The suicide of theorist and writer Mark Fisher has left possibly the most bizarre intellectual lacuna in the post-2008 Left, filled not by a synthesis of his work with the present moment, but more content. One shudders to think what will happen to David Graeber and Lauren Berlant’s oeuvres once their bodies have cooled and the maws of internet intellectuals have sharpened their teeth. Author of three books, Capitalist Realism, The Weird & the Eerie, and Ghosts of My Life, Fisher’s complete compendium of blog posts, articles, and other intellectual ephemera was collected in 2018 as K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. He has been the subject of an ever-lengthening list of think-pieces, meme pages, YouTube videos, and more recently books, notably Post-Capitalist Desire: Mark Fisher, The Final Lectures edited by Matt Colquhoun and the recently published The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Predicted Capitalist Realism by Mike Watson, the curator of one of the aforementioned YouTube channels.
His YouTube channel, The Acid Left, takes its cues from the 17-page draft of an introduction from Fisher’s final unfinished project, “Acid Communism.” The aesthetics of the page give way to what is a baffling work of theorization. Purple and pink seems to be the most dominant color in the posts, swirling tie-dye tapestries a first-year college roommate would use to tell people he smokes weed, lay behind Watson, his co-host, Adam Ray Adkins, and guests as they discuss texts of Marxist cultural and political theory. “Acid Leftism,” the theory, as conveyed by Watson rather than in Fisher’s words, seeks to raise consciousness with “irrationalist aim,” challenging the data economy and to “push towards quantitative goals both online and in real life.” Fisher’s own writing on acid communism, elsewhere suggested as a “volte face” on his feelings towards hippies and the culture of the 1960s, is perhaps a relaxed take on the issue rather than a flip. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher lamented the lack of sensuality in the New Left, while in the 17 pages supposedly opening a new politics sprouting from LSD’s “far-out” possibilities, Fisher suggests an “unforgetting” of the simple history that the “Sixties led to neoliberalism.” Instead, he wishes to rethink the 1970s, not only as a time of the Left’s waning, but also as a time of struggle and contradictions, Old vs. New Left to put it broadly, that failed.
The book project, The Memeing of Mark Fisher, from Zer0 Books, a house founded by Fisher and Tariq Goddard, aims to “situate the online culture of the 2010s and 2020s,” within the framework of The Frankfurt School. But most of that sentence was in the title, so you knew that already. Such is the mode Watson writes in. His project has a point, even an argument sometimes, that makes it momentarily lucid, but what the slim pamphlet accomplishes is a gloss of Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Horkheimer which serves as an attempt to demonstrate Watson’s own literacy with the name-checked thinkers rather than advance leftist or even progressive thought. The book is careerist, which isn’t a crime in itself worth of much other than chide, but the cynicism is maddening. The Frankfurt School and Fisher possess such rich arguments and theories for the present and Watson does them and the reader a massive disservice.
Watson takes as his ideal mover of history as a member of the “online left,” those “meme-producers” who work in abstraction and ironic placement of text. Briefly, the concept of “the left,” evenly broadly construed to include as many divergent and disagreeing progressive ideologies as possible, as “online” is deluded and bizarre. This is not because an “online left” can only be anti-Marxist, anti-union, anti-organizing, anti-worker, and misanthropic, but because any belief remaining in the potential of the internet, the thing having been subsumed by big tech and venture capital to harm workers and further atomize individuals, as empowering a mass movement to seize the means of production is a Y2K-era fantasy. It is an argument common in the reactionary mind of Fisher’s former colleague Nick Land that our ability to fuse with the technology available to us will lead to our liberation. It is SparkNotes Marxism that technology per se possesses potential without a change in the means of production. Watson writes that a “coherent political dialogue” is largely impossible “because of the internet.” Nevertheless, he persisted.
Watson’s intervention then suggests a “slow meme movement” that uses memes to challenge the “breakneck speed that platforms encourage us to browse at.” Setting aside whether this is possible given the fact that the internet sprints by design and algorithm, the concept isn’t wrong in the sense that in order for the left to win, we need to step away from the day-to-day quarrels and main characters of the internet and instead think and act long term for capacity building. Yet, the idea that memes offer a vehicle out and through capitalism is simply wrong.
The meme that sparks the longest discussion by Watson is “We fuckin on the Capitalist Realism bed tonight.” This meme signals the internal contradictions of the online left—one of a desire to move through capitalism coupled with a depressive set of consistent failures. He then, in a tic that vexingly persists throughout the text, quotes Adorno’s Minima Moralia in blocks of text at a time. Aside from being aesthetically discomforting on the page, this is a college essay move to pad a page count and prove to the professor you have read the text.
