Mark Fisher

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, and teacher based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Fisher was formatively influenced in his youth by the post-punk music press of the late 1970s, particularly papers such as 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 Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy at Hull University (1989), and completed a PhD at the University of Warwick in 1999 titled Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.

During this time, Fisher was a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which were associated with accelerationist political thought and the work of philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land.

There, he befriended and influenced producer Kode9, who would later found the Hyperdub record label.

In the early 1990s, he also made music as part of the techno group D-Generation, releasing the 12" Entropy in the UK. In the 1990s Mark wrote "White Magic" for CritCrim.org.

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.

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".

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 central 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 described his writing on k-punk as "lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets".

Fisher used the blog as a more flexible, generative venue for writing, a respite from the frameworks and expectations of academic writing.

Fisher also co-founded the message board Dissensus with writer Matt Ingram.

Subsequently, 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.

He proposes that the 2008 financial crisis compounded this position; rather than catalyzing a desire to seek alternatives for the existing model, the response to the crisis reinforced the notion that modifications must be made within the existing system.

Fisher argues that capitalist realism has propagated a 'business ontology' which concludes that everything should be run as a business including education and healthcare.

Following the publication of Fisher's work, the term has been picked up by other literary critics.

Fisher popularised the use of Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology to describe a pervasive sense in which contemporary culture is haunted by the "lost futures" of modernity, which failed to occur or were cancelled by postmodernity and neoliberalism.

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.

In 2009, Fisher 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.

He expanded on the concept in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, arguing 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."

Fisher writes:

"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."

As a philosophical concept, capitalist realism is influenced by the Althusserian conception of ideology, as well as the work of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.

The concept of capitalist realism also likely stems from the concept of Cultural hegemony proposed by Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci; which can generally be described as the notion that the "status quo" is all there is, and that anything else violates common sense itself.

Capitalists maintain their power not through violence or force, but by creating a pervasive sense that the Capitalist system is all there is.

They maintain this view by dominating most social and cultural institutions.

Fisher proposes that within a capitalist framework there is no space to conceive of alternative forms of social structures, adding that younger generations are not even concerned with recognizing alternatives.

Fisher was an early critic of call-out culture and in 2013 published a controversial essay titled "Exiting the Vampire Castle".

He argued that call-out culture created a space "where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent".

Fisher also argued 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 also contributed intermittently to a number of publications, including the music magazines Fact and The Wire.

In 2016, Fisher 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.

After years intermittently struggling with depression, Fisher died by suicide in January 2017, shortly before the publication of The Weird and the Eerie (2017).

Fisher was born in Leicester and raised in Loughborough to working-class, conservative parents; his father was an engineering technician and his mother a cleaner.

He attended a local comprehensive school.