Can The Left Learn To Meme
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Can the Left Learn to Meme?
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.
There Is an Alternative
The book aims at interrogating the contemporary problematic of neoliberalism and its relationship to culture and ideology through the lens of a theoretical synthesis interweaving the emancipatory aesthetics of Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson's pathbreaking analysis of the cultural logic of late capitalism, and the late Mark Fisher's work on "post-capitalist desire" and "acid communism." The main imperative is to formulate a possible (and, as it turns out, necessary) opening for aesthetic critique in the climate of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. This mode of aesthetic critique is then operationalized through an exemplary reading of the emancipatory poetics of Ben Lerner's 2014 novel "10:04."
The Memeing of Mark Fisher
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.