27 Facts About Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher, 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.

Mark Fisher 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.

Mark Fisher was the co-founder of Zero Books, and later Repeater Books.

Mark 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.

Mark 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.

Mark Fisher was influenced by the relationship between working class culture and football, being present at the Hillsborough disaster.

Mark Fisher earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy at Hull University, and completed a PhD at the University of Warwick in 1999 titled Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.

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

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

Subsequently, Mark 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.

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

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

Mark Fisher 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, Mark 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.

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

In 2016, Mark 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.

Mark 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.

Mark Fisher 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.

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

Mark 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.

In contrast to the nostalgia and ironic pastiche of postmodern culture, Mark Fisher defined hauntological art as exploring these impasses and representing a "refusal to give up on the desire for the future" and a "pining for a future that never arrived".

Mark Fisher critiqued economics, claiming that it was a bourgeois "science", that molded reality after its presuppositions, rather than critically examined reality.

Mark Fisher hanged himself at his home on King Street, Felixstowe on 13 January 2017 at the age of 48, shortly before the publication of his latest book The Weird and the Eerie.

Mark Fisher had sought psychiatric treatment in the weeks leading up to his death, but his general practitioner had only been able to offer over-the-phone meetings to discuss a referral.

Mark Fisher discussed his struggles with depression in articles and in his book Ghosts of My Life.

Mark Fisher has been posthumously acclaimed as a highly influential thinker and theorist.

Mark Fisher still has a large influence on contemporary Zer0 Books writers, with him being cited extensively in Guy Mankowski's 'Albion's Secret History: Snapshots of England's Pop Rebels and Outsiders'.