Top 66 Mark Fisher Quotes

In a world of niches, we are enchained by our own consumer preferences.

Basic Instinct 2′ is an uneasy experience because, although it is hyper-reflexive to the point where it is hard to think of one character, one scene, one plot twist that isn’t a reference or an echo, there is nothing knowing about it. No matter how absurd the film gets, it refuses to raise its eyebrows.

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.

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.

Like all of Moore‘s work, ‘V for Vendetta’ is considerably less than the sum of its parts.

Under neoliberal governance, workers have seen their wages stagnate and their working conditions and job security become more precarious.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is no right to not be offended, nor should there be.

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.

Just because something is current doesn’t mean it is new.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

I have taught Philosophy, Religious Studies, English Literature, Cultural Studies, Writing and Publishing Studies, Critical Thinking.

The most powerful love songs always turn on the discrepancy between the act of declaring love and the knowledge that the ostensible addressee is no longer there, was never there, and could never be there.

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 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.

The 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.

In ‘A Scanner Darkly,’ as in ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,’ all intersubjective relations devolve into webs of suspicion and betrayal.

What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?

Neoliberalism emerged by defining itself against what it labelled as an unrealistic and unsustainable programme of social welfare and public spending.

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.

A Scanner Darkly’ is one of Dick’s bleakest novels, and almost certainly his saddest.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Picnic at Hanging Rock’ is the exemplary study of disapparition in cinema – I know of no other major film which deals with unexplained disappearance.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Star Wars‘ was a sell-out from the start, and that is just about the only remarkable thing about this depressingly mediocre franchise.

Sometimes a disappearance can be more haunting than an apparition.

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.

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.

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.

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 arrival of ‘Star Wars’ signalled the full absorption of the former counterculture into a new mainstream.

Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce.

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.

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?’

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.

What better example than the World Cup is there of the fact that individual people are irrelevant while impersonal structures are invariant?

Affective exploitation is crucial to late capitalism.

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.

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.

Some IMDB viewers complain that ‘Beloved‘ should have been reclassifed as Horror… well, so should American history.

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.

I loathe my name because it is mine and also because it is not mine; it is at once too intimate and seems to have no connection with me. Perhaps because the name is quite common, it never seems to fit me, or fit me alone. Nevertheless, when I see the name, I always feel a peculiar sense of shame.

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.

The point is always made that capitalism is efficient, people say ‘You might not like it, but it works.’ But Britain is not efficient.

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.

It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated. But this says nothing about their causation.

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.

I’m the world’s greatest apologist for Brian De Palma but his version of Ellroy’s ‘The Black Dahlia’ is a disaster.

Columbo’s deliberately irritating questioning technique – ‘just one more thing’ – is designed to produce discomfort rather than to elicit information.