Sectarian Review 68: Exiting the Vampire Castle

Episode 68: "Exiting the Vampire Castle"

5/3/2018

In 2013, the late Mark Fisher wrote an essay that immediately became a lightning rod in Left politics. “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” took aim at a leftism which Fisher saw as replacing class interests with a moralizing, liberal identity politics. In many ways, the essay predicted the aftermath of Trump’s election and the Clinton/Sanders debates. More importantly, however, it offers us a chance to think about how political discourse is changed by social media. Joining the Sectarian Review Podcast for this episode is C. Derick Varn. In addition to his long history of being involved in leftist political debates, Varn has special insight into this particular essay, as he was one of the editors who originally commissioned it in the first place. Sit back and take a deep dive into a fascinating conversation about political discourse.
Links:
“Exiting the Vampire Castle,” by Mark Fisher
“Out of a Castle, Into a Pit,” by C. Derick Varn
Russell Brand Versus Jeremy Paxman on the BBC

9 Comments

Arnold Paole

5/7/2018 07:43:46 am

mmmm, I can't help but find quite ironical the fact of talking about a text called "Exiting The vampire Castle" using the imagery of a film (and a novel) that precisely tells the story of how a vampire leaves his castle to spread death and terror in a city. So, in the end... shall we leave the castle in order to stop being vampires or shall we leave it in order to be more lethal ones??

Danny Anderson

5/8/2018 02:06:04 pm

Great observation. I actually love to make cover art with double/ambiguous meanings, so I'm very happy you picked up on that!

7/5/2018 04:10:28 pm

Seems none of the links to the North Star are active anymore. I have found Fisher's original article reposted elsewhere but not Varn's reply. Any chance it is published elsewhere?

Danny

7/5/2018 04:20:37 pm

Hmm. That must have just happened. I will contact Derek and see what he knows. Can you email the show at sectarianreview at gmail dot com? Then I can get back to you as soon as I find out something. Thanks! Danny

7/5/2018 04:42:39 pm

Found Varn's response on the Wayback Machine!

https://web.archive.org/web/20131128221531/http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11342

7/5/2018 05:40:17 pm

Perfect thanks!

Jesse M.

7/28/2018 12:22:52 am

Did Fisher say in an interview that the reason he didn't consider himself a Marxist was because he held class identity sacred and didn't want to abolish class, as you describe his position around 46 minutes in? It seems like he's arguing against treating class as an identity to be preserved in his 2006 post at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007595.html quoted below, did he change his position completely or is it possible you misunderstood his reasons for not calling himself a Marxist?

"The disaster of Cultural Studies lay in its ethnicizing of the 'working class', in its paeans to the 'dignity' of working class life, its celebrations of the microresistances supposedly demonstrated by 'subversively' watching soap operas and such like. What Cultural Studies did, in other words, was to assimilate Marxism into identity politics. That move totally undermined the basis of Marxism, which would be better described as a disidentity politics. This is not to suggest that Marxism entails the empirical destruction of identities and ethnicities. It is to say that for Marxism, collectivity is organized on the basis of an indifference to difference."

8/4/2018 08:31:12 pm

Thanks Jesse for this comment. It’s a really good complication to some of the claims made on the show. I will be hosting Derick on the show again this week (for part two of our “Keywords” series). I will send this along to him and ask him to respond at the beginning of that episode. Thanks and keep listening!

Reginald Side

4/29/2019 09:43:38 am

Just came across this and Fisher's essay after a lengthy trail. Two things occurred in response.
One, things have moved on so much. The question he cites as the VC's search for a mechanism of internal policing: 'how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church' reads these days as more diagnostic of the Right's interventions in national politics. The appeal to Brexit as a kind of faith requiring all manner of public expressions of purity is a kind of daily imprint on the mediation of public debate.

And two. It's like Stewart Hall never happened.

This does not at all detract from Fisher's main point, that class analysis on the Left - or anywhere - is not really treated with anything like the rigour that it demands. Too frequently it's been dismissed as about a set of outmoded objective relations when that's not even beginning to be a fraction of it.

Episode 68: "Exiting the Vampire Castle"

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