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. Mark Fisher Read Quote
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. Mark Fisher Read Quote
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. Mark Fisher Read Quote
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. Mark Fisher Read Quote
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. Mark Fisher Read Quote
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. Mark Fisher Read Quote
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. Mark Fisher Read Quote
In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture. Mark Fisher Read Quote
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. Mark Fisher Read Quote
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. Mark Fisher Read Quote
