On the Memeing of Mark Fisher

This was a wholly disappointing contribution to the literature. I was hoping for more on the interplay between the Frankfurt School and Fisher, and that’s not what I got. The argument seems to be that the Frankfurt School was a forerunner to Fisher’s work, which should be so obvious to anyone who’s read Fisher as to be meaningless. Watson did his PhD at Goldsmiths, where Fisher taught until his death in 2017, so I expected more rigor on the work — but Fisher almost gets mischaracterized here, with Watson clinging to the link Fisher drew between capitalist realism and mental health. That link mattered, but it wasn’t the whole point. There’s some material on capitalist realism, hauntology, and even Acid Communism at the end, but none of them gets the attention it deserves, while Fisher’s cybergothic, gothic-materialist, and accelerationist writing is missed entirely. He was very much a product of the CCRU, and it shows across his whole body of work, but that seems to count for nothing here.

The most interesting parts are Watson’s discussion of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and of Marcuse on capitalism and sexuality. There’s a clear line from Marcuse to Fisher, especially in Acid Communism but also in the earlier work, which is heavily influenced by Lacan and Freud (the death drive in particular). I don’t fully agree with Watson’s call for a Benjamin-style study of digital spaces on the model of the Paris arcades — Watson is, by the evidence of the book, chronically online, and I think it would be far more interesting to do the same for warehouses, malls, and markets. It did inspire me to look at Tunisia this way: what do the souks, the malls, the 3attars, the concept stores and boutiques of Tunis tell us about global capital? Quite a lot, I’d imagine. The book is a very quick read, so it’s not a huge investment, but I’m not sure it’s worth it.