Mark Fisher Quotes

“those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Baudrillard observes somewhere that computers don’t really remember because they lack the ability to forget”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Everything comes back as an advertising campaign. It isn’t just that the alternatives are written over, or out, it is that they return as their own simulacra”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The disarticulation of class from race, gender and sexuality has in fact been central to the success of the neoliberal project”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Why is it always raining here? Or is that just the sound of the television, tuned to a dead channel?”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk?”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The ethos espoused by McCauley is the one which Richard Sennett examines in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, a landmark study of the affective changes that the post-Fordist reorganization of work has brought about. The slogan which sums up the new conditions is 'no long term'. Where formerly workers could acquire a single set of skills and expect to progress upwards through a rigid organizational hierarchy, now they are required to periodically re-skill as they move from institution to institution, from role to role.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Like Sennett, Marazzi recognizes that the new conditions both required and emerged from an increased cybernetization of the working environment. The Fordist factory was crudely divided into blue and white collar work, with the different types of labor physically delimited by the structure of the building itself. Laboring in noisy environments, watched over by managers and supervisors, workers had access to language only in their breaks, in the toilet, at the end of the working day, or when they were engaged in sabotage, because communication interrupted production. But in post-Fordism, when the assembly line becomes a 'flux of information', people work by communicating. As Norbert Wiener taught, communication and control entail one another.

Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions.”
― Mark Fisher

“Curtis's critique has a point, but it misses important dimensions of what is happening on the net. Contrary to Curtis's account of blogging, blogs can generate new discourse networks that have no correlate in the social field outside cyberspace. As Old Media increasingly becomes subsumed into PR and the consumer report replaces the critical essay, some zones of cyberspace offer resistance to a 'critical compression' that is elsewhere depressingly pervasive. Nevertheless, the interpassive simulation of participation in postmodern media, the network narcissism of MySpace and Facebook, has, in the main, generated content that is repetitive, parasitic and conformist. In a seeming irony, the media class's refusal to be paternalistic has not produced a bottom-up culture of breathtaking diversity, but one that is increasingly infantilized. By contrast, it is paternalistic cultures that treat audiences as adults, assuming that they can cope with cultural products that are complex and intellectually demanding.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?