Whatever the intention, however, his latest release is a testament to the importance of reading both the Frankfurt School and Fisher in light of our present conjuncture, not only theirs, and is an effort that is far from modest in its scope and consequence.īuilding on his earlier work, also published by Zer0 Books and titled Can the Left Learn to Meme? ‒ in which various twenty-first century pop culture instances are investigated under the guise of a collective imagination, such as Netflix’s Stranger Things and its widespread resonance, the video series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared and its propensity for millennial sensibilities and the inherent fraternity found in online gaming communities ‒ Watson depicts a constellation that forces us all to take seriously online leftist movements in light of a thorough reading of the Frankfurt School’s main proponents (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse) and, of course, Mark Fisher. Perhaps Watson’s comment is best understood as an attempt at modesty, then.
Yet, in his final chapter, entitled ‘Psychedelic Dreams: Marcuse, Fisher, and Acid Communism’, one finds a coherent vision that provides direction for the late Mark Fisher’s ‘Acid Communism’, a vision that synthesises the work found in the preceding chapters. Finally, as more people have access to the means for theoretical and cultural broadcasting, it is urged that the online left uses that access to build a real life cultural and political movement.In the introduction to The Memeing of Mark Fisher, Watson writes that the book is ‘laid out here in six more-or-less standalone chapters’, leaving the reader to assume that each chapter is self-contained and their consequences to be theorised independently.
Taking in the phenomena of QAnon, twitch streaming, and memes it argues that the dichotomy between culture and political praxis is a false one. In examining their thoughts and drawing parallels with Fisher's Capitalist Realism, The Memeing of Mark Fisher aims to render the Frankfurt School as an incisive theoretical toolbox for the post-Covid digital age. In the aftermath, this book revisits the main Frankfurt School theorists, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin and Marcuse, who worked in the shadow of World War Two, during the rise of the culture industry. This depression was brought about not just by Covid isolation, but by the digital economy, fueled by social media and the meme.
We witnessed a depression, not economically speaking, but in the psychological sense: A clinical depression of and by society itself. Spring 2020 to 2021 was the year that did not take place. The Frankfurt School meets Fisher in this critique of capitalism incorporating memes, mental illness and psychedelia into a proposed counterculture.
0 kommentar(er)
