Download or read book The Memeing of Mark Fisher written by Mike Watson and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-24 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Frankfurt School meets Fisher in this critique of capitalism incorporating memes, mental illness and psychedelia into a proposed counterculture. Spring 2020 to 2021 was the year that did not take place. We witnessed a depression, not economically speaking, but in the psychological sense: A clinical depression of and by society itself. This depression was brought about not just by Covid isolation, but by the digital economy, fueled by social media and the meme. 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. 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. Taking in the phenomena of QAnon, twitch streaming, and memes it argues that the dichotomy between culture and political praxis is a false one. 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.
Download or read book Capitalist Realism written by Mark Fisher and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-25 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the ways in which capitalism has presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system.
Download or read book Can the Left Learn to Meme written by Mike Watson and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking in an array of cultural references from the contemporary art world, to cat memes, Stranger Things, the Kardashian-Jenners, Mad Men, Run the Jewels, and video gaming, Can the Left Learn to Meme? argues that there is positivity in millennial-era cultural production. Utilising Adorno’s unswerving yet understated hope in spite of the odds, Mike Watson embraces the abstraction of the new media landscape as millennials refuse to surrender to cynicism, by out-weirding even the world at large. They pose a radical alternative to the right wing approach of Steve Bannon and the conservative psychology of Jordan Peterson. Here, the cultural elitism of the art world is contrasted with the anything-goes approach of millennial culture. The left avant-garde dream of an art-for-all is with us, though you won't find it in museums. It is time the left learned to meme, challenging conventions along the way.
Download or read book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle written by Jonas Ceika and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creator of the Cuck Philosophy YouTube channel comes this timely and explosive re-evaluation of Marx and Nietzsche for the 21st-century left. Modernity has been defined by humanity's capacity for self-destruction. Over the last century, the means which threaten not only life's joy but its very existence have only multiplied. At the same time, as a new wave of nationalism and right-wing politics spreads across the world, fewer and fewer people are being convinced that socialism could improve their everyday lives, let alone save us from our own destruction. In this timely and explosive book, philosopher and YouTuber Jonas Čeika (aka Cuck Philosophy) re-invigorates socialism for the twenty-first century. Leaving behind its past associations with bureaucracy and state tyranny, and it's lifeless and drab theoretical accounts, Čeika instead uses the works of Marx and Nietzsche to reconnect socialism with its human element, presenting it as something not only affecting, but created by living, breathing, suffering human individuals. At a time when ecological collapse is hurtling towards us, and capitalism offers no solution except more growth and exploitation, How to Philosophise with a Hammer and Sickle shows us the way forward to a socialism grounded in human experience and accessible to all.
Download or read book Acid Communism written by Mark Fisher and published by Pattern Books. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A short zine collecting an introduction to the concept by Matt Colquhoun that appeared in 'krisis journal for contemporary philosophy Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins' and the unfinished introduction to the unfinished book on Acid Communism that Mark Fisher was working on before his death in 2017. "In this way ‘Acid’ is desire, as corrosive and denaturalising multiplicity, flowing through the multiplicities of communism itself to create alinguistic feedback loops; an ideological accelerator through which the new and previously unknown might be found in the politics we mistakenly think we already know, reinstantiating a politics to come." —Matt Colquhoun
Download or read book The World Made Meme written by Ryan M. Milner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How memetic media—aggregate texts that are collectively created, circulated, and transformed—become a part of public conversations that shape broader cultural debates. Internet memes—digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection—are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It's hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn't generate a constellation of memetic texts. Memetic media, Milner writes, offer participation by reappropriation, balancing the familiar and the foreign as new iterations intertwine with established ideas. New commentary is crafted by the mediated circulation and transformation of old ideas. Through memetic media, small strands weave together big conversations. Milner considers the formal and social dimensions of memetic media, and outlines five basic logics that structure them: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. He examines how memetic media both empower and exclude during public conversations, exploring the potential for public voice despite everyday antagonisms. Milner argues that memetic media enable the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality. This new kind of participatory conversation, he contends, complicates the traditional culture industries. When age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new ways of sharing information, the relationship between collective participation and individual expression becomes ambivalent. For better or worse—and Milner offers examples of both—memetic media have changed the nature of public conversations.
