R.I.P. Mark Fisher

Totally devastating, as he was a massive inspiration across the whole field of culture, the arts, philosophy and politics. I'd known him well over the past 15 years, corresponding with him regularly right up to a few weeks ago and was aware of his depression. When we first corresponded back in 2002 via the alt.movies.kubrick newsgroup he was then going through a depressive episode, but miraculously and magnificently he soon recovered and then blossomed, becoming a cultural force for numerous people and in numerous countries in subsequent years. In a few short years, from about 2005-2010m he became, with his unbelievably erudite, insightful, and remarkably lucid writings, the leading cultural theorist, commentator and diagnostician of our time, and his past work is now likely to be widely re-embraced with renewed interest. I had just been reading his latest book, "The Weird and the Eerie", with its section on Kubrick (will post it hereabouts shortly), published just a week ago, a week before he took his own life last Friday, 13th, January (a date that is not coincidental to those who knew him).

Here's what some of his colleagues, past and present, have been writing in response to his sudden death:

Philosopher Graham Harman:
"Social media is reacting to the death yesterday of MARK FISHER.

Under the handle kpunk, he was one of the most respected voices in the early years of the philosophy blogosphere. As a writer he was truly gifted. Many were greatly moved by his Capitalist Realism and the even more confessional Ghosts of My Life. Both were published by Zero Books, where he was part of a powerful editorial team (my first three or so books with Zero were a direct result of Mark’s mediation).

Mark’s sincerity, enthusiasm, and heart-on-his-sleeve demeanor were the secret to his human appeal. He could be disarmingly open about the things that interested or bothered him, yet somehow without ever crossing the lines of discretion. Such personalities often summon the cruelty of others; may the latter be cursed.

One anecdote comes to mind. I attended Mark and Zoe’s beautiful wedding in Suffolk in the summer of 2009. At one point I wandered into the town center, where I picked up a paperback collection of the ghost stories of M.R. James (the same collection from which I later lifted the term “ontography” for The Quadruple Object). I happened to catch sight of a footnote which mentioned that James was baptized in the exact same church where the wedding would be held later that same day. And I knew in advance that I would love Mark’s reaction to that fact, since he loved the stories of James: pure, childlike appreciation and enthusiasm for the discovery. No snide remarks dismissing the new information, no haughty, table-turning irony. Such behavior was completely foreign to his nature.

I wonder if Mark ever recognized the depth of his own writing talent. Not infrequently he would dash off a paragraph that gave us the definitive words on the topic at hand. It is no secret for anyone who has read his writings that he often lived close to the edge of the darkness. But he was unusually kind in warning others to stay away from it, and even in thinking of practical methods by which they might do so.

Over time I hope his family and closest friends will find peace in the face of this tremendous loss."
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Writer and celebrated blogger, Richard Seymour:

"The second time I met Mark was at the University of East London occupation. The Docklands campus was bitterly cold, the winter wind ripping through it, as though, like those other Docklands up at the Isle of Dogs, it wasn't really made for human beings. He was enthusiastic, almost in the religious sense: it was like the spirit had moved him. He wrote about it, about how this moment -- the student movement and the sudden energy everywhere -- was like a depression lifting.

It was like a depression lifting, but was it actually a depression lifting? Classically, depression is linked to mourning, in a way that most modern therapies (drugs or CBT) have tended to forget or repress. In the Freudian view, when we mourn, we bitterly reproach the dead: how could they die? How could they do that to us? The thwarted mourning becomes melancholia: we direct that rage at ourselves, find ourselves endlessly useless, pointless, both incapable and culpable. We can't help being useless, but are to blame for it. Klein thought that this posed the distinction too sharply, and that all mourning has melancholic tendencies and that -- in a sense -- self-formation is a melancholic process, the self being produced out of the traces of objects that we have lost or been separated from.

It's one thing to speak of left-wing melancholia, but what happens to a defeated class, a class that is what it is because of historical defeats? A class that is made by loss and separation? To the extent that we can speak of the working class as a subject, it must be a melancholic subject. Its self-harm and self-medications those of a defeat which cannot be mourned, raged about, because it can't be experienced as such.

Freud used the term 'work' about mourning; the 'work of mourning', suggesting that its cognates were the work of art, the work of analysis, and the work of production.

As if to say, a class that cannot mourn its defeats (much as a stricken soul mourns sins) and put them away (which is to say, make something of them), goes on repeating them."
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Long-standing colleague Robin McKay:

"Grieving is a bleak business. But how do you grieve for someone who made it his life’s work to face up to the bleakest realities and yet to recognise joy where it existed and to forge hope for the future? A writer who himself grieved the passing of cultural and political possibilities, portrayed an utterly dismaying world populated by malign forces that reached into the very soul, but used writing to understand them, to resist them, and to project new virtual futures?

I first met Mark Fisher at Warwick University in the 90s, where his overpowering enthusiasm and determination to ‘produce’ (not just ‘think about’! he would insist) within and across multiple cultural forms and disciplines—and to produce cyberpunk-style, using whatever came to hand, experimenting with high-tech, low-tech, or no-tech, without needing to seek approval from any institutional authority—was inspirational. Mark was instrumental in the formation of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which quickly became an official nonentity (but a productive one). He submerged himself in its collective endeavours, which resulted in a body of work I still find immensely compelling and intriguing, culminating in the coining of the term ‘hyperstition’ (cultural processes which make themselves real (of which the CCRU was one (or several))), the creation of the occultural Numogram, and the revelation of a pantheon of numerically-coded demons. This masterpiece of pulp theology combines a gleeful comic-book grandiosity with a diligent mapping of the space of human affect and an understanding of the human psyche as a mere switching-station for warring demonic currents. All of which continued to work beneath Mark’s writings, I think: he saw the world in terms of abstract forces and Spinozan struggles, and sought to name (demonise?) the cybernetic complexes of affect and power from which the circuitry of so-called reality is constructed; his writings continued to be populated by Katak and Uttunul, among others, as well as new conceptual personae such as the ‘gray vampire’ and malign apparatuses such as ‘business ontology’.

