Abstract

Discussing his experience of being interviewed, Mark E. Smith of the post-punk band, The Fall, admits to being ‘purposefully arsey’ and unwilling to ‘give my secrets away to these idiots’. This paper explores the failure of broadsheet media attempts to define and neuter Smith by reducing him to a ‘mediapheme’. We contend that Smith is an untimely figure, never a sign of the times but rather a critic of the present, out of step, a site of indeterminacy. Smith’s writing constitutes a critique of contemporary class ‘hexes’ (what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘order-words’, the bourgeois stoppages and arrests of culture and langage).