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Mark Fisher QUOTES

Mark Fisher QUOTES

101 " Capitalist realism, however, entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment. We are confronted with what Jameson, in his essay ‘The Antimonies Of The Postmodern’, calls ‘a purely fungible present in which space and psyches alike can be processed and remade at will’. The ‘reality’ here is akin to the multiplicity of options available on a digital document, where no decision is final, revisions are always possible, and any previous moment can be recalled at any time. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

102 " There's no doubt that late capitalism certainly articulates many of its injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. The banning of smoking in public places, the relentless monstering of working class diet on programs like You Are What You Eat, do appear to indicate that we are already in the presence
of a paternalism without the Father. It is not that smoking is ‘wrong’, it is that it will lead to our failing to lead long and enjoyable lives. But there are limits to this emphasis on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely feature at all, for instance. What we see instead is a reductive,
hedonic model of health which is all about ‘feeling and looking good’. To tell people how to lose weight, or how to decorate their house, is acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement is to be oppressive and elitist. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

103 " For Baudrillard, phenomena such as fly on the wall documentaries and political opinion polls - both of which claimed to present reality in an unmediated way - would always pose an insoluble dilemma. Did the presence of the cameras affect the behavior of those being filmed? Would the publication of poll results affect the future behavior of voters? Such questions were undecidable, and therefore 'reality' would always be elusive: at the very moment when it seemed that it was being grasped into the raw, reality transformed into what Baudrillard, in a much misunderstood neologism, called 'hyperreality'. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

104 " The disarticulation of class from race, gender and sexuality has in fact been central to the success of the neoliberal project "

― Mark Fisher , Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

105 " The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn't end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate.

But what of the catastrophe itself? It is evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. I want to argue this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises? "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

106 " Capitalist realism, however, entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

107 " We are confronted with what Jameson, in his essay ‘The Antimonies Of The Postmodern’, calls ‘a purely fungible present in which space and psyches alike can be processed and remade at will’. The ‘reality’ here is akin to the multiplicity of options available on a digital document, where no decision is final, revisions are always possible, and any previous moment can be recalled at any time. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

108 " In one of the key scenes in Alfonso Cuaron's 2006 film Children of Men, Clive Owen's character, Theo, visits a friend at Battersea Power Station, which is now some combination of government building and private collection. Cultural treasures - Michelangelo's David, Picasso's Guernica, Pink Floyd's inflatable pig - are preserved in a building that is itself a refurbished heritage artifact. This is our only glimpse into the lives of the elite, holed up against the effects of a catastrophe which has caused mass sterility: no children have been born for a generation. Theo asks the question, 'how all this can matter if there will be no-one to see it?' The alibi can no longer be future generations, since there will be none. The response is nihilistic hedonism: 'I try not to think about it'. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

109 " How could it ever be possible for us to believe successive or even co-extensive stories that so obviously contradict one another? Yet we know from Kant, Nietzsche and psychoanalysis that waking, as much as dreaming, experience, depends upon just such screening narratives. If the Real is unbearable, any reality we construct must be a tissue of inconsistencies. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

110 " What, then, is it like to live through someone else’s dream coming true? [Haber] could not go on talking. He felt it: the shift, the arrival, the change. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

111 " neoliberalism and neoconservatism worked together to undermine the public sphere and democracy, producing a governed citizen who looks to find solutions in products, not political processes. As Brown claims, the choosing subject and the governed subject are far from opposites ... Frankfurt school intellectuals and, before them, Plato theorized the open compatibility between individual choice and political domination, and depicted democratic subjects who are available to political tyranny or authoritarianism precisely because they are absorbed in a province of choice and need-satisfaction that they mistake for freedom. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

112 " Here, Žižek’s elaboration of Lacan’s concept of the ‘big Other’ is crucial. The big Other is the collective fiction, the symbolic structure, presupposed by any social field. The big Other can never be encountered in itself; instead, we only ever confront its stand-ins. These representatives are by no means always leaders. In the example of the White Sea Canal above, for instance, it wasn’t Stalin himself who was the representative of the big Other so much as the Soviet and foreign writers who had to be persuaded of the glories of the project. One important dimension of the big Other is that it does not know everything. It is this constitutive ignorance of the big Other that allows public relations to function. Indeed, the big Other could be defined as the consumer of PR and propaganda, the virtual figure which is required to believe even when no individual can. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

113 " the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

114 " The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups — the more “marginal” the better — into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering — those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly. "

― Mark Fisher , K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher

115 " What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short- circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. (...) What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

116 " listening to the Junior Boys after Grime or Dubstep is like walking out of a locker room thick with dope smoke out onto a Caspar David Friedrich mountain. "

― Mark Fisher , Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

117 " Токсины эгоистического капиталиста, которые наиболее опасны для благополучия человека, — это систематическое поощрение идей, будто материальное богатство — это ключ к самореализации, что только преуспевшие в материальном отношении являются победителями, причем доступ к вершинам открывается любому, кто готов достаточно упорно работать, независимо от семейных, этнических и социальных условий; так что, если вы проиграли, вы знаете, кого винить. "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

118 " Kapital je apstraktni parazit, nezasitni vampir i stvaratelj zombija; ali živo meso koje pretvara u mrtvi rad naše je, a zombiji koje stvara mi smo sami. "

― Mark Fisher

119 " Deleuze says that Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists – get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you’d left school at sixteen… "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

120 " Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort. Needless "

― Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?