Review: “The Memeing of Mark Fisher”

“Located within the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, The Memeing of Mark Fisher boldly riffs on everything from conspiracy theories and memes to economic policy and election campaigns…”

With a host of respected academics—including Matt McManus, Alfie Bown, and Conrad Hamilton—already endorsing Mike Watson’s The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What To Do About It, there is little that has not been said to praise Watson’s latest work. Indeed, if with his 2019 book Can the Left Learn to Meme?: Adorno, Video Gaming, and Stranger Things Watson announced himself as a significant voice of the online left, then it is with his latest offering that he establishes his reputation as one of the most impressive analysts of our strange digital era.

In building upon his previous work, in which he sought to recuperate and reimagine Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s 1944 essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” for a contemporary audience—championing the power of new media (such as memes, online gaming, and social media) as offering boundless opportunity for expression and advocating the utilization and abstraction of it through persistence production—Watson once again revisits the work of the Frankfurt School as an antidote for the sickness of modern times.

Such pathology is diagnosed through the unwavering, if not increased relevance of the late Mark Fisher’s 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, which echoes the bleak skepticism of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek in arguing that it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.