The Conflation of Life with Fiction
“All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”
There is no working, thinking creature that does not have their thoughts, their life, their whole essence, alienated from them. Whether you work as a labourer, a gardener, a chef, a cleaner, a brickie, a middle-manager, an assistant, you have your very life purchased from you (if you’re lucky enough to be paid). When I worked in grounds maintenance for the council, I certainly sold my inability to feel what is now a continual ache in my hips. That privilege of not being in pain was bought from me for a clean £7.20 an hour. My mum and her arthritic wrists made worse every day peeling spuds in the nursing home, sells not only her ability to feel no pain, but even how long she has left to use those hands for a similar, low-level wage price.
We sell our thoughts. We smile at customers and blink back the tears from our breakdowns at how little money we have to put the heating on. We sell to the company our state of mind so that we can play and pretend that we are happy. Everywhere we look, we are, and always will be, a commodity. Karl Marx saw this in the factories of Europe and defined it as “alienation,” the loss of the “product of labour.”1 The world has (d)evolved since then. Factory-life has all but melted into air, if I am to echo Marx; writing forty years ago, Jean Baudrillard predicted the saturation we’d face as individuals whose very lives are commoditised at every turn: “There is no longer a medium in a literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real, and one can no longer even say that the medium is altered by it.”2
TikTok, Twitter, Facebook—all platforms that market our lives as content to consume—are the natural progression of reality TV shows or interviews Baudrillard was paying attention to. On a fundamental level, the very life we lead can be vlogged, written about —contentified. Mark Fisher puts it best in Capitalist Realism. “Work and life become inseparable,” declares Fisher, “Capital follows you when you dream. […] As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems.”
Where does this leave us as creatives, then? If you are a writer performing that age-old adage of writing what you know, then what is really happening is that you are learning how best to sell yourself, how best your life might be manufactured and repurposed as consumable content—and in so doing, you are alienated not just from production of your labour (writing), but from the very life you are forced to lead. A horror writer marginalised under a class system, or because of their race or their sexuality or gender, is caught in a double bind: they are pressured to commoditize these traumatic experiences either for social capital, or for capital itself, by the very system that causes it. When the market demands more stories from marginalised individuals, it is asking those individuals to sell their hurt that the market itself has likely caused.
This melding of the medium with its outside, the fictitious with the real, is what constitutes this sense of what will be called the flattening. The flattening is not just of our lives with the content, but with our inability to perceive outside of our existence as that which is to-be-consumed. In contentifying our lives, we flatten them—turn them into tight little pieces to be gobbled up.
To explore this make-your-hobby-profitable grindset of the Etsy-ethos, what better to analyse than the work of the horror author Thomas Ligotti? Beside his penchant for motifs that eerily evoke the innate falseness of our existence—puppets as pitiable portrayals of our lack of agency, our naive belief in a stringless, free-willed consciousness—Ligotti has, in the latter part of his career, been the most outspoken about how art and writing has been manipulated by capitalist forces and its endless need for profit-motive. After the publication of Ligotti’s last short story release in 2003, “The Town Manager,” the only “content” Ligotti produced through to the mid-2010s was nonfiction work, in the form of interviews and the philosophical treatise on pessimism, Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Compared to his especially fecund and gothic writing between the 80s and the 00s, this sudden hiatus arrived at a curious moment in history. By the early 2000s, America had lived through the rampancy of neoliberalism for twenty years. The cocaine-fuelled mania of the markets run on a currency with no gold standard was long gone, and there was only the comedown and cultural crash of a country having to reckon with worsening welfare, at-risk civil liberties (that were never granted in the first place), and ruined livelihoods. No wonder Ligotti’s fiction dried up here. The horror started to pale next to the legitimate horrors of real-world capitalism.
He says himself in Conspiracy that “certain readers of the present book may view it as essentially belonging to the domain of the supernatural, the weird, the uncanny,” adding that, “Although a work of nonfiction, [the book’s] subtitle, ‘A Contrivance of Horror’ does seem to encourage such a conclusion.”3 This “contrivance” can be many things, like the falsehoods we’re sold about our life, that we are subjects, have selves, believe we have goals, wants, needs. But I take it to mean the flattened reality of creatives, that of a culture that conflates existence with a fundamentally capitalist living of it.
