Britain had a popular-modernism network that irreversibly vanished in the Eighties

Evidence

It’s this kind of wide and interconnected network that I call “popular modernism”, a kind of infrastructure for disseminating and distributing experimental theory and culture. At the time it was just right, you just expected things to be like that, there was nothing special about it. But during the Eighties, this network slowly disappeared. At first, I thought it was just a temporary blip and that it would have all come back. But I was wrong: it was an irreversible shift. So you see, things that are taken for granted just disappear. And this brings us to a melancholia, a hauntological melancholia. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2287

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘popular modernism’ as the author’s coined term for the music-press infrastructure that disseminated experimental theory.
• XREF: connects to: Capitalist realism became entrenched in Britain within a single decade by the mid-1980s. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2102; British mainstream cinema retreated from modernity after 1979 — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 502; British post-punk largely erased America from its pop imagination — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1013 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Tory policy dismantling of welfare and art schools killed working-class popular modernism #expands (0.92) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1368
• Tory welfare cuts dismantled the welfare infrastructure that enabled working-class popular modernism #expands (0.90)
• British mainstream cinema retreated from modernity after 1979 #corroborates (0.82) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 502
• People are haunted by futures the Eighties neoliberal turn terminated #corroborates (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2290
• Welfare-state spaces indirectly funded postwar Britain’s alternative culture #corroborates (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1670
• Modernism’s decline stems from political defeats rather than economic change #qualifies (0.74) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 216
• British post-punk largely erased America from its pop imagination #corroborates (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1013