Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher (11 July 1968 – 13 January 2017), who also wrote under the online alias k-punk, was an English writer, music critic, political and cultural theorist, philosopher, Marxist, and teacher at Goldsmiths, University of London, in its Department of Visual Cultures. He first gained recognition for his early-2000s blogging as k-punk and was noted for his work on radical politics, music, and popular culture.

Fisher authored several books, including the surprise hit *Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?* (2009), and wrote for outlets like *The Wire*, *Fact*, *New Statesman*, and *Sight & Sound*. He co-founded the publishers Zero Books and later Repeater Books. After struggling with depression on and off for years, Fisher died by suicide in January 2017, just before his book *The Weird and the Eerie* (2017) came out.

Born in Leicester and raised in Loughborough, Fisher came from a working-class, conservative family. His father worked as an engineering technician, his mother as a cleaner. He went to a local comprehensive school. In his youth, the late-1970s post-punk music press—especially papers like the *NME* that mixed music with politics, film, and fiction—shaped him. He was also influenced by the link between working-class culture and football, and was present at the Hillsborough disaster.

Fisher earned a BA in English and Philosophy from Hull University in 1989, and a PhD from the University of Warwick in 1999, with a thesis titled *Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction*. At Warwick, he helped found the interdisciplinary Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, linked to accelerationist thought and including philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land. There he befriended and influenced producer Kode9, who later started the Hyperdub label. In the early 1990s, Fisher 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 launched his cultural theory blog, k-punk, in 2003. Music critic Simon Reynolds called it "a one-man magazine superior to most magazines in Britain" and the hub of a "constellation of blogs" where popular culture, music, film, politics, and critical theory were discussed together by journalists, academics, and colleagues. *Vice* later said his k-punk writing 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, noting: "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 space for writing, a break from academic frameworks and expectations. He also co-founded the message board Dissensus with writer Matt Ingram.

Fisher worked as a visiting fellow and lecturer on Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, 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 singer's career and death, and published *Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?*, which analyzed how neoliberalism ideologically affects contemporary culture.

Fisher was an early critic of call-out culture, publishing a controversial 2013 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", and that it reduced every political issue to criticizing individual behavior rather than addressing them through collective action. In 2014, he published *Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures*, a collection of essays on similar themes explored through music, film, and hauntology. He wrote intermittently for publications including *Fact* and *The Wire*. In 2016, he co-edited the critical anthology *Post-Punk Then and Now* with Kodwo Eshun and Gavin Butt, published by Repeater Books.

In the late 2000s, Fisher repurposed 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 captured the ideological situation after the Soviet Union's fall, where capitalism's logics define the limits of political and social life, with major effects on education, mental illness, pop culture, and resistance methods. The result, he wrote, is a state where it is "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." He described capitalist realism as "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, it draws on the Althusserian idea of ideology, as well as the work of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. Fisher also credited his experience working in the public sector in Blairite Britain.