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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com 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 220 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com and depressing vision. “The most gothic description of capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, and insatiable vampire and zombie-maker, but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.” This is a horror show in which we are all trapped. In BUY Mark Fisher books online from and Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher shows with terrifying insight just how completely it has enveloped us, but offers little glimpse of how we can break out. He does however disabuse us of any false hopes, and in demonstrating the enormity of the hold it has on us, shows the rank monster for what it is. Maybe that’s a start. � 221 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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