Mark also relished CCRU’s enterprise of collaboration and collective production, keenly anticipating the emergence of ‘microcultures’ that would spring up in-between, unassignable and unattributable to any one author. This search for new modes of collectivity was something he never let go of.

Yet the CCRU work also unmistakably bore the imprint of Mark’s zeal for supercharging theory with pop culture. Refusing all received cultural hierarchy, he always championed the conceptual and formal achievements of pop music, comics, fiction, TV, and film, aiming both to map and contribute to what he described as ‘pulp modernism’.

Beneath all of this simmered his intense class-consciousness and sensitivity to the invisible barriers, insider codes, traps and tricks that protect high culture and academic thought from those not already endowed with cultural capital and bulletproof confidence. He was never embittered by these barriers, but made it his business to expose and diagnose them, and to openly share his own frustrations, minor triumphs, and defeats as he was dashed against them. And his refusal of the assumption that mass-consumed pop culture is necessarily of a lesser conceptual density was just as uncompromising.

As well as being fascinated by the expression of the collective unconscious in even the ‘lowest’ forms of entertainment, he celebrated the cultural achievements of those who came from outside the media establishment, had got in before its rules had been set down, or had autonomously nurtured their own microcultures, and were thus able to realise singular, subversive visions of modernity untroubled by culture cops and homogenizing ‘managerialism’. Ever more deeply captivated by the resonances of the oddball canon he had assembled since childhood, he delighted in propagating both its pulp modernist obscurities and its poptastic gems to others; many a cultural itinerary has been sent off in an unexpected direction by contact with Mark Fisher’s work.

While there is a sense in which, for Mark, everything was personal, since he always gained theoretical purchase by connecting theory to his own experience, he also relentlessly attacked the very notion of the ‘person’ or ‘individual’. For many years Mark wrote about his struggle with depression; but his question was never ‘What is wrong with me?’ but ‘What is wrong with the world that it should produce such a suffering, closed-off subject?’ This conviction that ‘mental health’ is not adequately addressed as a merely personal condition, nor as a purely medical issue, led him to challenge all quick fixes that aim merely to restore the social (consumer-worker) functionality of the ‘unwell’…and entailed frustrated encounters with exasperated ‘mental health professionals’ who got more than they bargained for.

He multiplied his burden by believing that he could only heal himself by reconfiguring the world, or at least by seeding a social collectivity capable, against all prevailing forces, of breaking out of the prison-house of capitalist subjectivity. That’s because he was for real, ‘theory’ was not a game for Mark. And he was right in his belief that personal affect is a tributary of social, cultural, class, and economic forces. He was also right in his unflagging faith in cultural production as a source of energising joy, insight, and understanding, and a vector for emancipation; and in his belief that writing and theorizing about culture need not mean ‘critical’ dessication, but can in fact transform and intensify its effects and propel them beyond mere aesthetics, unlocking their political charge—something he proved to readers time and time again.

At a distance of twenty years, for me the Warwick era is lost in a general blur of intensity (and people talking intensely about intensity). But one trivial episode reminds me of qualities I loved in Mark: Having unexpectedly had an abstract for a joint conference paper accepted, and following a lengthy train journey, Mark and I began writing our paper the morning before the conference (of course), and a state of panic swiftly morphed into a sleep-deprived, hysterical flow state. It was hugely enjoyable, because Mark was never happier than when swept up in working on something that seemed to be building itself, soliciting further input, coalescing into some unexpected entity before his eyes, suggesting new double-meanings, puns, unexpected connections between the abstract and the empirical, Marvel Comics-style names for as-yet unnamed forces, concepts for unrecognised processes. Then the self-doubt would disappear, the anxiety would dissipate (even if the paper had to be given in a few hours!) and he would be in his element: that outside element, something beyond the strictures of the personal, that fuels enthusiasm and enthralled fascination with what is being ‘channelled’.

The paper was delivered. It was messy, it was truculent, it was sarcastic, it was a bit punk. Everyone hated it. Nevertheless, relieved of our duties, we later slunk into the posh conference reception held in a grand Victorian museum, where high-flying postmodern academics chatted politely with local dignitaries. Immediately we both knew this was not ‘for us’, and there was mutual relief in realising we shared the feeling that we were not supposed to be there. For a short while before we ran away, we skulked around in corners giggling at the professors’ fruity voices, sarcastically clinking our champagne flutes, and cracking up at being served canapés from a tray—like street urchins who had sneaked themselves into a palace.
And to me, that was Mark: the accidental interloper at High Table, the punk in the museum. Even when his work was acclaimed and he was appointed to a ‘real job’ at Goldsmiths, I think he always feared he was an impostor, just one who had decoded the scam and learned how to ‘pass’. But whether or not you agreed with him, whether or not you shared his passion for John Foxx or Sapphire and Steel, whatever your opinion on the philosophical rigour of his Schwarzenegger/Kant mash-ups, he was as close to the real thing as it gets: always in earnest (sometimes dangerously unfiltered), always keen to share his excitement and to respond to engagement, synthetic and eclectic in his sources but obsessional in pursuing the themes that he knew mattered, modest in person but passionate, ambitious, and vehement in thought. It felt good to know that he had finally ‘made it’, that he fought through, unable and unwilling to adapt his work to the requirements of academic tedium. Following the publication of ‘Capitalist Realism’, it was heartening to see his unique style and aptitude for rendering ideas dynamic, accessible, and connected to pop culture finally break through and create its own audience.

