The Ghosts of Mark Fisher | Hacker News Reader

The Ghosts of Mark Fisher

newstatesman.com

52 pointsmiobrien9 comments

> The licence to attend provided by Fisher’s approach feels liberating – particularly for millennials whose inability to imagine alternatives to neoliberalism arises in part from their having never known anything else. Fisher’s writing may resonate with those who came of age in the thick of capitalist realism, and who, unlike Fisher’s generation, have no memory of social democracy, precisely because it theorises a loss they can’t remember or measure, but which they’ve nevertheless inherited.

This kind of reminds me of a concept I recall from The Great Transformation by Polanyi: that introduction of the modern market to societies elicited quite a bit of opposition from the first generations that experienced it, since they understood what they were losing because they remembered it. Later generations couldn't muster the same energy because they didn't know the loss.

"Fisher grew up in the East Midlands town of Loughborough with working-class conservative parents – his father an engineer, his mother a cleaner."

As a Canadian engineer, I've always found what exactly a UK engineer is somewhat murky. Growing up, if someone told me their father was an engineer I would never think working class. I've lived in Germany too and having an engineering degree was a big deal there, so I know it isn't a European thing, well at least pre-Brexit.

> As a Canadian engineer, I've always found what exactly a UK engineer is somewhat murky. Growing up, if someone told me their father was an engineer I would never think working class. I've lived in Germany too and having an engineering degree was a big deal there, so I know it isn't a European thing, well at least pre-Brexit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer#UK:

> In the UK, "engineering" has more recently been erroneously styled as an industrial sector consisting of employers and employees loosely termed "engineers" who include tradespeople. However, knowledgeable practitioners reserve the term "engineer" to describe a university-educated professional of ingenuity represented by the Chartered (or Incorporated) Engineer qualifications.[23] A large proportion of the UK public incorrectly thinks of "engineers" as skilled tradespeople or even semi-skilled tradespeople with a high school education. Also, many UK skilled and semi-skilled tradespeople falsely style themselves as "engineers". This has created confusion in the eyes of some members of the public in understanding what professional engineers actually do, from fixing car engines, television sets and refrigerators (technicians, handymen) to designing and managing the development of aircraft, spacecraft, power stations, infrastructure and other complex technological systems (engineers).[citation needed]

It kinda sounds like "engineer" in UK usage encompasses might roles that I'd call "technicians" as an American.

There was a time in the US when blue collar jobs tried to spruce things up a bit by adding the term engineer somewhere. Garbage worker became sanitation engineer (not the people engineering separation of recyclables, etc., but your neighborhood garbage truck driver, got example).

Hurumph

How many people here call themselves "software engineers" when they never went to engineering school?

Sanitation engineer was always a joke, I think.

But engineer also referred to train operators and the third crew position on an airliner is typically a "flight engineer" so there is something there.

class membership isn't degree or salary dependent. East Midlands is a traditional blue collar neighbourhood, and you can be an actual engineer who is still situated in that environment, or an artist or whatever else. Hell, you can be a physician and live in a blue collar culture.

This is the actual difference between Europe and North America. In the US people strongly stratify by income and schooling. In Germany you can be a 'working class' software developer. I'm German, the first person of my family to go to university, but my social circle overwhelmingly stayed non-academic and blue collar. I'd still describe myself as working class. I do not feel comfortable in the upper middle-class culture that a lot of my classmates in uni came from and never assimilated into it.

This was also true for Mark Fisher, which is why I think the description makes sense. As the article points out he often just scraped by financially and wrote in unconvential ways from an outsiders perspective. He was fascinated with the influence of mass and pop-culture on social life. He was not your typical academic humanities character. A lot of the people at the CCRU weren't.

Engineer can mean anything from aerospace engineer to someone who fixes boilers in UK. I.e.someone might say they're a boiler 'engineer' but they didn't build or design the thing. It doesn't have a single meaning here. Others might say technician.

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