When pop can no longer muster a nihilation of the World, a nihilation of the Possible, then it will only be the ghosts that are worthy of our time.
M
Mark Fisher
Profession:
Writer
Born:
July 11, 1968
Nationality:
British
Quotes by Mark Fisher
Showing 50 of 100 quotes
I have taught Philosophy, Religious Studies, English Literature, Cultural Studies, Writing and Publishing Studies, Critical Thinking.
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Mark Fisher
If, as is certainly the case, capitalism cannot do without nationality, that is precisely why accelerating and intensifying the deterritorializing, de-ethnicizing and anti-national impulses within (but inhibited by) capitalism constitutes an anti-capitalist strategy.
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Mark Fisher
Capitalism can never pursue deterritorialization to the absolute. What deterritorialization there is within capitalism is always balanced by a compensatory lockdown onto nation, culture, and race. Hence the 'Steampunk' quality of capitalism, where the most ancient traditions can co-exist with the ultramodern.
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Mark Fisher
Structurally, as is evident, the role of the 'Islamic Terror' is to fill the gap left by the disintegration of Stalinism. That is why Saddam's quasi-Stalinist Baathist regime was the perfect transitional object for the U.S. in the immediate years after the Cold War ended. Saddam was no more a Muslim than Stalin was a Christian.
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Mark Fisher
Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce.
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Mark Fisher
Sinatra's melancholy was the melancholy of mass (old) media technology - the 'extimacy' of the records facilitated by the phonograph and the microphone, and expressing a peculiarly cosmopolitan and urban sadness.
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Mark Fisher
On the Junior Boys' 'When No-one Cares' beats are abandoned altogether, the track's 'endless night' lit only by the dying-star flares and stalactite-by-flashlight pulse of reverbed electronics.
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Mark Fisher
Some of the Junior Boys' textures may be borrowed from synthpop but, formally, their songs would be impossible without twenty years of the rave discontinuum. And where synthpop was self-consciously European, the Junior Boys have pioneered an electronic Pop that speaks in a Canadian accent.
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Mark Fisher
Identitarianism assumes that people are condemned to identify with the positive (ethnic/ gender/ nationalistic) predicates they possess, as if their subjectivity were exhausted by those properties. Exactly the opposite is the case: the authentic dimension of subjectivity consists not in any positive identity but in that which makes identifications.
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Mark Fisher
The point is always made that capitalism is efficient, people say 'You might not like it, but it works.' But Britain is not efficient.
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Mark Fisher
We once turned to popular culture because it produced fantasy objects; now, we are asked to 'identify with' the fantasising subject itself.
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Mark Fisher
It will come as no surprise that I would count Nietzsche the perspectivist - he who questioned not only the possibility but the value of Truth - as the enemy. There will be even fewer surprises that I would reject the Dionysian Nietzsche, the celebrant of transgressive desire.
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Mark Fisher
You can be debased without relinquishing your identity, just as you can relinquish your identity without being debased.
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Mark Fisher
Is it possible to reproduce, later in life, the impact that books, records, and films have between the ages of fourteen and seventeen? The periods of my adult life that have been most miserable have been those in which I lost fidelity to what I discovered then.
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Mark Fisher
Just because something is current doesn't mean it is new.
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Mark Fisher
Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube.
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Mark Fisher
In a world of niches, we are enchained by our own consumer preferences.
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Mark Fisher
Reality TV is flat with the anti-cultural imperatives of business: cheap to make, it does ideological work even when it is not giving guru status to dull business people. It fits in with capitalism's anti-mythic myth: the idea that we have liberated ourselves from the dangerous illusions allegedly propagated by art and politics.
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Mark Fisher
Much of reality TV has been like the worst nightmares of Theodor Adorno and Jean Baudrillard come true, its seductive allure turning us into gossips in the global village.
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Mark Fisher
In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.
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Mark Fisher
Neoliberalism emerged by defining itself against what it labelled as an unrealistic and unsustainable programme of social welfare and public spending.
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Mark Fisher
Play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.
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Mark Fisher
There is no right to not be offended, nor should there be.
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Mark Fisher
In particularly acute cases of depression, it is recognized that no verbal or therapeutic intervention will reach the patient. The only effective remedy is to do things, even though the patient will, at that time, believe that any act is pointless and meaningless.
