Vigilien

The Gothic has an affinity with the concept of the haecceity because it refuses to distinguish human figures from backgrounds; “the ‘Gothic or Northern’ decorative lineâ€? is “a broken line which forms no contour by which form and background might be distinguished.â€? (Deleuze, Cinema 1, 111) You can’t enter such zones without entering into composition with them.

[…]

Whilst an organicist Left social criticism finds in cyberpunk the quietist collapse of transformative political projects into a “hardboiledâ€? “survivalistâ€? hyper-nihilism (Ross, Cyberpunk in Boystown), Gothic Materialism locates in Baudrillard’s ecstatic communication, Gibson’s Cyberspace, Jameson’s total flow and Cronenberg’s Videodrome the map of a hypermediatized capitalism that is decoding privatized subjectivity.

[…]

So it will be argued here that cybernetic capitalism does not engender what Ballard has followed Jameson in identifying as a “death of affect.â€? Those switched on to Spinozism by Deleuze-Guattari might suspect the reverse; that what defines the “postmodernâ€? is in fact the amplification of affect. Brian Massumi suggests that the theorization of “intensityâ€? Jameson calls for is to be achieved precisely by paying renewed attention to the phenomenon of affect and to Spinoza as its principal theorist.

[Mark Fisher: Flatline Constructs. Gothic Materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction]