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that is solid melts into PR”, and targets proliferate. A
frantic scramble ensues for formless trinkets with no
link to reality. Everyone knows this is meaningless, yet
at an official level this cannot be admitted. When Gerald
Ratner called his product “crap” he sinned against
this unwritten rule – we all know it but it must not be
admitted. This is an omnipresent facade, from which
everyone seeks escape by any means necessary. The
daydreams appropriate to this Janus-faced world are
the paranoid fantasies of Paralax View or the Bourne
films, or at a higher level in the nightmare schizoid
dreamscapes of Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and David
Cronenberg, “where agency is dissolved in a phantasmagoric
haze of psychic and physical intoxicants.”
Writing with a mercurial set of cultural references,
Fisher can shift gear from the ground level of reality
TV shows like Supernanny to the heights of Baudrillard
and Lacan without any sense of jarring incongruity.
Unlike Slavoj Zizek, another social critic given to
blending high and low cultural reference points, you
never get the sense that they are being thrown in just to
shock, or to highlight the author’s brilliance.
Fisher shows the modern society as a sinister hall of
mirrors, and illuminates each pained pane perfectly.
So many themes throb within this tiny book (just 81
pages!) as to take your breath away, and this review has
only scraped the surface. Other panes – that revolution
itself has been absorbed and commodified within the
BUY Mark Fisher books online from and
neoliberal paradigm with ‘liberal communists’ such as
the philanthropic elite of Gates and Soros giving out
with one hand what they take away with another, that
Kafka prefigured the current order better than Orwell or
Huxley, (and uncannily predicted the call centre while
he was at it), and that the ostensible ‘choice’ of the market
has worked its way in ever diminishing returns into
a zero common dominator, 999 channels of nothing.
Deft at sociology, political theory and cultural analysis
alike, Fisher is probably at his weakest with his own
empirical examples of students at the college where he
has worked. He claims that the listless sense of time,
and inability to absorb abstract concepts, that he observes
in his students, mirrors the blip-vert consumer
mentality of modern market reality. Maybe true, but
this also sounds suspiciously like the moaning of the
teachers at their inattentive pupils over the ages. The
piercing vividity of his other insights however more
than make up for this.
While by no means a ‘light’ read, and the odd excursion
into Deleuze and other theorists did shoot slightly
over my scalp, this is not a tome you need a degree
in philosophy or cultural theory to comprehend – its
ingenuity is an open book. And while Fisher’s style
is more often academic in style than not, the forensic
imagination and magnificently multifarious breadth of
scope on display means this is anything but a dry read.
Indeed, he brings to vivid life a somewhat deadening
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