The path from anger and sadness to collective joy has taken a terribly wrong turn here—we have lost someone who painstakingly sought to construct and communicate hope, for himself and for others. There are many who can attest to his innate passion for thinking and creating, his positive influence, and his unaffected, sincere, and generous character. Realising at this moment that I assumed he would always be there, it’s hugely painful to think that he is no longer among us."
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Writer and cultural critic, Adam Kotsko:

"I was shocked and saddened to learn of the death of Mark Fisher. Mark was one of the pioneers of theory blogging and para-academic independent publishing. I learned a great deal from his blogging at K-punk, where he wrote incisive political commentary and undertook bold philosophical speculation, and he blazed a trail when he published Capitalist Realism, which brought the Zero Books series (now succeeded by Repeater Books) to international prominence. He supported a lot of us in this corner of the blogosphere, and I personally owe him a debt of gratitude as his recommendation helped make the publication of Awkwardness and its sequels possible.

Mark was truly a model of how to pursue a life of public intellectual engagement for a generation of young thinkers."

And two more brilliant appreciations, below and following post, of Mark Fisher/K-Punk by former fellow writers/bloggers, Owen Hatherley (now one of the world's leading architectural critics, partly thanks to Mark's encouragement) and David Stubbs (a first-class music critic).

"Remembering Mark Fisher By David Stubbs

The Quietus , January 16th, 2017 10:02

David Stubbs looks back over the life of theorist Mark Fisher. And below that, for those wanting to know more about Mark's work, we have a previously unpublished interview between him and Agata Pyzik conducted in 2010.

The loss of Mark Fisher, aged just 48, has not just left family, friends and colleagues shocked and devastated; it leaves a gaping crater in modern intellectual life. The poet and writer Alex Niven, with whom he worked at Repeater books, described him as “by some distance the best writer in Britain” and, as a flood of tributes on social media have come appended with links to his work, whether on k-punk, his much-read blog, interviews he conducted for The Wire or extracts from his very latest book The Weird And The Eerie, that is a judgment with which it is hard to disagree.

Mark was a theorist, steeped in and conversant with the realms of academic discourse which the lay reader might find bafflingly abstruse. While never diluting his own ideas or others for popular consumption, he played a singular, vital role in disseminating these ideas to a wider audience. As anyone who ever attended any of his talks would attest, he was a passionate and highly skilled communicator, not in the least bit dry, who fired up and enthused his audiences, as well as fellow writers. He could hold a room in the palm of his hand. “Inspirational” is a word that crops up repeatedly in the tributes paid to him. He further palliated his formidable barrage of ideas by applying them to popular culture, music in particular, providing unique readings of everything from Joy Division to grime, Japan and The Cure, Tricky and the Caretaker (aka Leyland James Kirby whose work is an excellent soundtrack to any reading of Mark Fisher), as well as mainstream cinema such as The Shining, The Hunger Games and figures like Russell Brand. He was even an ardent football fan, a supporter of Nottingham Forest and co-founded a blog to which I contributed, Minus The Shooting (in reference to George Orwell’s famously snobby crack about football being “war minus the shooting”), describing pundit Alan Shearer’s “faint air of suppressed violence that surrounds him: he looks like a squaddie who's just beaten someone to death with a shoe.” Yes, that was Mark Fisher.

Mark emerged into the contemporary world of letters via pre-internet groups and fora such as D-Generation and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, a collective that grew from the philosophy department of Warwick University and the investigations of its founders Nick Land and Sadie Plant. Plant was a proponent of what was termed “cyber-punk”, which immersed itself in the potential effects of phenomena such as rave culture and Blade Runner and whose thinking contained neo-Situationist, quasi-mystical, occultist elements and pre-internet futurist imaginings. All of this was designed as a reproach to the fusty greys, complacency and Olympian detachment popular culture of the old guard of the left-leaning philosophical establishment. In his late 20s, Mark quickly emerged as one the CCRU’s most electrifying and exhilarating thinkers, part of a movement which urged an embrace of popular capitalism’s accelerationist, synthetic tendencies - hallucinatory rushes which might somehow hasten its own destruction. Mark spoke of "the false memory-chip of Socialist authenticity”, and in an early interview with Simon Reynolds said, “There's definitely a strong alliance in the academy between anti-market ideas and completely scleroticised, institutionalised thought. Marx has been outdated by cybernetic theory. It's obvious that capitalism isn't going to be brought down by its contradictions. Nothing ever died of contradictions!”


However, whereas antipathy towards leftist intellectual assumptions led some of the “Cyberpunks” perversely to embrace some aspects of Thatcherism, Mark never abandoned socialism and his commitment to what seemed a lost cause in the “reality” imposed in the 21st century was always tireless, sanguine and exemplary.

I first met Mark at a party where he enthused with typically dancing eyes and hands about having read my work at Melody Maker in the late 1980s. It was all the more chastening, then, to read Mark’s own music journalism, which ventured further into the depths of theory and perception than I could ever hope to reach. I can’t be the only fellow writer who emerged from his essays feeling educated and energised but also like a bit of a banal lunk by comparison. There is a fog that circles all of our consciousnesses; a fog of uncertainty and personal limitation, a fog which some take to mark the limits of what can be said, thought and done, a fog into which most fear to venture, for fear of seeming pretentious or coming unstuck, a fog which prevents us from making connections. Mark fearlessly walked through that fog. His subject matter, the ambience of his writing may have been nebulous but his observations, his illuminations were always laser sharp. He would demonstrate this in his most recent book, The Weird And The Eerie. Of this, Mark said, “The feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird. The simplest way to get to this difference is by thinking about the (highly metaphysically freighted) opposition — perhaps it is the most fundamental opposition of all — between presence and absence. As we have seen, the weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases of the weird (those with which Lovecraft was obsessed) the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something.”

Come the 21st century, Mark’s preoccupations became “hauntological”, drifted towards the misplaced hopes and ghostly ideals of the 20th century and its Utopian relics. The Situationists had talked about leaving the 20th century but its Utopian and Dystopian (pop) cultural monuments and lost futures preoccupied him greatly. This profound sense of elegy was not so much a lament as a potent device for escaping the clamp of modern times. He championed Burial in particular, interviewing the enigmatic, image-less electronic music artist whose work was a Noughties lamentation for the post-rave era, in December 2007 for The Wire. He wrote:

“Burial’s is a re-dreaming of the past, a condensation of relics of abandoned genres into an oneiric montage. His sound is a work of mourning rather than of melancholia, because he still longs for the lost object, still refuses to abandon the hope that it will return.”

