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Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Mike Watson, "The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What to Do about It" (Zero Books, 2021)
Description: Through his blog K-Punk, Mark Fisher become one of the cult figures of cultural theory after the economic crash of 2008. One of Fisher’s insights, widely taken up by the online memesphere, was that capitalism breeds depression. Mike Watson picks up Fisher’s prognosis when the locked-down pandemic world is mired in a depression that is economic and psychological, and no doubt exacerbated by the transfer of culture and life online.In the aftermath, The Memeing of Mark Fisher (Zero Books, 2021) revisits the Frankfurt School theorists who worked in the shadow of World War Two, during the rise of...