A narrative route out of the Vampire Castle

But the rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the re-assertion of class. A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group. Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure. It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed. The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital.

Mark Fisher, Exiting the Vampire Castle

Narrative theory - or, we would contend, a bastardisation of it - lurks within the shadows of the current identitarian turn of the online left. Attention to discourse becomes discourse policing, the discovery of the stories of identity becomes the celebration and fixing of identity as immutable and fixed, a method for understanding the world which recognises and celebrates the fact that it could always be otherwise, becomes a depressive and depressing fatalism.

A foundational document for us in our exploration of stories is Mark Fisher’s celebrated essay ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’ which is featured in the dazzling anthology K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) published earlier this year by Repeater Books.

The essay itself is freely available online and remains sadly relevant. But it is also a hopeful clarion call to materialists and radicals, and anyone else trying to work their way through a preoccupation with identity with which the left is frustratingly concerning itself right at the moment when a hopeful, materialist, and inspiring route to Fisher’s ‘new and surprising worlds’ is so urgently needed.

Part of this new project is to try to reclaim what is useful of a storied analysis from the vampiric idealism which has overwhelmed it, and to lay out a narrative route out of the Vampire Castle. As materialist students of narrative we have a contribution to make towards the destruction of the appearance of the ‘natural order’ - and to making Fisher’s ‘new and surprising worlds’ seem (and become) attainable.