As he cast his mind over the long, Gothic shadows of late 20th century post punk, meanwhile, he could, in the sweep of a paragraph in a blog essay on Joy Division, convey the conflation of literature, history, politics which was vital to the make-up of that group.

“It was in this Eastern bloc of the mind, it was in this slough of despond, that you could find working class kids who wrote songs steeped in Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Burroughs, Ballard, kids who, without even thinking about it, were rigorous modernists who would have disdained repeating themselves, never mind disinterring and aping what had been done twenty, thirty years ago (the Sixties was a fading Pathe newsreel in 1979).”

These were not mere names dropped but references thudded with acumen and effortless authority.

However, the work for which Mark is most famous, and which is mandatory reading for all, is his 2009 volume Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? The essence, the crux of this is encapsulated in its title, which co-opts the term Socialist Realism, the mode of art designed to glorify Soviet values in figurative images mocked by Western liberals for their risible wishfulness. Mark, however, saw that Capitalism, particularly post-1979 had imposed its own mode of “realism” which they had successfully persuaded the electorate and even large sections of the liberal commentariat to internalise - summed up in Margaret Thatcher’s own cruelly effective, wholly inaccurate dictum, “There is no alternative”. Years of Toryism, followed by the pliant neoliberalism of the Blair/Brown/Mandelson years have only helped embed this idea further in the collective consciousness. Simply put, you can vote for whoever you like but capitalism stays until the end of time. Understand that democracy’s bounds preclude its removal. Your dreams of revolution and foment are buried in the 20th century. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a dangerous fool.

Capitalist Realism strives brilliantly to decondition the reader of this idea, frequently using as its reference points the pop cultural products of capitalism itself. It is the culmination of all of his thinking and his most vital text, indeed among the most vital political texts of the 21st century, which has earned the praise of Slavoj Zizek, Russell Brand and Owen Jones among many others. I recall sitting in a cafe with Mark discussing my own book published at the time and wondering what sales we would be happy to register. A thousand, we agreed. Mine did a bit better than that - Capitalist Realism, however, sold in the tens of thousands, an astonishing tribute to its pertinence and impassioned lucidity.

In recent years, Mark could have been taken to task for over-investing faith in the ultimately disappointing likes of Zizek and Brand in particular, boldly predicting imminent revolutions which, alas, failed to transpire. However, those who sneer at such boldness are themselves a greater part of the problem; post-leftists who consider it more “grown-up” to settle into a knowing inertia, although all that this results in is the continuing drift to the right.

Mark was determined to snap out of this inertia, this inevitablist spirit. His positive energy was applied despite his own struggles with mental health, with which he wrote with candour, and in the hope that his mighty intellect might help slay the irrational forces which assailed him. He was even able to set his experiences in a political context. “Mental health is, in fact, a paradigm case of how Capitalist Realism operates,” he wrote. “Capitalist Realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but then again, we know that weather is no longer a natural fact). Poor mental health is of course a massive source of revenue for multinational drugs companies. You pay for a cure from the very system that made you sick in the first place.”

Simon Reynolds has described chatting to Mark about his future projects and the “vast edifice” they represented. Perhaps it was his determination to overcome his own personal despondency, as well as the sinking despondency of society at large, which lent him energy and ambition to construct this edifice, one which would stand tall and face down the oppressors, political and psychological, external and internal, he found himself ranged against. Perhaps he was uniquely qualified and situated to carry out this task. He leaves a truly formidable legacy; I believe he may well become a literary legend posthumously, his work revisited and referenced when others have shrivelled into irrelevancy, especially in our own, post-End Of History times. Right now, in the cold middle of January, with a Trump presidency almost upon us and a Tory government grossly over-trusted by the public about to carry out the ruinously stupid Brexit project, with inequality unchecked, Mark’s loss feels especially grievous. And yet, the antithesis to this grief, the much-needed filip, is to return to Mark’s own writing which crackles with the guiding, ever-burning, ferocious intensity of a brilliant and indomitable spirit. It’s all there, for all time, in the writing.

Mark was a colleague, a hero, an inspiration, but also a friend. I remember a series of meetings in the Hare And Billet pub in Blackheath, just a mile away from the site where Wat Tyler and the peasants rallied in 1381. I remember his savagings of his intellectual enemies, of Alan Shearer, the culture industry, the liberal press; I remember his humour, his warmth and generosity, freely pouring out the contents of that ever-active, ever-fertile mind. I remember meeting him with his lovely young family, upon whom he clearly doted and emotionally depended, at parks and parties. A literary legend he may well become, a touchstone, a towering figure - but all of those who knew him dearly wish that we could have back the man."

And interview with Agatha Pyzik from 2010:
http://thequietus.com/articles/21572-mark-fisher-rip-obituary-interview

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Owen Hatherley on Mark in next post, below:

"And he had this effect on more people than anyone else I have ever met."---Richard King on Mark.

"Mark changed the way I saw & thought about the world"---Sam Davies.

"What I owe Mark Fisher is absolutely incalculable, and I have absolutely no idea what I'd be doing without having known him."---Owen Hatherley.