Ligotti’s My Work is Not Yet Done is evidence enough that he seems to be unable to disentangle one’s subjectivity in a capitalist system from one’s own selfhood ontologically, as an uncanny creature with basic want and urge and need (i.e., simply being born). It is already well known that Ligotti bases this novella on his own experiences in the office—releasing it while he was still working at this workplace as well—so even the protagonist’s name, Frank Dominio, evokes the construction of Thomas Ligotti’s own, combining an anglophonic first name (Frank/Thomas) with a Latinate (Dominio/Ligotti). Evoking your own name when writing is often a cardinal sin, yet here it illustrates what exactly this “contrivance” is, gives a kind of hyperreal stake in the story where the “content” has begun to collapse (or flatten) with the life inspiring it (which won’t be the last time Ligotti does this).
The novella doesn’t shy away from the supernatural, either, introducing to us the entity known as the “Great Black Swine;” a creature that Ligotti goes on to say is this insistent, Schopenhauerian will-like entity that drives not only the self and our personalities, but our desire for capital. This entity is “a grunting, bestial force that animated, that used our bodies to frolic in whatever mucky thing came its way,” which, throughout the novella, is often for the nameless and banal corporate horrors.4 It is the entity responsible for an entire array of muckiness, all of which could easily be reduced to the basic desire for supposed progress, the increasing desire to spread, to reach out: “sunrises and skyscrapers,” “cell phones and rockets launched into space,” as well as the “laws of nature and the laws of humanity” (Ligotti, 2002: 137). While Frank was at the service of a creature that also drives the forces of late capitalism, this same force is the very creature propelling the plot forward. It’s the creature that gives Frank not only his supernatural powers in the novella, but also what animates him. It is, essentially, Ligotti himself, as well as the reader, forcing the horrors onto the world these characters are interned within.
Ligotti flattens himself with the same animating forces of the Great Black Swine, then, to examine exactly how we are forced to act the way that we are. If the horrors of the novella are flattened with reality so as to imply that the world is already a supernatural fever-dream, then Ligotti’s lack of fiction 2003-onward says all that it needs to: What can he write that isn’t already being done by the forces of just-in-time capitalism? In his first real release of content since The Spectral Link in 2015 (which contains only two stories), he has a book of interviews published in 2018, titled A Little White Book of Screams and Whispers. The collection, in a typical Ligottian turn, opens with a short story mixed with an interview format. If Ligotti was eroding the line between fiction and reality in 2003, then this collection is simply presenting the Real as a kind of (un)reality, a world that is as unreal as that of a supernatural horror because it is manufactured and designed. In the very first two lines of “Last Interview,” this almost comic approach to the falseness of reality is clear in this dry exchange:
[Tom] Why do you do interviews?
[Ligotti] People ask me to. I’m obliging.
Obliging?
That’s right. I’m doing it right now. Put a penny in me and I go through the motions, do my herky-jerky dance.5
Ligotti’s bifurcation of himself between [Tom] and [Ligotti] instantly feels like some kind of remark, too, on parasocial relationships, on the content production of the author-as-product. The personable questions come from the [Tom] character, and the usually witty and sardonic persona Ligotti possesses is present in the [Ligotti] section. This duality is the very essence of the (un)real, of this flattened product of story and reality. Ligotti points out from the very beginning how the interview is, in its way, a short story. Why else begin the collection of interviews with this story? “Put a penny in me and I go through the motions,” Ligotti says—and that’s exactly the scripted nature of an interview, of questions that lean purposefully into an author’s strengths, but also lean into the kind of horror that self-as-content society gives us (2019: 8).
When we read a story, we already peer into the author’s thoughts—but there’s a kind of engagement the reader has where they can take away from that fiction something the author never intended. Is this not troubling, then, when applied to the legitimate words out of Ligotti’s mouth? Look at me—I’ve routinely read Ligotti’s pessimism and antinatalism against itself. In his interview with Nicola Lombardi, he says, “In my view, there is something dreadful, something deeply wrong, about both the world around us and that within us. I want to show how these dual nightmares feed off each other and intensify each other” (Ligotti, 2019: 12). Does Ligotti say anything about late capitalism, about content production? No. Fans of Ligotti can easily assume what Ligotti is discussing—the innate fiction of the self on a neuroscientific level, and thus the innate fiction of society that leads to its endless production as a meat farm of potential subjects. And yet—and yet here I speak, here I present him as I want him read.
