Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction by Mark Fisher

“For Baudrillard, then, the cultural reconfigurations that Jameson identifies do not mark the end of the age of anxiety, as Jameson thinks: rather, they usher in another, new, era of anxiety. The characteristics of this new age of anxiety had already been delineated by McLuhan. Whereas ‘modernist anxiety is founded is founded on the inescapability of individual freedom; its themes are individual solitude, social fragmentation, and alienation.’ By contrast, ‘McLuhan’s anxiety’, in anticipation of Baudrillard’s, ‘is exactly contrary: it has its origins in a social disalienation and the denial (or penetration by the media, and so by everyone else) of any margins of solitude or alienation. Modernist anxiety involves the withdrawal to an imaginary identity resistant to immersion in the forms of modernization. McLuhan’s postmodern anxiety has given up this resistant identity, and has no anchorage in individual thought or feeling.’”

—Mark Fisher