Owen Hatherley on Mark:

"I met Mark for the first time in a pub, in north London, where there was a panel discussion launching Simon Reynolds's Rip it Up and Start Again. For a few years at this point I had been reading K-Punk, religiously, for writing of a sort that wasn't supposed to exist anymore, and that elsewhere, off the internet, largely didn't. Working as a filing clerk for T Brown and Sons Heating Engineers, I would use a proxy server to wait for, and then read, the latest K-Punk post, many of which had the same sense of anticipation that you would have waiting for a new record, the next episode of some sort of dream-serial. Then you'd be rewarded, when just under the document you were meant to be working on, you could bring out something like his essay on Joy Division, his account of Fleetwood Mac via John Le Carre, and later, his astonishing series on The Fall. These names might make it all sound like one of those Rock History magazines, but K-Punk involved an entire canon, one where Japan's 'Tin Drum', Visage's second album, Gladys Knight's 'The Way We Were' were of more import than the entire collected works of Bob Dylan. I knew that 'Mark K-Punk' would be at the event, and given that I occasionally posted on the forum he'd set up, Dissensus, and had for a few weeks ran a deeply K-Punk derivative blog, I drank enough to feel confident enough to introduce myself. He knew who I was, was incredibly friendly, a man in his mid-30s with wiry, dyed pink hair and excellent dress sense. He suggested next time meeting somewhere else: 'I hate pubs'. This opinion, controversial enough, was followed by a discussion where he made abundantly clear he considered everything New Order did after Movement to be totally inferior.

From there, we became close friends. This was partly through blogging and through forums – he overrated what I did massively, but an idea was never left alone, always pulled into a constellation with others, and speaking to Mark made me a writer who took seriously what I did, as he did. A post on K-Punk, produced in his spare time, unpaid, was always far more finely wrought, considered and original than the hackwork people were and are habitually paid for. It helped that he lived nearby, I in Deptford, he in a flat in a rambling, subdivided Gothic house in Brockley, with a big, sinister pointed-arched door. People will write, rightly so, about how personable Mark was, how funny – and how much he found other people funny, how often he was laughing. But when I say this, it almost implies that there were two sides, the terrifying pop theory terminator and the friendly, animated football fan and superb cook. As if the first of those wasn't serious. I don't think he found those things remotely contrary, and however ferocious he could be online, he would have considered personal animosity not just petty, but irrelevant. Mark spoke as he wrote – part of what made him such a terrific public speaker – and would refer to something quite casually as 'delibidinising', or pepper his speech with the neologisms he would coin in K-Punk – 'interpassive', 'oed-i-pod', 'proleface', to denote the caricatures of working class culture that were and are dominant in the media ('legitimate concerns') and my favourite of all, spoken in a very slightly East Midlands-accented cackle, smugonaut. We would meet, several times a week, Mark, Joel, Nina, Dominic, Laura, Douglas, Bat, me, not in pubs, obviously, but in cafes, like Gambardella in Blackheath, Golden Fish in Farringdon, and most of all, in the New Piccadilly in Soho, whose yellow formica tables, googie lampshades and inedible SF menu were a spatial analogue of his concept of Pulp Modernism.

I learned, and it made perfect sense, that K-Punk had come out of a period of depression, as a means of getting out of it - it read as the reappearance of a voice that had been silenced, that had disappeared, as someone coming back to life. A decade before I knew him there was the CCRU, jungle, Warwick, an earlier, younger life. The world we created was an incredible solace during the apparently endless boom, the grinning Blairish optimism that danced on the grave of everything Mark held dear – a popular modernism that was miles from the 'pop' and 'rock' held up by cultural studies (another derisive cackle, cultstuds) as an alternative to theory and politics, but one which was theory and politics. A constantly morphing musical subculture, a working class dandyism (he longed for the day that working class youth would stop wearing sportswear), self-education, solidarity, hope that we as a society could do better than this. I had started blogging largely because I'd been diagnosed with a chronic illness, was in catastrophic debt, was mostly unemployed, and had no idea what my future looked like. Mark was such an inspiration because he had made his blogging a vengeful, resentment-driven (VIVA RESENTMENT!, ran one K-Punk headline) assault on a cultural and political world that seemed designed to make sure that someone like him was impossible. But again, this all sounds too personal; the point for him was the creation of a new network, something that would supplant and destroy the world of....well, you can fill in who, you know who they are, and they're still there. With the usual consonantal slip, it was about a Kollective.

Zero Books came out of this, in an uneasy relationship with a dubious mind body spirit publisher – control wasn't really achieved until he and Tariq Goddard set up Repeater Books, away from its auspices, but at the time, nobody else was going to publish anything like this. Each of the early books Zero put out is unimaginable without Mark's influence as interlocutor, inspiration and constant encouragement. The statement printed on each book, that relentlessly driven little mini-manifesto, was of course written by Mark, in such obviously K-Punk cadences – ''a cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor' – what other publisher's mission statement not only includes a neologism the writer had just made up, but also made you want to stand up and cheer? And for a first book, rather than put together some things he'd already written, like the rest of us did, Mark instead wrote through a short book of breathtaking clarity and power, the K-Punk voice changed a little into something less stentorian, a humane, melancholic but eventually hopeful account of precisely how capitalism *beep* us up. If anything, Mark grew as a writer after that – his blog posts on political figures like Gordon Brown and David Cameron showed an assured, dramatic political historian who could have made a career out of long duree cultural history. A short Compass pamphlet with Jeremy Gilbert showed that he could write extremely convincing thinktank reports if he wanted to. There were projects that never happened: the radio collage on 1979, the book on football, the book on Grace Jones, a book on post-capitalist desire to be called 'Acid Communism'. What there is, both during and after K-Punk, is at its best on the level of Fredric Jameson or Walter Benjamin at their best. Often better, because while they wrote about pop culture and class consciousness from the outside, these were utterly intrinsic to Mark, immanent, the fibre of his being.

It was always particularly exciting when Mark came across someone or something contemporary that was worthy of his ideas – David Peace, Burial, the Hunger Games. Caricatured as a miserablist, he was anything but, and sometimes he would overrate things so as to wish new movements into being, to will ways out, as if he could write them into existence; I think he saw the student protests, and the shift to the left in Labour, as vindication of his ideas, which they were. But I saw little of Mark in the last few years. He was in Suffolk, I was half the year in Warsaw. We would see each other intermittently, briefly; I would read his things, we would exchange short 'interactions' on social networks, that was it. I last saw him a year ago, at an event where he was in conversation with Andy Beckett, whose books on the 1970s and 1980s show how K-Punk's once-marginal hyperstitional-cyber-pop-theory had begun to influence the writing of history. My last happy memory is of around five years ago in Zagreb, where there was a Zero Books event. He, Douglas Murphy, Agata Pyzik and I walked round the city, with its crumbling socialist modernism and Hapsburg boulevards, in the worst fog I've ever seen, so thick you could barely see in front of you, a scene so K-Punkish it was hilarious, a readymade Kubrick set of ornate modernity, into which people would fade in and out like ghosts. We then came to a sign pointing to 'the museum of broken relationships' and collapsed into giggles. He did that a lot. I regret seeing him as little as I did in the last few years more than I can possibly express."

