A Year and a Half After Mark Fisher’s Death, His Thinking Rings True

“It is easier to imagine Emperor Palpatine of the Sith falling than to imagine a politician effectively challenging the power of Wall Street.”

Introduction

“Oh how I realized how I wanted time,
Put into perspective, tried so hard to find,
Just for one moment, thought I’d found my way.
Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away.”

Joy Division, 24 Hours

Recently I have engaged more thoroughly with the works of Mark Fisher, a cultural theorist whose reputation has been rapidly growing over the past several years. This engagement has been prompted by a desire to better understand post-modern culture and its impact on the politics of the day. Fisher, often writing for his blog under the alias K-Punk, was a keen analyst of post-modern culture and its discontents, and his provocative work provides a bevy of intellectual riches. In this brief essay, I will provide a brief account of some of Fisher’s major ideas. My hope is that this will inspire others to look into Fisher’s thinking. He was an important and accessible critical theorist who contributed a great deal, and sadly, could have contributed much more.

Here it is necessary to provide a mordant biographical detail. At the same time as his fame and influence were growing, and shortly after the release of his last book The Weird and the Eerie for Repeater Books, Mark Fisher took his own life on January 17th, 2017. Fisher had been open about his lifetime battles with depression, often writing about them with considerable eloquence and power in works such as Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. While he never denied that there was an individual-land psychological dimension to depression, his own experiences also made him aware of the myriad ways the post-modern culture of “capitalist realism” plays an important role in engendering a despairing society. As such, Fisher’s intimately personal approach to social programs can provide a great deal of insight into how to deal with an increasingly uncertain and angry socio-political climate.