The most disquieting section of the Joy Division documentary is the cassette recording of Curtis being hypnotised. It's disturbing, in part because you suspect that it is many ways the key to Curtis's art of performance: his capacity to evacuate his self, to "travel far and wide through many different times". You don't have to believe that he has been regressed into a past life in order to recognise that he is not there, that he has gone somewhere else: you can hear the absence in Curtis's comatoned voice, stripped of familiar emotional textures. He has gone to some ur-zone where Law is written, the Land Of The Dead. Hence another take on the old 'death of the author' riff: the real author is the one who can break the connection with his lifeworld self, become a shell and a conduit which other voices, outside forces, can temporarily occupy.

Mark E Smith once understood this very well; perhaps still understands it, even now, sitting at the bar at the end of the universe, his psychic antenna dulled by booze. In a very different way to Curtis, Smith at his most incendiary was a depersonalised host for stray, strange signal. Where Curtis's dispossession was concentrated into a single and singular voice that sounded as if it was already dead, Smith became a cacophony, an 'ESP medium of discord', a damaged transmitter that was like Baudrillard's schizophrenic: a switching centre for all the networks of influence. That is partly why the Smith 'auto' 'biography' is so disappointing. Biography is an end of history form, deflationary and reductive in its rush to reassure us that it was always about people. The point that artists come to believe it it is all about them – and not about their ability to channel externalities which erased them – is usually the point at which they lose it.

… the Mark E Smith persona has solidified, become a ‘national treasure’. Mark E Smith, the sort of no-nonsense bloke everyone would like to have a drink with. A fancied wit, still sharp, sarcastic – he’d keep you on your toes – but at the end of the day, he’s as pubbish and blokish as his one-time mentor John Peel, only with added prole cred. Mark E Smith, who gives his own life story to a culture in which biography has passively aggressively defanged fiction. See, we can explain it all now. True life tales. Nothing odd to see here.

This Mark E Smith is a doppelganger who has gradually all but replaced Mark E Smith the psychic and the schizophrenic, the ‘righteous maelstrom’, the dissonant vorticist transmitter who heard voices and spoke in tongues, the medium and media-channeler. The Mark E Smith who could make himself a riot of voices. People think of themselves too much as one person – they don’t know what to do with the other people that enter their heads.

Mark K-Punk