Mark Fisher

“In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.”

“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.”

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

“Nietzsche should not be taken seriously as a political theorist, at least not at the level of his positive prescriptions. But the Nietzsche who denounces the insipidity and mediocrity that result from democracy's levelling impulses could not be more acute.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”

“Noir' has been talked about a great deal in the discussion of 'The Black Dahlia,' but De Palma's palllete couldn't be less monochrome; it's the very definition of garish.”

“The arrival of 'Star Wars' signalled the full absorption of the former counterculture into a new mainstream.”

“Identitarianism assumes that people are condemned to identify with the positive (ethnic/ gender/ nationalistic) predicates they possess, as if their subjectivity were exhausted by those properties. Exactly the opposite is the case: the authentic dimension of subjectivity consists not in any positive identity but in that which makes identifications.”

“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.”

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

“No ideology better understands the need for enemies than neoconservatism, and when the cold war dramatically and unexpectedly ended, the way was prepared for the 'Arab threat' to emerge. 'True Lies,' the 1994 James Cameron comedy thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, duly served up the Arab villain Salim Abu Aziz.”

“The World Cup is like the Overlook Hotel: the identities of individual meat puppets might change, but the structure continues endlessly.”

“The ruling ideology prefers to talk about individual ethics rather than the capitalist system.”

“De Palma's great theme, obsessively reiterated, is betrayal.”

“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.”