Mark Fisher’s “K-punk” and the futures that have never arrived (2018)
For anyone interested in a perspective on the current woke/anti-woke zeitgeist from someone on the left, I would highly recommend Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle": https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vam...> The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.