The Memeing of Mark Fisher:
Art Production as Acid Communist Strategy

Instructor: Mike Watson Date & Time: Jan 7, 14, 21, 28 9 to 11:30 AM ET

Enroll – 200 USD

DESCRIPTION: Today, Mark Fisher’s first book, “Capitalist Realism,” is as relevant as ever. In the last two years, even Fisher himself has become a commodity, featured in memes whose circulation provides income for social media giants. This Seminar looks at the trajectory from the publication of “Capitalist Realism” and the theory-blogging community from which it emerged to the meme and YouTube culture of the post-Covid era, and asks if there can be any resistance to capitalism from the online or “IRL” cultural field. We will trace Fisher’s treatment of the neoliberal notion that There is No Alternative, predicated on the tendency of capitalism to co-opt all creative opposition, back to the Frankfurt School, which will provide us with the tools to analyze Fisher’s last unfinished work, ‘Acid Communism’. Adorno’s Shudder, Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria and Marcuse’s Great Refusal will all be contextualised in terms of their relevance to a post-Covid society in which a generation that has been denied its rite of passage, including drug and social experimentation, will emerge from lock down to meet a disillusioned mass of unemployed people. How will such a mass view the datafication of society? What resistance will there be to the normalisation of lockdown-era restraints?

In particular, the course will ask whether there can be any incisive critique of society from within the meme sphere or the wider cultural field so long as capitalist forces control the means (or ‘memes’) of production. Utilising the terms Acid Communism and the Acid Left, together with Fisher’s proposal that we foster a countercultural movement to raise class consciousness, we will ask whether a post-Covid society might be ripe for a culturally-oriented protest movement and how the tools of online and officialized contemporary art culture might be used alongside grassroots initiatives. To what degree does Fisher’s ultimately Adornian identification of the possibility of witnessing ‘glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities’ within the ossified whole remain valid today?

IMAGE: Mark Fisher memorial mural, Goldsmith University, London

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Enroll – 200 USD