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Mark Fisher (11 July 1968 – 13 January 2017), also known under his blogging alias k-punk, was an English writer, music critic, political and cultural theorist, philosopher, Marxist and teacher based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He initially achieved acclaim for his blogging as k-punk in the early 2000s, and was known for his writing on radical politics, music, and popular culture.

Fisher published several books, including the unexpected success Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), and contributed to publications such as The Wire, Fact, New Statesman and Sight & Sound. He was also the co-founder of Zero Books, and later Repeater Books. After years intermittently struggling with depression, Fisher died by suicide in January 2017, shortly before the publication of The Weird and the Eerie (2017).

Early life and education

Fisher was born in Leicester and grew up in Loughborough to working-class, conservative parents. Fisher's father was an engineering technician and his mother a cleaner. Fisher attended a local comprehensive school. He was formatively influenced in his youth by the post-punk music press of the late 1970s, particularly papers like the NME which crossed music with politics, film, and fiction. He was also influenced by the relationship between working class culture and football, being present at the Hillsborough disaster.

Fisher earned a B.A. in English and Philosophy at Hull University in 1989. He completed a PhD at the University of Warwick in 1999; his thesis titled Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction. During that time, he was a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which was associated with accelerationist political thought and included philosophers such as Sadie Plant and Nick Land. There, he befriended and influenced producer Kode9 who later began the Hyperdub record label. In the early 1990s, Fisher also made music as part of the breakbeat hardcore group D-Generation, releasing the EPs Entropy in the UK and Concrete Island, and later Isle Of The Dead as The Lower Depths. In the 1990s he wrote "White Magic" for CritCrim.org.

After teaching philosophy at a further education college, Fisher began his blog on cultural theory, k-punk, in 2003. Music critic Simon Reynolds described it as "a one-man magazine superior to most magazines in Britain" and as the hub of a "constellation of blogs" in which popular culture, music, film, politics, and critical theory were discussed in tandem by journalists, academics, and colleagues. Vice magazine later said Fisher's writing on k-punk was "lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets". The Guardian contrasted it with his CCRU work, stating "The blog retained some Warwick traits, such as quoting reverently from Deleuze and Guattari, but it gradually shed the CCRU's aggressive rhetoric and pro-capitalist politics for a more forgiving, more left-leaning take on modernity." He used the blog as a more flexible, generative venue for writing, a respite from the frameworks and expectations of academic writing. He also co-founded the message board Dissensus with Matt Ingram, a writer.

Career

In turn, Fisher was a visiting fellow and a lecturer on Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, a commissioning editor at Zero Books, an editorial board member of Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture and Edinburgh University Press's Speculative Realism series, and an acting deputy editor at The Wire. In 2009, he edited The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, a collection of critical essays on the career and death of Michael Jackson, and published Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, an analysis of the ideological effects of neoliberalism on contemporary culture.

Fisher was an early critic of call-out culture and in 2013 published a controversial essay titled "Exiting the Vampire Castle". He felt that call-out culture created a space "where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent". He went on to say that call-out culture reduces every political issue to criticizing the behaviour of individuals, instead of dealing with such political issues through collective action. In 2014, Fisher published Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, a collection of essays on similar themes viewed through the prisms of music, film, and hauntology. He contributed intermittently to a number of publications including the music magazines Fact and The Wire. In 2016, he co-edited a critical anthology on the post-punk era with Kodwo Eshun and Gavin Butt titled Post-Punk Then and Now, published by Repeater Books.

Capitalist realism

In the late 2000s, Fisher re-purposed the term "capitalist realism" to describe "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it".

He argued that the term best describes the ideological situation since the fall of the Soviet Union, in which the logics of capitalism have come to delineate the limits of political and social life, with significant effects on education, mental illness, pop culture, and methods of resistance. The result is a situation in which it is "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." He wrote:

Capitalist realism as I understand it... is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.