I noticed something similar to the "fan" thing too: there's a certain point at which a fan is accused of betrayal, even if the fan is just being very consistent in following some of the spirit (rather than the letter) of the object she's a fan of.
I kinda skimmed it, and I don't know if it's profound or useful, but I didn't find it a bad read. It strikes me as a rant about some passive-aggressiveness the author's seen. And I'm not sure there's a particularly strong link between the Grey Vampire stuff and The Fan.
Tayssir
On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 4:59 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> At 04:31 AM 12/2/2009, James Heartfield wrote:
>>
>> Dwayne wrote about 'something Mark Fisher calls "Grey Vampirism":' which
>> is the best thing I have read on the internet for years. Do have a look
>> http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011182.html
>> thanks Dwayne
>
> i thought it was interesting but kind of a troll -- says the nipple twister.
> :)
>
> i was also lost through some of it. what's a project? what is "state of
> pre-commitment confusion"?
>
> i was also unclear as to what this paragraph meant: "Usually, though, the
> major clue that someone is not a GV is the willngness and capacity to be
> taken over by a depersonalisng passion. Grey Vampires, like Trolls, tend to
> be extremely self-conscious, and part of what motivates them is a poisonous
> envy of others who are possessed by this kind of depersonalising passion."
>
> what is a depersonalising passion? is this just an idiom peculiar to
> k-punkage or is the result of reading badiou? i see zizek and lacan's name,
> but the lingo isn't reducible to those thinkers, no.
>
> abd then this quotage:
>
> "Being a fan doesn't mean being "uncritical." There is not some sort of
> opposition between gullible belief on one side and critical distance on the
> other. The fan stands somewhere in between the devotee and the critic.
>
> In fact, being a fan of someone most often means "cutting them some slack."
> A true devotee would not need to do this, because the devotee (or
> "sycophant", if you prefer) never admits that the object of worship did
> anything wrong in the first place."
>
> the fuck? OK, so whoever called someone a fan -- they really meant a
> devotee. Why the need to hold on to the word fan? rescue it? who frickin'
> cares? maybe there are just different kinds of fans? like maybe we could be
> aristotle and run 'round classifying maybe, who knows?, 20 different kinds
> of fans.
>
> where are they getting this stuff? just making it up?
>
> and why is kpunk writing as if s/he's not a fan? or devotee? or critic?
> whatever the category, all three types? they are some Other, out there.
> quite bizarre. obviously, it's not bad to be any of these things since
>
> and this:
> "(Zizek could also be considered a betrayer of Lacan for the same reason:
> expounding Lacan's doctrines in a lucid style could be seen as depriving
> them of something essential, their late modernist intractability.) "
>
> made me roll my eyes so hard they are currently sticking to the ceiling.
> ferfuck's.
>
> oh no! this:
>
> "Interesting consequences also follow from being a fan of more than one
> thing at the same time. (cf Graham's being a fan of both Heidegger and
> Latour.) The Last Man stance is to keep the two objects separate, to insist
> on their irreducibility to one another. But it's far more interesting to ask
> the question: is there any principle or set of principles that can allow me
> to be a fan of both of these two things? Is there some invisible consistency
> that binds them? Or must I favour one over the other, and on what grounds? "
>
> my freakin eyes are bolting through the ceiling. Dwayne, are they just being
> hiply ironic?
>
> might as just as well have started humming: "torn between two lovers,
> feelin' like a fool. loving both of you is breaking all the rules. "
>
> and then this to close:
>
> "Badiou rejects empirical science because it is too fuzzily mired in the
> material world."
>
> philosophy. plato. footnote. gottit.
>
> not to take away from kpunk because i've generally enjoyed the blog, but
> still: the fuck?!
>
>
>
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>
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