Tag: mark fisher

  • The creative freedom of post-work

    From Post-Capitalist Desire by Mark Fisher, pg 77: I just think about the Beatles. What does a post-work society look like? It kind of looks like what life was like for them, doesn’t it? They didn’t have to work. They’d made enough money, surely, by the early Sixties to just not work. Then their most […]

  • Who is writing this blog?

    Who is writing this blog?

    “A theme here is blogging’s tendency to summon a strange double, a second self that seems both alien yet which cannot entirely be disavowed.”

  • Magical voluntarism: I got this

    Magical voluntarism: I got this

    Even if we didn’t manage to solve it this time, we can defer things forward so that next time we assume it’s going to be possible. Perhaps when I’ve changed in some way? Improved myself? Made myself stronger? Or more resilient?

  • Nick Land’s Poeticisation of Capital’s Obscenity

    Nick Land’s Poeticisation of Capital’s Obscenity

    It’s a position I’d understood intellectually but reading it left me with a momentary flash of this obscene totality weaving itself materially and immateriality through social reality as it orchestrates its own expansion and continued ascension.

  • Post-Pandemic Hedonism: Thoughts on Mark Fisher’s Final Book

    Post-Pandemic Hedonism: Thoughts on Mark Fisher’s Final Book

    If our desires are imbricated in the circuits of capital, if we feel and dream in terms of commodities and within the horizon of the existing system, what does this mean for the possibility of moving beyond it?

  • Mark Fisher on using social media rather than being used by it

    “In sum, the obsession with the web, its monopolisation of any idea of the new, has served capitalist realism rather than undermined it. Which does not mean, naturally, that we should abandon the web, only that we should find out how to develop a more instrumental relationship with it. Put simply, we should use it […]

  • Things I’ve been reading recently #2

    Following on from this post: I wasn’t enormously impressed by Malign Velocities. I had assumed it was a book about social acceleration but was surprised to find it’s actually about accelerationism. To be fair, it’s quite clear about this in the blurb, it’s just that I failed to read the blurb properly. Its concern was far […]

  • Ghosts of Sociologists Past in the Accelerated Academy

    I’m currently reading Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher. It’s an interesting book which explores a condition in which “life continues, but time has somehow stopped”. His claim is that this “stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of ‘newness’, of perpetual movement” and he explores it […]

  • At what point do addictive games become sinister?

    Prior to christmas I found myself installing Candy Crush on my iPad. Less than a week later I forced myself to delete it, not least of all because of the dawning realisation that I was going to do something which I’d previously found absurd and pay for extra lives. Since then I’ve been thinking about […]

  • What is Capitalist Realism?

    Assuming I haven’t completely misunderstood Mark Fisher’s point then I’d argue this is one of the most striking examples of capitalist realism I’ve ever encountered. It was posted as a comment on this Glenn Greenwald article. Note how an assertion of the obviousness of this state of affairs goes hand-in-hand with a dismissal of the ‘rubes’ who are […]

  • Mark Fisher on Communications and Late Capitalism

    In this keynote from Virtual Futures, Mark Fisher, author of the stunning Capitalist Realism, talks about the role which innovations in communicative technology play in the unfolding of late capitalism. He talks about the growing ‘digital communicative malaise’ which can be observed in contemporary society while suggesting that there’s still to much reluctance to address this […]