28 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 grew up in Loughborough to working-class, conservative parents.

Mark Fisher's 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 like the 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 completed a PhD at the University of Warwick in 1999; his thesis titled Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction.

Vice magazine later said Mark Fisher's writing on k-punk was "lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets".

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

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

Mark Fisher went on to say 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.

Mark Fisher argued 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.

Mark Fisher credited working in the public sector in Blairite Britain, as well as being a teacher and trade union activist, with making him see that "neoliberal capitalism didn't fit with the accelerationist model" but was instead creating the bureaucracy he describes in Capitalist Realism.

Mark Fisher proposed 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 said that the 2008 financial crisis compounded this position.

Mark Fisher has stated that after the financial crisis, even the capitalist status quo seemed impossible, which he considered an improvement.

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.

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

Mark Fisher died by suicide at his home on King Street, Felixstowe in Suffolk, England 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.