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K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher
A comprehensive collection of the writings of Mark Fisher (1968-2017), whose work defined critical writing for a generation.This comprehensive collection brings together the work of acclaimed blogger, writer, political activist and lecturer Mark Fisher (aka k-punk). Covering the period 2004 - 2016, the collection will include some of the best writings from his seminal blog k-punk; a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews; his key writings on politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health and popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines; his final unfinished introduction to his planned work on "Acid Communism"; and a number of important interviews from the last decade. Edited by Darren Ambrose and with a foreword by Simon Reynolds.
821 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 13, 2018
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About the author
Mark Fisher
72 books1,709 followersMark Fisher (1968 – 2017) was a co-founder of Zero Books and Repeater Books. His blog, k-punk, defined critical writing for a generation. He wrote three books, Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie, and was a Visiting Fellow in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 102 reviews
September 11, 2019
This is 750 pages of Mark Fisher complaining about pop culture by quoting Fred Jameson. And it’s unbearable. Thing is, it’s a scrapbook covering about 10 years of Fisher’s blogs and articles--which is fine, who doesn’t like a good compilation?--but the acid jeremiads about the poor quality of films and pop songs becomes so repetitive that I found myself losing interest in his central premise (culture has succumbed to retrospection and ceased to produce the new blah blah blah) until by the end it just seemed like senescent whinging. Granted, Fisher’s blogs weren’t supposed to be read as a 750-course meal but getting through the lukewarm philosophy attendant to ‘why isn’t the BBC as good as when I was a kid’ actually caused me to change my mind about Mark Fisher who I used to really like. And by extension his field of references--Zizek, Jodi Dean, Fred Jameson and the rest of the who’s-who of complaining-about-movies-but-communistly in 2009.
I don’t like neoliberalism either but being a generation younger than Fisher (I was an undergrad at Goldsmiths when he was a professor there) I’m a little less phobic of the 21st century than he is. It’s not that there isn’t stupid shit on TV--of course there is, granddad--and I don’t deny that BBC serials, pop songs and, yes, even big budget movies were probably better in 1976 or whenever exactly the sepia-toned halcyon of Fisher’s golden age / youth was. But he extrapolates ‘the mediums which produced such exciting material when I was young have become stagnant, mute and stupid’ out to all of global culture, and I’d suggest that he just doesn’t know where to look. He rails against Star Wars, Doctor Who and Britpop as being the fetishistic carapaces of a perverse & sanitized cultural memory and...so what? Of course they are. Of course you’ll think that art is just capital becoming nostalgic for its mid-century crests if all your only exposure to it is going to the cinema. Get with the times, old man.
If you accept this sort of modernist calculus of art as necessarily producing some kind of novelty--new ideas, styles, fresh perspectives, whatever--then it must be very distressing to see the popularity of remakes, revivals and sequels. However, defining art solely by way of innovation is problematized by the prevalence of great artists working in the modes of antiquity, medievalism and other modalities of days-gone-by. If there's no life left in these forms then look elsewhere. And the political ontology of difference between art that wants to entertain people and art that wants to lull people into a docile ideological slumber is...tenuous. The people who make (and by extension sell) guitar music and action movies may or may not just want to make something fun & comforting for people to enjoy after their dire and weary lives as service industry automatons. Which I think was also the motive of the painters, poets and playwrites from whenever art was supposedly good, most of whom were patronized by capital or the state apparatus in one capacity or another, and the thoughtlessness of this connection between the junk food accompanying your neural shutdown at the end of the workday and the necessity of capitalism reifying its strictures and engendering passivity is...yeah, again, troubling to anyone who both likes movies and dislikes capitalism. But it doesn’t prima facie prove that we’re forestalled in an uncreative echo chamber.
I’m tilting toward the older end of being young and I find a lot of stuff about Gen Z weird and creepy, as Mark Fisher seemed to think about my own generation. When he’s not doing a callow retreading of his own epoch’s creative triumphs, he’s mostly droning on about millennials' symbiotic relationship with iphones and social media being an insidious mind virus that’s truncated our potential. Which I don’t really agree with because digital technology is just another ordinary part of life I feel ambivalent toward, but what I really take issue with is his pessimism about the our capacities as creative agents. He’s infatuated with J.G. Ballard, Cronenberg and David Lynch (there are stunningly profuse elegiac essays about each) and imagines that there’s no one my age capable of matching them. Which is annoying. It’s normal to find the next generation uncanny and maybe kind of threatening but you should make sure you know what you’re talking about before you call them a bunch of dead-eyed copycats.
