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Ghosts of My Life

Metadata

  • Author: Mark Fisher
  • ASIN: B00JQPK1V8
  • ISBN: 1780992262
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JQPK1V8
  • Kindle link

Highlights

there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. — location: 199 ^ref-42063

In the UK, the postwar welfare state and higher education maintenance grants constituted an indirect source of funding for most of the experiments in popular culture between the 1960s and the 80s. The subsequent ideological and practical attack on public services meant that one of the spaces where artists could be sheltered from the pressure to produce something that was immediately successful was severely circumscribed. — location: 289 ^ref-41737

an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful. The result of all of this is that the social time available for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural production drastically declined. — location: 292 ^ref-34210

It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities. — location: 294 ^ref-33604

the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished. — location: 296 ^ref-29435

the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before. — location: 300 ^ref-6379

‘the painful obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history and to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness.’ — location: 422 ^ref-40197

its lost futures do not force such false choices; instead, what haunts is the spectre of a world in which all the marvels of communicative technology could be combined with a sense of solidarity much stronger than anything social democracy could muster. — location: 453 ^ref-23823