Lika Kareva A Note on Mark Fisher There have been some pretty ridiculous opinions about Mark Fisher circulating on Instagram today. They claim that Mark Fisher was dumb and had no taste. I wrote a short reply to post back on Instagram, but since it’s still longer than the allowed limit, I am posting it here. Still from David Cronenberg’s ‘Crash’ Due to some unfortunate circumstances, in 2012 I ended up being a student of the Literature Institute in Moscow, named after Maxim Gorky. I hated it. I remember the profound shock I felt after my first exam there: it was on historical grammar of slavic languages, and I studied the textbook very hard to pass it. Then the actual exam happened. Instead of asking us about the subject, the professor just told us to take pen and paper and asked us three questions, all the answers to which were elementary to remember from her lectures. A quick 5-minute pass. That was it. Yet, I wasn’t happy about it: I walked out of the exam hall with an uneasy sense that the professor simply thinks we’re stupid. I was studying in the part-time group, which meant we only needed to attend the institute 2 months a year during the examinations, so no one expected high results from us. The professors’ talks felt lazy, disoriented, and often propagandistic. It was a culture for TV-brainwashed pensioners. https://likakareva.substack.com/p/a-note-on-mark-fisher