I am regularly supporting and referencing the work of the late lamented Mark Fisher in this blog. I like this zer0 books statement taken from Mark's collected posthumous writings K-Punk, and it may well have been written by Mark, it has his slightly overwrought hammering adjectivalism. But what it speaks to is the story of the ripped out heart of the community, intellectually, socially, architecturally, visually, culturally. It speaks to the flattened and corrupted times.
'Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces-both physical and cultural- are now either derelict or colonised by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheered by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor. The informal censorship internalised and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propoganda chiefs of Stalinism could only have dreamt of imposing. Zer0 books knows that another kind of discourse-intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist-is not only possible: Its is already flourishing in the regions beyong the striplit malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zer0 is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.'
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