Download or read book Postcapitalist Desire written by Mark Fisher and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of transcripts from Mark Fisher's final series of lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, in late 2016. Edited with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun, this collection of lecture notes and transcriptions reveals acclaimed writer and blogger Mark Fisher in his element -- the classroom -- outlining a project that Fisher's death left so bittersweetly unfinished. Beginning with that most fundamental of questions -- "Do we really want what we say we want?" -- Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line of thinking, this volume charts a tragically interrupted course for thinking about the raising of a new kind of consciousness, and the cultural and political implications of doing so. For Fisher, this process of consciousness raising was always, fundamentally, psychedelic -- just not in the way that we might think...
Download or read book Egress written by Matt Colquhoun and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Egress is the first book to consider the legacy and work of the writer, cultural critic and cult academic Mark Fisher. Narrated in orbit of his death as experienced by a community of friends and students in 2017, it analyses Fisher’s philosophical trajectory, from his days as a PhD student at the University of Warwick to the development of his unfinished book on Acid Communism. Taking the word “egress” as its starting point—a word used by Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie to describe an escape from present circumstances as experiences by the characters in countless examples of weird fiction—Egress consider the politics of death and community in a way that is indebted to Fisher’s own forms of cultural criticism, ruminating on personal experience in the hope of making it productively impersonal.
Download or read book Towards a Conceptual Militancy written by Mike Watson and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-27 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards a Conceptual Militancy is aimed at the interested art-viewing public, artists, the politically disillusioned, and readers of both European Philosophy, particularly of Speculative Realism/OOP, and Accelerationism. This book calls on the artist to mount a defence of subjective freedom in opposition to the twin objectifying factors of Science and Capital, personified by growing surveillance technology. Presenting the artistic declaration of freedom as exemplary of how the subject might circumvent its objectification, Towards a Conceptual Militancy brings art back into the social sphere following decades of cultural commodification.
Download or read book Ghosts of My Life written by Mark Fisher and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-30 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.
Download or read book Prehistoric Digital Poetry written by Chris Funkhouser and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2011-04-22 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A singular and major historical view of the birth of electronic poetry. For the last five decades, poets have had a vibrant relationship with computers and digital technology. This book is a documentary study and analytic history of digital poetry that highlights its major practitioners and the ways that they have used technology to foster a new aesthetic. Focusing primarily on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, C. T. Funkhouser analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry to illustrate that the foundations of today’s most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative, visual, and interlinked productions of the genre’s prehistoric period. Since 1959, computers have been used to produce several types of poetic output, including randomly generated writings, graphical works (static, animated, and video formats), and hypertext and hypermedia. Funkhouser demonstrates how hardware, programming, and software have been used to compose a range of new digital poetic forms. Several dozen historical examples, drawn from all of the predominant approaches to digital poetry, are discussed, highlighting the transformational and multi-faceted aspects of poetic composition now available to authors. This account includes many works, in English and other languages, which have never before been presented in an English-language publication. In exploring pioneering works of digital poetry, Funkhouser demonstrates how technological constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead extended and enriched poetic discourse. As a history of early digital poetry and a record of an era that has passed, this study aspires both to influence poets working today and to highlight what the future of digital poetry may hold.
