“The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First,… — Mark Fisher Copy Share Image
“Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and… — Mark Fisher Copy Share Image
“It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. 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; and the task of repoliticizing mental… — Mark Fisher Copy Share
What is remarkable about Joy Division is the way they are bereft of two of the mainstays of most other rock and pop: longing… — Mark Fisher Copy Share Image
While football embarrassingly exposes the excesses of capitalism, the Olympic sports have been used to propagate the neoliberal mantra that success is simply a… — Mark Fisher Copy Share Image
The story of Basinski's 'Disintegration Loops' - tapes that destroyed themselves in the transfer to digital - is a parable (again almost too perfect)… — Mark Fisher Copy Share Image
Star Wars' was a sell-out from the start, and that is just about the only remarkable thing about this depressingly mediocre franchise. — Mark Fisher Copy Share Image
You can be debased without relinquishing your identity, just as you can relinquish your identity without being debased. — Mark Fisher Copy Share Image
“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. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some… — Mark Fisher Copy Share
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… — Mark Fisher Copy Share Image
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. — Mark Fisher Copy Share
“emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere… — Mark Fisher Copy Share Image
“Invited to think of the futuristic, we will still come up with something like the music of Kraftwerk, even though this is now as… — Mark Fisher Copy Share Image
“[W]hat counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very… — Mark Fisher Copy Share
