Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Fisher
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British writer Mark Fisher.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
While football embarrassingly exposes the excesses of capitalism, the Olympic sports have been used to propagate the neoliberal mantra that success is simply a matter of hard work.
While the emphasis on effects became a catastrophe for science fiction, it was a relief for the capitalist culture of which 'Star Wars' became a symbol. Late capitalism can't produce many new ideas any more, but it can reliably deliver technological upgrades. But 'Star Wars' didn't really belong to the science fiction genre any way.
No ideology better understands the need for enemies than neoconservatism, and when the cold war dramatically and unexpectedly ended, the way was prepared for the 'Arab threat' to emerge. 'True Lies,' the 1994 James Cameron comedy thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, duly served up the Arab villain Salim Abu Aziz.
The fact that the 1984 cold war film 'Red Dawn' has been remade is more than just another sign of Hollywood declining into pastiche and repetition. It shows that, in a moment of deep capitalist crisis, the Red Peril is back.
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.
Nietzsche should not be taken seriously as a political theorist, at least not at the level of his positive prescriptions. But the Nietzsche who denounces the insipidity and mediocrity that result from democracy's levelling impulses could not be more acute.
Some IMDB viewers complain that 'Beloved' should have been reclassifed as Horror... well, so should American history.
Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.
What is remarkable about Joy Division is the way they are bereft of two of the mainstays of most other rock and pop: longing and supplication.
Like all of Moore's work, 'V for Vendetta' is considerably less than the sum of its parts.
Crucially, Marxist atheism is only achieved once the theological critique of capitalism is completed. This is what separates Marxist atheism from the gliberal platitudes of the likes of Nick Cohen, who proclaim secularism while remaining attached to the theology of capital (liberal commonsense).
To be able to function in late capitalism without being a psychological wreck, it is necessary to accept the insane as standard.
The sustaining fantasy of Nolan's Batman films - which does chime uncomfortably with Romney -is that the excesses of finance capital can be curbed by a combination of philanthropy, off-the-books violence and symbolism.
The arrival of 'Star Wars' signalled the full absorption of the former counterculture into a new mainstream.
I'm not sure that Liberation Theology has ever satisfactorily resolved the tensions between Marxism's 'social naturalism' (the claim that all beliefs have their origins in social practice) and religion's supernaturalism (the claims that its beliefs are underwritten by divine will).
In a world of niches, we are enchained by our own consumer preferences.
Just because something is current doesn't mean it is new.
We once turned to popular culture because it produced fantasy objects; now, we are asked to 'identify with' the fantasising subject itself.
If people dying as a consequence of the implementation of measures cannot count as evidence that the legislation has detrimental effects, what would?
Picnic at Hanging Rock' is the exemplary study of disapparition in cinema - I know of no other major film which deals with unexplained disappearance.
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.
It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated. But this says nothing about their causation.
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.
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.
The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.
The reality of nostalgia is nowhere better invoked than at the end of Tarkovsky's 'Solaris.' When the camera pans away from Kelvin embracing his father on the rain-soaked steps of his dacha, we realise that the scene is yet another of the simulations produced by the inscrutable planet.
The discussion of 'V for Vendetta' - on Pinocchio Theory in particular - has been far more interesting than the film deserved. Yes, there is a certain frission in seeing a major Hollywood movie refusing to unequivocally condemn terrorism, but the political analysis in the film (as in the original comic) is really rather threadbare.
What Public Enemy and Underground Resistance had in common was a rejection of the idea of music as entertainment.
Now that we are used to globalisation it's hard to imagine a time when the countries behind the iron curtain were largely obscured from the western gaze. The Soviet bloc was a genuine mystery. Such was the dehumanisation of the Soviets that Sting could wonder in song if 'the Russians love their children too.'
The neoliberal policies implemented first by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s and continued by New Labour and the current coalition have resulted in a privatisation of stress.
There is no right to not be offended, nor should there be.
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.
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.
The paradoxical War on Terror is based on a kind of willed stupidity; the willed stupidity of wishful thinking. Only the logic of dreamwork can suture 'War' with 'Terror' in this way, since terrorists were, by classical definition, those without 'legitimate authority' to wage war.
Sometimes a disappearance can be more haunting than an apparition.
There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.
Under neoliberal governance, workers have seen their wages stagnate and their working conditions and job security become more precarious.
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.
The World Cup is like the Overlook Hotel: the identities of individual meat puppets might change, but the structure continues endlessly.
Christopher Nolan's 'The Prestige' is an enthralling study of doubles, doubling and duplicity. Its twinned themes are obsession and the Secret: the Secret as objet-a, that which inspires, but which can never satisfy, obsession.
In terms of the film itself, there was nothing much very new about 'Star Wars.' 'Star Wars' was a trailblazer for the kind of monumentalist pastiche which has become standard in a homogeneous Hollywood blockbuster culture that, perhaps more than any other film, 'Star Wars' played a role in inventing.
What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.
The ruling ideology prefers to talk about individual ethics rather than the capitalist system.
In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.
Postmodernism is, of course, the dead end from which hauntology starts - but one of its role is to denaturalise what postmodernism has taken for granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the sense of a sickness.
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.'
The moment that most fascinated me in Ursula Le Guin's 'The Lathe of Heaven' was its descriptions of times of transition from one reality to another.
Footballers' 'lack of loyalty,' for instance, is not an indication of players' moral delinquency. Instead, the capacity to move on quickly without forming lasting attachments is a skill that the contemporary capitalist world inculcates and relies upon.
Roxy Music' and 'For Your Pleasure,' those exercises in learning and unlearning of accent and manners, are Pop's equivalent of 'The Talented Mr Ripley.' The clothes , the bearing and the voice are faked, but not yet perfectly.
Children of Men' reinforces what few would doubt, but which British cinema would seldom lead you to suspect: the British landscape bristles with cinematic potential.
What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?
Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming 'ought' under 'is.'
Most psychiatrists assume that mental illnesses such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, which can be treated by drugs. But most psychotherapy doesn't address the social causation of mental illness either.
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.
The first 'Red Dawn' was made at a time when Hollywood didn't stint in its use of Russian stereotypes. Cold war capitalist ideology construed the Soviets as different for two reasons - not only did they belong to another political-economic system, they didn't seem to possess the same emotions that 'we' do.
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.
Anti-capitalism is nothing new in Hollywood. From 'Wall-E' to 'Avatar,' corporations are routinely depicted as evil. The contradiction of corporate-funded films denouncing corporations is an irony capitalism cannot just absorb, but thrive on. Yet this anti-capitalism is only allowed within limits.
Star Wars' was a sell-out from the start, and that is just about the only remarkable thing about this depressingly mediocre franchise.
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.
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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