomena to Yarvin, but is identifying the cause differently // he is a leftist talking to other leftists, so is using terms like ‘capital’ in a valenced way. I think the utility of this work, for someone who is not part of the audience he is critiquing, is that it shows that the left has any answer at all to the phenomena Yarvin and Ngo are calling out; that they’re not, wholesale, oblivious to these problems and, in fact, the principal divide in the contemporary left is between those who reject the Cathedral and those who seek to join it.
(obligatory “Nick Land was Mark Fisher’s dissertation advisor.”)
Happy to take your word on these things if the wikipedia article is unrepresentative!