Well, that's very sad. And the newspaper says he committed suicide. He wrote so well about depression, and the systemic causes of depression, that you'd think someone as self-reflexive and smart as him would be able to find a way out of the vortex. Or maybe those qualities make it worse.

I remember finding his blog from AMK and from Harry Bailey's essays. His blog was like reading dystopian sci-fi. Then I started reading all the books and philosophers he referenced; I'm pretty sure I've been ideologically indoctrinated by Kubrick and Mark Fisher.

Thanks for the context and appreciations, countdown. I didn't know whether or not to mention that the cause of death was suicide, even though it's now been reported in many articles. Perhaps it's better not to deny such an issue, though, but rather continue to confront it head-on, especially at times like these. After all, the shame that comes with depression, and mental illness generally, only causes more harm; a further descent.

Tieman, your post got me thinking about how I became very interested in Kubrick about a decade ago, and read a lot of the old newsgroup posts. It's strange how much my younger mind was influenced by not only Mark's posts there and elsewhere, but yours and Harry's as well. I may not have pursued a philosophy major had it not been for names like Zizek, Foucault, Jameson, Lacan, etc, who were themselves introduced to me by names like Mark, Harry and tieman. Film analysis became my gateway to a more critical thinking in all regards. The philosophy major never quite worked out (I got a film degree instead), but it's just odd to think of how much various strangers on the internet so deeply influenced my own ideas and writing.

I like how you say Mark's writing was like dystopian sci-fi. It really was beautiful not just for the ideas therein, but as sheer prose; there was nothing hum-drum about the way he wrote. Every other sentence there'd be a new delight: an unexpected word, a word you didn't know even existed (and perhaps technically didn't), a seamless expression of thought. His prose had a kind of cyberpunk, glistening modernist sheen to it. Never content, always searching, always looking past surfaces, casting even the most banal objects in new and even uncanny light... The worst thing one can do these days is be complacent, and like most great thinkers I always felt that Mark was dedicated to questioning, to looking forward instead of repressively backward, to interrogating the standard modes within which we operate.

Tributes and appreciations continue to pour in, especially from all of the many publications for which he wrote (the fund-raiser site for his family exceeded its original goal in less than a day, and so the target was revised upwards). Here's a recent one from the BFI's "Sight and Sound" magazine (he wrote on film and TV for many other publications, including "Film Quarterly" journal, "New Humanist" (on TV programmes and series), and "The Guardian" newspaper:


Mark Fisher obituary: a thrillingly creative critic



Challenging his readers to see the world in entirely new terms, Mark Fisher wrote exceptional criticism rooted in his scrutiny of high and low culture, his anti-capitalist politics and his dream of popular modernism. Sam Davies pays tribute to his late colleague.

11 July 1968–13 January 2017.

Sam Davies, 24 January 2017

Web exclusive


Mark Fisher, writer, critic and cultural theorist

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/obituaries/mark-fisher-obituary-thrillingly-creative-critic


"I first met Mark Fisher online. I can’t remember exactly when, but I do know how: through the rapid-fire exchange of ideas and theories that flourished between music blogs like Matt Ingram’s Woebot and Simon Reynolds’ Blissblog, around 2005-06. It feels strange that I can’t pinpoint a date, a specific piece – but perhaps it’s because encountering Fisher’s blog, K-punk, was like a slow-detonating shock, a challenge that required decoding. Reading most writers, you look for flashes of insight or a different angle on a world you’d largely pre-agreed and mutually understood. Fisher was one of the few contemporary critics I can think of who had his own unique arrangement for the world – his own constellation of its contents. He was a creative critic, someone whose world you found yourself stepping into; and when you stepped out, you never saw the tired, conventional world in quite the same way.

His critical co-ordinates included (and this is only a selection) David Sylvian, The Parallax View, Metalheadz, Spinoza, John Foxx, M.R. James, The Terminator, Brian Clough, Philip K. Dick, The Caretaker, Deleuze, The Pop Group, Patricia Highsmith, Burial, Tarkovsky, Frederic Jameson, Tricky, Ligotti, Zizek, Junior Boys, H.P. Lovecraft, Sapphire & Steel, Roxy Music, David Peace. And K-punk was the lens through which Fisher focused these disparate elements into a coherent vision. He wrote across film, music, literature, high and low culture. He could illustrate J.G. Ballard and Bataille using Basic Instinct 2, but also find the philosophical implications of The Fall’s Spectre vs Rector. For Fisher – crucially – none of this existed on some flat plane of postmodern equivalence. Criticism was not a low-stakes distraction, and the casual clubbability of much cultural discussion was anathema to him.


Fisher once told me there were always two questions whenever he spoke to his parents on the phone: what are you having for tea? What are you watching tonight? In recent years he had become TV critic for New Humanist, writing perceptively on Westworld, Broadchurch, Benefits Street, The Americans. At one point, his Saturday night routine involved livetweeting commentary on The X Factor. Tony Grisoni’s Channel 4 adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding trilogy (2009-10) – exorbitant, apocalyptic, and eerily prophetic of later revelations regarding Yorkshire police – could have been written for K-punk, and was his “TV event of the decade”.

