Text page
Fisher - White Magic (1998)
An earlier White Magic page that keeps Fisher's confinement/flight vocabulary tightly bound to the CCRU's occult-cybernetic relay.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they make blocked futurity and unrealized political desire central to Fisher's public afterlife. Haunting is not only a mood here, but a way of naming what remains unfinished in culture and politics.
Temporal recurrence and unfinished projects drive the argument. The page works by treating spectral return, stalled futurity, or unfinished communist desire as live public-theoretical pressures rather than literary motifs.
That matters because Fisher's later public reception often turns on exactly these unfinished futures. This cluster keeps visible the connection between hauntology, public criticism, and renewed collective imagination.
How to read this text
Read for how the page turns recurrence or afterlife into a diagnosis of blocked futurity rather than a generic elegiac atmosphere.
Track where unfinished desire is made public and political. That is the point where Fisher's afterlife remains active rather than merely memorial.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Karl Marx Michel Foucault Bruce Arrigo TR Young Dragan Milovanovic Peter Manning Stuart HenrySteve Goodman Simon Reynolds Bill Bogard Angus Carlyle Mark Fisher VOLUME 6 Virtual Criminologies White Magic by Mark Fisher Cybernetic Culture Research Unit WHITE MAGIC Sarkon: What you would call white magic is a program of confinement: it operates by marking boundaries, setting limits, stopping things from happening (and also, making things happen; it has a natural affinity with a certain Creationism).
Definition · paragraph 11
If there is such an overvaluation of one’s own mental processes (to the point of exporting this theory, as we have done with our morality and techniques, to the core of every culture), then it is Freud’s overvaluation, along with our whole psychologistic culture. (SED 143) Baudrillard’s very hatred of Xorcery means that he remains complicit with White Magic, over‐emphasising its powers of capture.
Definition · paragraph 7
"the whole traditional world of causality" with its "distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the ends and the means" (SS 31) has been superceded by a logic of "code." White magical capture : to be in the system is already to be processed by it.
Definition · paragraph 7
"the whole traditional world of causality" with its "distinction between cause and effect, between active and passive, between subject and object, between the ends and the means" (SS 31) has been superceded by a logic of "code." White magical capture : to be in the system is already to be processed by it. Consider the opinion poll. The question that concerned opinion in the "political class" worries about ‐ do polls affect voting behaviour? ‐ is unanswerable.
Mechanism · paragraph 8
White magic Xorcery operates by organizing words into language, installing new (micro and macro) pseudosignifying regimes in the heart of capitalism’s "profoundly illiterate" (AO 240) sub‐Culture, and spreading Fuzz (by ex‐ communicating everything that connects).
Appears in sections
Mark Fisher and Public Theory Primary section
Fisher as bridge figure, public critic, and one of the clearest routes into the archive's afterlife.