The ethics of this kind of reading is an undeniable endpoint of any creative output. Ligotti’s “Put a penny in me” even rewards a further close reading when we remember that this is paid work, that the author and their self is always exchanged for money. As Karl Marx would write, if “labour objectified” is “an alien, hostile, powerful object independent” of the worker, then it is as though “someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of [them]” (1988: 33). The split down between [Tom] and [Ligotti], between self and author (since first names are often personable), leans toward this inherent crisis a creator always faces. The persona they craft, the art they make—all of it is bogus in a way that starts to reveal the innate fiction of the self not commoditized.
Luigi Pirandello’s One, No One, and One Thousand dealt with the increasing anxiety of recognising that we are only the measurements people make of us, a hundred hundred disparate selves existing separately in people’s heads. What happens when we are never allowed access to the people we think we are? When we are flattened into being the person other people see us as? Our wave functions are collapsed, the myriad possibilities, the “I contain multitudes” power of Walt Whitman’s verse destroyed in favour of our neoliberal world so hungry for simplicity and little boxes. Even on the level of a writer producing work, of Ligotti mining his discomforts and anxieties in an office for a story, only for that to be enjoyed, it can become problematic—the common defence of this is that writers and creators choose to sell their hurts.
The retort has always been obvious to me: We’re forced to sell our hurt. That’s all that we can market. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade; when life gives you trauma, turn it into art. It’s the very same quandary Banksy must find himself in, his self-shredding paintings ever a greater contributor to the ending price, even in its destruction. Anything can be sold under capitalist realism—even the desire for its end. And now, as we move past hurt-as-commodity, where we bypass even the stage of writing and go instead to the idea of the interview, now readers can have direct access to the pipeline, the raw, untampered agonies of an author.
If there is no medium to speak of, if creative writing is as worthy a production as simply relating our lived experience is, then is there any real resistance? Is Ligotti an example of all our entrapment, snared by the analysts of our words, ensorcelled by the payments we receive for our unpackaged hurt? Where do we go from here?
There is one potential recourse against the flattened (un)real. We embrace it. As Ligotti writes in a journal during the most active, early part of his career: “Only in the unreal can we be saved. Reality ruins everything for everyone.”6 The potential revolutionary vistas of fiction, and New Weird in general, is all that we can rely on, that we must begin to import into the flattened existence of our lives. This approach is a kind of post-postmodernist (or metamodernist) reappraisal of an author’s role in the fiction of themselves and their output. A way of recognising the control we have in the artifice of the self—and of (un)reality. Ligotti’s impulse that the unreal can save us isn’t a novel idea—Miéville, Koja, Butler (the list is endlessly filled with writers of New Weird/Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction) have all espoused the notion implicitly or overtly—but what is novel is recognising how, now, our own existence is contentified, is treated as fictional. If we each of us are factories of pain, in the industry of abuse, then we should begin to recognise the innate powers that we have as content producers. If our lives are to feed the neverending pursuit of content, then is there a way of altering what is liked? What the algorithm enjoys? Now that we each of us are creators—the modes of our own production—what stories, I wonder, can we make?
1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto. trans. by Martin Milligan. Prometheus Books, 1988.
2. Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation. trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser. University of Michigan Press. Michigan. 1994. p.30
3. Thomas Ligotti. Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. Penguin. New York. 2011., p. xi
4. Thomas Ligotti. My Work is Not Yet Done. Virgin Books. London. 2002, p. 109
5. Thomas Ligotti. Little White Book of Screams and Whispers. Borderlands Press. Benson. 2019, MD. p. 7
6. Thomas Ligotti. We Can Hide from Horror Only in the Heart of Horror: Notes and Aphorisms
Notes and Aphorisms. 1994. bit.ly/4aQtFTz > [accessed 13/09/2022]