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Mark Fisher
Pele featured in the Brazilophile imaginary as the a figure of non-utile excess, a carefree artist in the Nietzschean sense, indifferent to the narrow teleology of winning matches... check the way that most of the endlessly replayed footage we see of Pele is not of him scoring goals, but audaciously missing chances contrived by force of wit.
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Mark Fisher
The 1890s was perhaps the most Gothic decade ever: 'Dracula,' 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'The Time Machine,' not to mention 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The Interpretation of Dreams,' were all written between 1890 and 1899.
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Mark Fisher
I make no special effort to conceal my surname online; the reason I do not use it is more because I dislike, even loathe it, than because I want to keep it a secret.
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Mark Fisher
Picnic at Hanging Rock' is the exemplary study of disapparition in cinema - I know of no other major film which deals with unexplained disappearance.
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Mark Fisher
Sometimes a disappearance can be more haunting than an apparition.
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Mark Fisher
De Palma's great theme, obsessively reiterated, is betrayal.
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Mark Fisher
Noir' has been talked about a great deal in the discussion of 'The Black Dahlia,' but De Palma's palllete couldn't be less monochrome; it's the very definition of garish.
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Mark Fisher
I'm the world's greatest apologist for Brian De Palma but his version of Ellroy's 'The Black Dahlia' is a disaster.
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Mark Fisher
Although it was published in 1977, "A Scanner Darkly's" mood is already postpunk.
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Mark Fisher
A Scanner Darkly' is one of Dick's bleakest novels, and almost certainly his saddest.
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Mark Fisher
Columbo's deliberately irritating questioning technique - 'just one more thing' - is designed to produce discomfort rather than to elicit information.
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Mark Fisher
The World Cup is like the Overlook Hotel: the identities of individual meat puppets might change, but the structure continues endlessly.
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Mark Fisher
What better example than the World Cup is there of the fact that individual people are irrelevant while impersonal structures are invariant?
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Mark Fisher
If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation.
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Mark Fisher
Little Axe's records are wracked with collective grief. Spectral harmonicas resemble howling wolves; echoes linger like wounds that will never heal; the voices of the living harmonise with the voices of the dead in songs thick with reproach, recrimination and the hunger for redemption.
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Mark Fisher
Some IMDB viewers complain that 'Beloved' should have been reclassifed as Horror... well, so should American history.
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Mark Fisher
The story of Basinski's 'Disintegration Loops' - tapes that destroyed themselves in the transfer to digital - is a parable (again almost too perfect) for the switch from the fragility of analogue to the infinite replicability of digital.
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Mark Fisher
OK, so we all know that 'Borat' is humiliatingly, career-endingly unfunny (one trick too many for one-trick pony Sacha Double-Barelled) - but can anyone explain why the 'character' isn't roundly condemned for being as unacceptably racist as the one-dimensional stereotypes from 70s sitcoms such as 'Mind Your Language?'
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Mark Fisher
What many students most want from college, although they would never admit it, is an authority structure. There is a demand for an authority which they can then reject; they want to be told what to do, so they can disobey. It is a textbook case of bad faith, a flight from freedom.
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Mark Fisher
Basic Instinct 2' is camp, not because it takes itself too seriously, nor because it sends itself up, but because we are not sure quite how seriously it wants us to take it.
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Mark Fisher
There is no opposition between efficiency and justice; on the contrary, an institution run by those who actually do the work is likely to be more effective than one run by interchangeable exploiters who often lack any specific expertise in what they are supposedly managing.
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Mark Fisher
We're invited to believe that the worst effects of Stalinism arose from its 'dogmatic' intransigence; but it is precisely because so much was left open to interpretation that its Terror was so pervasive.
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Mark Fisher
When The Fall pummeled their way into my nervous system, circa 1983, it was as if a world that was familiar - and which I had thought too familiar, too quotidian to feature in rock - had returned, expressionistically transfigured, permanently altered.
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Mark Fisher
There is no need to subject people in capitalism to additional suffering; the point is to get them to recognize that the suffering they are already undergoing is caused by capitalism.
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Mark Fisher
The vast numbers of people who suffer some kind of mental illness under capitalism can either think, 'there is some failing with me, if only I could fit into this system better, if only I were working harder, if only I could enjoy these empty pleasures more, then things would be OK' or 'the problem is with the system that is making me ill.'
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Mark Fisher