K-Punk and the Cultural Machinery of Capitalist Realism

Описание: Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world — one book at a time.

This episode explores K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016) by Mark Fisher — a systems-level examination of how late capitalism reshapes culture, emotion, and political imagination.

Across essays on music, film, television, education, and politics, Fisher argues that culture is not a passive reflection of society but an active site of ideological control. Central to the collection is the concept of capitalist realism: the pervasive belief that no alternative to capitalism is possible. This belief does not operate as explicit doctrine, but as an atmosphere that constrains what feels realistic, imaginable, or even worth desiring.

Fisher introduces the idea of hauntology to describe a cultural condition defined by nostalgia and repetition — a longing for futures once promised but never delivered. Rather than producing new forms, contemporary culture recycles the past, reinforcing a sense of stagnation and lost possibility. This cultural paralysis is mirrored in rising anxiety, depression, and the privatization of stress, as systemic pressures are reframed as individual psychological failures.

Rather than treating culture as entertainment or personal taste, this episode treats it as a systems problem — examining how neoliberal institutions, media industries, and bureaucratic incentives discipline imagination, suppress class consciousness, and normalize political resignation.

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