Mark Fisher (theorist)

Biography

Fisher earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and philosophy at Hull University (1989) and completed a Ph.D. at Warwick University 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. He spent a period teaching in a further education college as a philosophy lecturer and began his blog k-punk in 2003. It has been called "one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory." 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 ... some of which are written by practicing philosophers or others involved in lumpen academia" in which popular culture, music, film, politics, and abstract theory were discussed in tandem. 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 Zer0 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, 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. 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 Fact and The Wire. In 2016, Fisher co-edited a critical anthology on the postpunk era with Kodwo Eshun and Gavin Butt entitled Postpunk Then and Now on Repeater Books.

Fisher died on 13 January 2017 at the age of 48, shortly before the publication of his latest book The Weird and the Eerie (2017). His wife confirmed that he had taken his own life. At the time of his death, Fisher was said to be planning a new book entitled Acid Communism.

Capitalist realism

In the late 2000s, Fisher coined 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 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 cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. 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. 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. 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.

Hauntology

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 were purportedly cancelled by postmodernity and neoliberalism. Fisher and others have drawn attention to the shift into post-Fordist economies in the late 1970s, which he argued has "gradually and systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new." In contrast to the nostalgia and retro pastiche of postmodernity, Fisher defined hauntological art and culture as typified by a "refusal to give up on the desire for the future." Discussing the political relevance of the concept, Fisher wrote:

At a time of political reaction and restoration, when cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards, when "power . . . operates predictively as much as retrospectively" (Eshun 2003: 289), one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond postmodernity’s terminal time. When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.

Hauntology has thus been described as a "pining for a future that never arrived," manifested in a foregrounding of these historical and ontological disjunctions. Fisher's 2014 book Ghosts of My Life examined these ideas through cultural sources, such as the music of Burial and Joy Division, TV series such as Sapphire & Steel, the films of Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan, and the novels of David Peace and John Le Carre. Fisher extended these ideas in his 2017 book The Weird and the Eerie, focusing predominantly on examples from science fiction and horror.