The Schizo-Stroller

Continuing the book readings I have been putting on, next up is a book reading by Mark Fisher aka k-punk, upstairs @ the Open House on Springfield Road in Brighton, next to London Road station. From 7.30pm on Thursday 26th November, entrance £2.

Mark will be reading from his new book ‘Capitalist Realism’

Here is publishers blurb:

• Capitalist Realism
  Is there no alternative?
• ISBN:
  [978-1-84694-317-1]
• Price:
  £7.99 || $14.95
• Publishing on:
  27 Nov 2009
• Pages:
  92
  Format:
  Paperback
• Size:
  51/2×81/2 in ||  mm
• Category:
• Political/ Popular Culture
• Author(s): Mark Fisher

• It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system – a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it also shows that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program – endemic mental health problems, the proliferation of new forms of bureaucracy – capitalism in fact is anything but realistic. How can capitalist realism be challenged, and can we begin to imagine the unimaginable: an alternative to capitalism that is not some throwback to discredited models of state control?
  Capitalist Realism includes striking new readings of Children Of Men, the Jason Bourne films, Supernanny and the fiction of Le Guin and Kafka.

• Mark Fisher writes for The Wire, frieze, Sight & Sound and New Statesman. He teaches philosophy at the City Literary Institute in London and is Visiting Fellow at the Centre of for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. His weblog, k-punk, is highly regarded.

• Endorsements:

  Let’s not beat around the bush: Fisher’s compulsively readable book is simply the best diagnosis of our predicament that we have! Through examples from daily life and popular culture, but without sacrificing theoretical stringency, he provides a ruthless portrait of our ideological misery. Although the book is written from a radically Left perspective, Fisher offers no easy solutions. Capitalist Realism is a sobering call for patient theoretical and political work. It enables us to breathe freely in our sticky atmosphere.

  Slavoj Žižek

  What happened to our future? Mark Fisher is a master cultural diagnostician, and in Capitalist Realism he surveys the symptoms of our current cultural malaise. We live in a world in which we have been told, again and again, that There Is No Alternative. The harsh demands of the ‘just-in-time’ marketplace have drained us of all hope and all belief. Living in an endless Eternal Now, we no longer seem able to imagine a future that might be different from the present. This book offers a brilliant analysis of the pervasive cynicism in which we seem to be mired, and even holds out the prospect of an antidote.

  Steven Shaviro Author of Connected and Doom Patrols