Download or read book Post Memes written by Daniel Bristow and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art-form, send-up, farce, ironic disarticulation, pastiche, propaganda, trololololol, mode of critique, mode of production, means of politicisation, even of subjectivation - memes are the inner currency of the internet's circulatory system. Independent of any one set value, memes are famously the mode of conveyance for the alt-right, the irony left, and the apoliticos alike, and they are impervious to many economic valuations: the attempts made in co-opting their discourse in advertising and big business have made little headway, and have usually been derailed by retaliative meming. POST MEMES: SEIZING THE MEMES OF PRODUCTION takes advantage of the meme's subversive adaptability and ripeness for a focused, in-depth study. Pulling together the interrogative forces of a raft of thinkers at the forefront of tech theory and media dissection, this collection of essays paves a way to articulating the semiotic fabric of the early 21st century's most prevalent means of content posting, and aims at the very seizing of the memes of production for the imagining and creation of new political horizons. With contributions from Scott and McKenzie Wark, Patricia Reed, Jay Owens, Thomas Hobson and Kaajal Modi, Dominic Pettman, Bogna M. Konior, and Eric Wilson, among others, this essay volume offers the freshest approaches available in the field of memes studies and inaugurates a new kind of writing about the newest manifestations of the written online. The book aims to become the go-to resource for all students and scholars of memes, and will be of the utmost interest to anyone interested in the internet's most viral phenomenon. ABOUT THE EDITORS ALFIE BOWN is the author of several books including "The Playstation Dreamworld" (Polity, 2017) and "In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy" (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is also a journalist for the Guardian, the Paris Review, and other outlets. DAN BRISTOW is a recovering academic, a bookseller, and author of "Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis" (Routledge, 2016) and "2001: A Space Odyssey and Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory" (Palgrave, 2017). He is also the co-creator with Alfie Bown of Everyday Analysis, now based at New Socialist magazine.
Download or read book Internet Memes and Society written by Anastasia Denisova and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a solid, encompassing definition of Internet memes, exploring both the common features of memes around the globe and their particular regional traits. It identifies and explains the roles that these viral texts play in Internet communication: cultural, social and political implications; significance for self-representation and identity formation; promotion of alternative opinion or trending interpretation; and subversive and resistant power in relation to professional media, propaganda, and traditional and digital political campaigning. It also offers unique comparative case studies of Internet memes in Russia and the United States.
Download or read book It Came from Something Awful written by Dale Beran and published by All Points Books. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How 4chan and 8chan fuel white nationalism, inspire violence, and infect politics. The internet has transformed the ways we think and act, and by consequence, our politics. The most impactful recent political movements on the far left and right started with massive online collectives of teenagers. Strangely, both movements began on the same website: an anime imageboard called 4chan.org. It Came from Something Awful is the fascinating and bizarre story of sites like 4chan and 8chan and their profound effect on youth counterculture. Dale Beran has observed the anonymous messageboard community's shifting activities and interests since the beginning. Sites like 4chan and 8chan are microcosms of the internet itself—simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary culture, politics, comedy and language, and a new low for all of the above. They were the original meme machines, mostly frequented by socially awkward and disenfranchised young men in search of a place to be alone together. During the recession of the late 2000’s, the memes became political. 4chan was the online hub of a leftist hacker collective known as Anonymous and a prominent supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But within a few short years, the site’s ideology spun on its axis; it became the birthplace and breeding ground of the alt-right. In It Came from Something Awful, Beran uses his insider’s knowledge and natural storytelling ability to chronicle 4chan's strange journey from creating rage-comics to inciting riots to—according to some—memeing Donald Trump into the White House.
Download or read book Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism written by León Rozitchner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an in-depth interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s so-called “collective” or “social” works, León Rozitchner shows how the Left should consider the ways in which capitalism inscribes its power in the subject as the site for the verification of history.
Download or read book Emotions and Loneliness in a Networked Society written by Bianca Fox and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Loneliness affects quality of life, life satisfaction, and well-being, and it is associated with various health problems, both somatic and mental. This book takes an international and interdisciplinary approach to the study of loneliness, identifying and bridging the gaps in academic research on loneliness, and creating new research pathways. Focusing in particular on loneliness in the context of new and emergent communication technologies, it provides a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and will contribute to the re-evaluation of the way we understand and research this contemporary global phenomenon.
Download or read book Rereading America written by Gary Colombo and published by Bedford Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 861 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended as a reader for writing and critical thinking courses, this volume presents a collection of writings promoting cultural diversity, encouraging readers to grapple with the real differences in perspectives that arise in our complex society.