But film was no less important to Fisher’s worldview. In 2009, Zero Books, an imprint Fisher set up with publisher Tariq Goddard, published his first book. A slim volume called Capitalist Realism, arriving in the aftermath of the financial crisis and in time for the student protests of 2010, it went on to sell over 10,000 copies. It argued against the way that capitalism had become baked into cultural thinking as the absolute ground on which all political possibilities could be imagined, and diagnosed the way in which mental health had been ‘privatised’, conceived as the individual’s fault. But turn to its very first page, and Capitalist Realism opens with a reflection on Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006), and the eerie plausibility of its managerial dystopia, brought about not by external disaster but liberal democracy’s limitations. Film recurs throughout the book: Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999), the Bourne films, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998). Fisher’s earliest articulations of the concept came from his reflections on Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins on K-punk. His most recent book The Weird and the Eerie – published in January by Repeater Books – discusses Tarkovsky, Kubrick and Nolan’s Interstellar (2014).

Cinema, this complex negotiation of corporate capital and audience expectations, provided fertile ground for Fisher’s ability to decrypt political conspiracy and diagnose cultural symptoms. His readings could be thrillingly against-the-grain: X-Men: Last Stand (2006) for example, “dares to take itself seriously, avoiding the bad reflexivity of Po-Mo in favour of an unscreened exploration of a mythos”. Its comic-book unreality, versus the pompous maturity of the rebooted Batman, is its strength: “This is not a film that tries to be ‘psychologically realistic’. No, it is a film about the Real, that which we flee from when we awake from a dream.” Fisher might have been expected to champion Wall-E (2008), a dystopian depiction of an Earth literally choked by mountains of garbage with an unmistakable critique of corporate power. But he used it to draw out the limits of ethical consumerism, and the way in which it turns dissent into product, arguing that Hollywood’s persistent anti-corporate theme was merely an escape valve for political pressure; capital profiting from its own critics, while sending audiences home with their consciences sated.

Writing for Sight & Sound in 2011 on Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald), Fisher couldn’t hide his frustration with W.G. Sebald as a figure of mild, enervated resignation, exiled by nostalgia from the thrilling modernism of post-war culture. Perhaps he also took it personally: Sebald depicted Fisher’s beloved Suffolk – his childhood holiday destination, and home in later life – as a drab, belated place, drained of life and possibility. For Fisher it was a numinous place, charged with eerie energy, as depicted in his favourite M.R. James stories. But Sebald was also too mild stylistically for Fisher, whose preferred mode was polemic; so much of his work was charged with political animus. The pressure of the political was inescapable; as he wrote of Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins for Sight & Sound in November 2010, “in England, a claustrophobic country that long ago enclosed most of its common land, there is no landscape outside politics.” Fisher was haunted by the dream of a kind of popular, public modernism that he felt had been steadily enclosed and privatised.

This intensity and this pressure could make Fisher seem a fearsome figure online. But when he joined the staff of the Wire magazine in 2007 I got to know him as a gentle, warm and very funny friend. For a critic, Fisher had profoundly creative instincts: not just in the way that he dreamt up neologisms, and made K-punk a project in world-building. He wanted to build networks and connections all the time: a positive conspiracy, an interventionist nexus formed from writers, bloggers, academics, critics and anyone else with the time to send him an email. As a graduate student at Warwick in the late 1990s, Fisher had become a catalysing figure at the university’s Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit, an unofficial formation of academics such as Nick Land, Sadie Plant and Kodwo Eshun theorising the wilder possibilities offered by new technologies, drugs and media. He literally built a network in 2004, founding an online forum called Dissensus with Matthew Ingram. But he also directly encouraged countless other writers, including many of those who challenged him most fiercely. Zero published the first books by Owen Hatherley, Nina Power, Carl Neville, Agata Pyzik and dozens more. I can still remember the urgency of his texts and emails when we put together a Zero collection of Michael Jackson essays in 2009, or set up a group blog for thoughts on the 2010 World Cup, which quickly spiralled, attracting contributors and links from all over the world.

Mark always had plans and projects. A book on England’s football culture (he was in the Nottingham Forest end during the Hillsborough disaster); a reckoning with the 1960s counter-culture he had always rejected, to be titled Acid Communism; a Soundings column for Sight & Sound. Action clearly, was one of his defences against the depression which eventually overwhelmed him in January this year. In February 2006 he wrote on K-punk of the “optimism of the act”: “In particularly acute cases of depression, it is recognised that no verbal or therapeutic intervention will reach the patient. The only effective remedy is to do things, even though the patient will, at that time, believe that any act is pointless and meaningless. But ‘going through the motions’ of the act is an essential pre-requisite to the growth of belief ‘in the heart’. Much as Pascal famously argued in his Wager, belief follows from behaviour rather than the reverse. Similarly, the only way out of cultural depression like now is to act as if things can be different.”

A video, from Repeater books, "Capitalist Realism and Mr Robot":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNxWA_jemLY

In this youtube video we’ll explore the crisis known as capitalism, that is we’ll look at the continued economic crisis, the failed protest movements, the retro digital culture, the psychotic businessmen, and even those pesky Russian cyberterrorists, only we’ll be looking at all of it through the lens of a TV cult hit from the USA television network. The show is “Mr. Robot” and the question that confronts us is whether Rami Malek and Christian Slater are stuck the same capitalist realist genre that we are, or have they found a show that can imagine the end of capitalism as easily as it can imagine the end of the world?
------------------------------------------------------

And another appreciation and summary of Mark Fisher's political critiques from Soucient.com:

K-Punk Politics
by Josh White on Jan 20, 2017

http://souciant.com/2017/01/k-punk-politics-mark-fisher/

Cultural theorist Mark Fisher died last week. He was just 48 years old. Ideologically committed to the ethos of Punk Rock, Mark Fisher was an influential music critic and blogger at K-Punk. Unlike liberal critics, Fisher did not engage with pop culture without recourse to critical theory and politics. And by politics, I mean radical politics.