I will spare the reader a delirious and word-by-word redlining of Watson’s arguments about some of the mid-century’s greatest thinkers and instead, meet Watson on his own terms: the surface. He leaps from arguing the internet is bad to a gloss of Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in an attempt to demonstrate how memes could raise class consciousness. He suggests this be worked towards rather than the “formation of new institutions and worker owned cooperatives.” Again, the belief that the internet raises class consciousness is deeply troubling. Class position is a relation to capital. Consciousness about that relation, its depths, its pressure points, its strong and weak spots at home and at work, require being in that relative state, i.e. at the workplace in the working day. The internet, even used at work, isn’t revealing of the machinations of capital. One cannot place consciousness in front of experience because the two work in synthesis, together all the time. Then, a “slow meme” culture of long readings and discussions of leftist concepts couldn’t accomplish class consciousness because that education occurs outside the relation of class, it simply raises levels of erudition of the attendees, creating ever more pedantic discussions of the Frankfurt School. Spare me.
The final two arguments Watson makes come from Benjamin’s concept of the “flaneur” and Marcuse’s concept of desire under capitalism. Watson, in a confused moment of factual inaccuracy, calls Adorno, Benjamin’s “mentor” and Adorno and Horkheimer, “Frankfurt School elders,” to Benjamin. Walter Benjamin was, famously, older than both Adorno and Horkheimer.
Benjamin’s Arcades Project, brought into the fold here by Watson, comes to us for the concept of flaneurism. Watson suggests a “digital flaneurism,” a walkabout through the flotsam of internet meme culture to “assemble constellations” and “reconstruct” the history of capitalism which will “allow possible future assemblages conducive to a socialist vision.” One imagines viewing, at a slow pace, the Bud Light “And twins!!!!” commercial, solemnly strutting to the Arial text memes of the late 2000s, meeting Pepe the Frog, first as a cartoon for friends, then far-right symbol, now some sort of rescued toad, and meeting the present at the Doomer Chad and Virgin memes. This is how we achieve socialism.
Watson finishes with Marcuse in an effort to pitch his concept of Acid Communism. He argues for “far-out creative output” to push “quantitative goals online and in real life.” This occurs by incorporating our “psychic reality” with image culture from “online arcades” all of this to challenge consumerism and algorithms. Watson suggests a new type of consciousness, a new way of viewing the world that attempts to clarify a way through capitalism. It is unclear in the pages of this text what Watson sees as the mechanism for the movement through capitalism is, and thus his theory of change appears to be “Subscribe to my YouTube page.” Watson’s argument quickly becomes anti-politics, an avoidance of the muck and grime of organizing people in real life to win working class power.
The productive forces of memes are for sure cultural but Watson’s argument supposes a politics. This politics, the way it’s argued, and the benefits of it, are spurious at best and twisted liberalism at worst. It is further bizarre that his agents of change are meme producers, yet he neglects that memes are largely produced anonymously, or if they aren’t, it is fairly simple to track down who made them. I was able to track down the two people who created the Capitalist Realism bed meme on Twitter. It took no time at all. The anonymous aspect of memes further problematizes Watson’s efforts. Right now, I could log-on to Twitter and make a “right wing” meme that I disagree with and let it be taken up by whoever. There is no ethical commitment to cultural production as Watson supposes it. There is no commitment to his politics, no steadfast desire to see a better world. Memes aestheticize politics; someone who believes nothing can be a “left wing meme producer.”
The lack of ethical commitment required to make memes then brings into question Watson’s historicizing of these thinkers, their uses, and his own Acid Communism. If his argument begins with thinkers writing in the 1920s, only a few years after the start of the Russian Revolution, as union power grows across the West, before WWII, then runs up to 1964 with Marcuse, on the cusp of 1968, its failures, contradictions, and eventual commodification, then skips to 2008 and Fisher’s writing of Capitalist Realism why should Watson be taken seriously? Why, I ask, should we read someone who leaps over the entire development of the neoliberal era, the growth of postmodernism, the pernicious movement of Critical Theory to only Theory, the government ordered upward movement of capital, the systematic destruction of unions, the growth of anti-solidaritistic politics, and the monopolization, surveillance, and data mining of tech companies? Why should Watson argue we need rigor, a “slow meme” economy, consideration and debate when he doesn’t hold himself to the same standard? Why else would be this be written other than as an exercise meant to dig up the grave of a much-admired man, Mark Fisher? The argument of Watson, lacking context, bizarre and unfettered, can be defeated even more simply than meeting his arguments on the same plain he presents, or reading Adorno and interpreting it differently. We can log off.
This book caused quite a stir within Theorygram circles when it was first announced, being one of the first solo books to be published by someone within the loose community. Mark Fisher memes have been a staple of the space for a long time, until they stopped when the meme became more overdrawn and over-advertised. In some ways, this book feels like the culmination of that overdrawn, memetic bank account: the memeing of Mark Fisher is also the death of the memeing of Mark Fisher. Even The Meming of Mark Fisher by Academic Fraud resembles a museum catalogue rather than a living interest in making such memes. Perhaps it will resume in a few years, but in bringing the memes to the surface, the meme dies from exposure to the air, so to speak.