Text page
mark-fisher-gothic-oedipus-subjectivity-and-capitalism-in-christopher-nolans-batman-begins
"mark-fisher-gothic-oedipus-subjectivity-and-capitalism-in-christopher-nolans-batman-begins" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
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Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 3
Gothic Oedipus: subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins By Mark Fisher 1 Batman has contributed more than its fair share to the 'darkness that hangs over contemporary culture like a picturesque pall. 'Dark' designates both a highly marketable aesthetic style and an ethical, or rather anti-ethical, stance, a kind of designer nihilism whose chief theoretical proposition is the denial of the possibility of the Good.
Definition · paragraph 5
7 The fascination of the latest cinema version of Batman, Batman Begins (directed by Christopher Nolan) consists in its mitigated return to the question of Good. The film still belongs to the .Restoration. to the degree that it is unable to imagine a possible beyond capitalism: as we shall see, it is a specific mode of capitalism—post-Fordist finance capital— that is demonised in Batman Begins, not capitalism per se. Yet the film leaves open the possibilitity of agency which Capitalist Realism forecloses.
Definition · paragraph 8
finance capital is given a more personal narrative focus through the character of the kindly Lucius Fox (another candidate for Father surrogate)[11] who is degraded by the new regime. The implication is that this state of rottenness can only be rectified once the name of the Father resumes its rights. 18 It is in its treatment of capitalism that Batman Begins is at its most intriguingly contradictory.
Stakes · paragraph 12
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Continuum, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Continuum, 2004.
History · paragraph 12
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Continuum, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Continuum, 2004. Fisher, Mark and Mackay, Robin, 'Pomophobia', Coventry: Abstract Culture/ Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, 1996.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.