From what we know, Fisher committed suicide after a lifelong struggle with depression. I hesitate to use the dreadful cliche ‘struggle’ together with depression. This condition requires greater nuance, and he himself wrote a lot about the politics of depression and what he called ‘depressive hedonism’, the cycle of pleasure and sadness enforced and regulated by social media and other forms of enjoyment. The inability to escape from the relentless treadmill of desires brings us to despair again and again.

He was right to see depression as a key figment of the era. It’s not just that the capitalist system has produced an alienated working class, the new threat is an all encompassing gloom – feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. This takes subtle forms. Fisher talks about ‘magical voluntarism’, which he describes as “the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be”.

After all, if you are a truly free individual then you have only yourself to blame for your problems. It’s not just right-wing politicians pushing this idea. It’s in Reality TV, CBT and the popular guff of self-help therapy, ‘positive thinking’ and ‘mindfulness’. We’re rendered still by ‘reflexive impotence’, Fisher argues, but it’s not an individual matter. It’s political and socio-economic in the end. It’s about the induced decline of class consciousness. And this is where it gets interesting.

There is an alternative

The politics of depression fit neatly within a broad political analysis of our predicament. This brings us to the notion of ‘capitalist realism’. In his book of the same name, Mark Fisher attempted to encapsulate the ideological field which prevents us from seeing beyond the horizon of the capitalist system. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism itself.

As a term, ‘capitalist realism’ is an obvious play on socialist realism – the stultifying aesthetic and cultural policies of the Soviet Union that snuffed the life out of the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s. This is itself a wonderfully subversive tactic of appropriation. In an interview with Ceasefire Magazine, Fisher summed up his analysis:


Put simply, capitalist realism is the view that it is now impossible even to imagine an alternative to capitalism. Capitalism is the only ‘realistic’ political economic system, and, since this is the case, all we can do is accommodate ourselves to it. This leads to the imposition of what I have called ‘business ontology’ – a version of social reality in which every process is modeled on corporate practices.

‘Business ontology’ is Fisher’s name for the incapacity to see the world outside of business and corporate terms. This is probably a play on Alain Badiou’s phrase ‘market ontology’. Even leftists struggle to see the world outside of market forces and the structures of business, big and small. In this sense, capitalist ideology – in the domination of culture, not just the economy – shapes the limits of thought and discourse, not just practical action.



Fisher was adept at coining such terms. ‘Market Stalinism’ was another great invention, referring to the enforced practices of companies. He singles out examples like employees being obliged to wear items expressing their individuality. Later, Fisher would use the phrase ‘liberal Stalinism’ to refer to the increasing tendency of the left towards moralism on social media. He would use this to dissect the Twitter mob as a new puritanical force.

Far from a conservative, Fisher was concerned by the decline of left-wing political experiments as a loss to revolutionary politics. Note, this was before Occupy Wall Street broke out in 2011. He wanted the left to avoid the drift into purely theoretical discourses, but not move towards action for the sake of action. This is not a desperate call for the Black Bloc to save us. And it’s not a diversion into the obscure corners of academia.

Instead, the focus is on the system and how it ensnares us. Capitalist realism dissolves agency and politics as we know them. It leaves, in its wake, the notion of individual responsibility and guilt. If you can’t find a job, that’s your fault. It’s not down to the structural functions of the economy, and its need for cheap labour and unemployment as a pressure for keeping wages low. All the while, we’re told we can do anything and be anybody.



Much like Slavoj Zizek and other thinkers, Fisher was responding to the ‘end of history’ and its almost universal acceptance. This led Mark to question the stagnant, managerial politics of the New Labour era. His work called into the question one of the fundamental assumptions of neoliberalism, namely the idea that “there is no alternative” to a liberal market economy. Fisher was not alone in his efforts to tear down the limits being foisted upon the human imagination. But, at the same time, he was not uncritical of the contemporary left.

The retreat into identity

In Exiting the Vampire Castle, Mark Fisher attempted to diagnose the ailments of the modern left, singling out its fetish for social media and the growing trend towards so-called ‘identity politics’. The loss of a sense of organisational form, instead drifting into petty bourgeois moralism about personal conduct and individual virtue. He takes the posh left’s animosity towards Owen Jones and Russell Brand as key instances of this.

Taking issue with ‘call out culture’, Fisher sees the fixation on moral failings (whether real or imagined) as a return to a new puritanism on the left. He points us to the abusive outbursts of Twitter mobs, and he is right. Ultimately, he argues, this shift serves to paralyse us – feeding back into the hopelessness endemic to the system. In short, petit-bourgeois moralism isn’t a substitute for political theory and action, in fact, it might actually be a hindrance to it.

At the same time, Mark is careful to make clear he does not think straight white guys should be treated with reverence. Nor does Fisher dismiss the struggles of queer people, women and people of colour. Rather he takes issue with the creeping influence of petit-bourgeois moralism, which appropriates these struggles and ties them to liberal reformism. He detects this influence in university life, and suggests it deters working people from getting involved.

Of course, Fisher was not alone in his scepticism of the shift towards identitarian politics on the left. He was very critical of what he called ‘neo-anarchism’, a name for a specific breed of anarchism espoused by privileged millennials – who have never known life before neoliberalism. The neo-anarchists fall back into the ditch of neoliberal thinking, as they hold twentieth century social democracy and communism in contempt, but refuse to concede parliamentary or state politics ever achieved any good at all.



It sounds like a close cousin to what Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams call ‘folk politics’. They argue that the organised left has fallen by the wayside and become enamoured with spontaneous local action over organised, hegemonic projects for universal emancipation. Instead, the collective focus is on localism and the immediacy of particular struggles rather than vertical, hierarchical attempts to restructure the world and build a far-reaching alternative.

This may be why horizontalism and anarchism are in vogue. Yet Fisher doesn’t see any hope in a return to old leftist ‘economistic’ notions of class. He sees the limitations of social movements at present, but does not see salvation in past models. In this regard, Fisher sounded like most other so-called postmodern theorists, but he was not necessarily wrong in this emphasis. The post-capitalist future is in the present, and the struggle is not just to defeat the present system but to bring about that future.