Humor me a slightly vulgar comparison; I don’t really watch boxing but a friend of mine does, and complained to me recently that there’s been minimal development in the sport since the 1980s. He said that the champs from those days could go toe-to-toe with the guys today, which reminded me of Mark Fisher’s morose dirges for better pop music. Well, I’m a Mixed Martial Arts hobbyist, follow the sport closely across several promotions and pay money to get kicked in the solar plexus at a local muay thai gym a few times a week, and let me tell you, the top fighters from a few years ago would get mauled by today’s top talent. MMA’s a young sport full of life--stymied and shackled by repulsive old men steering the ship--but its still innovative, dynamic and unpredictable. The moral of this little aside is not to let a curmudgeonly frustration that your favorite hobbies have become obsolete and irrelevant to metastasize into a misanthropic condemnation of the entire culture. Just as talented athletes are these days more drawn to MMA than boxing or wrestling, very few of the intelligent and creative people I’ve known have wanted to make films or shitty synth music because these things seem boring and old fashioned.
Mark Fisher’s a good writer and a smart person and there’s some interesting stuff collected here. Genuinely deep insights nestled in the bog water of a sad old man who’s scared by the present. I mean, I am too, I just don’t think that the declining quality in network TV is the death-faced herald of cultural collapse. We may very well be living in the end times and perhaps the 20th century’s dominant styles and mediums have played themselves out. But there’s still some interesting art accompanying the tailspin--you just need to be willing to try new things.
I don’t like neoliberalism either but being a generation younger than Fisher (I was an undergrad at Goldsmiths when he was a professor there) I’m a little less phobic of the 21st century than he is. It’s not that there isn’t stupid shit on TV--of course there is, granddad--and I don’t deny that BBC serials, pop songs and, yes, even big budget movies were probably better in 1976 or whenever exactly the sepia-toned halcyon of Fisher’s golden age / youth was. But he extrapolates ‘the mediums which produced such exciting material when I was young have become stagnant, mute and stupid’ out to all of global culture, and I’d suggest that he just doesn’t know where to look. He rails against Star Wars, Doctor Who and Britpop as being the fetishistic carapaces of a perverse & sanitized cultural memory and...so what? Of course they are. Of course you’ll think that art is just capital becoming nostalgic for its mid-century crests if all your only exposure to it is going to the cinema. Get with the times, old man.
If you accept this sort of modernist calculus of art as necessarily producing some kind of novelty--new ideas, styles, fresh perspectives, whatever--then it must be very distressing to see the popularity of remakes, revivals and sequels. However, defining art solely by way of innovation is problematized by the prevalence of great artists working in the modes of antiquity, medievalism and other modalities of days-gone-by. If there's no life left in these forms then look elsewhere. And the political ontology of difference between art that wants to entertain people and art that wants to lull people into a docile ideological slumber is...tenuous. The people who make (and by extension sell) guitar music and action movies may or may not just want to make something fun & comforting for people to enjoy after their dire and weary lives as service industry automatons. Which I think was also the motive of the painters, poets and playwrites from whenever art was supposedly good, most of whom were patronized by capital or the state apparatus in one capacity or another, and the thoughtlessness of this connection between the junk food accompanying your neural shutdown at the end of the workday and the necessity of capitalism reifying its strictures and engendering passivity is...yeah, again, troubling to anyone who both likes movies and dislikes capitalism. But it doesn’t prima facie prove that we’re forestalled in an uncreative echo chamber.
I’m tilting toward the older end of being young and I find a lot of stuff about Gen Z weird and creepy, as Mark Fisher seemed to think about my own generation. When he’s not doing a callow retreading of his own epoch’s creative triumphs, he’s mostly droning on about millennials' symbiotic relationship with iphones and social media being an insidious mind virus that’s truncated our potential. Which I don’t really agree with because digital technology is just another ordinary part of life I feel ambivalent toward, but what I really take issue with is his pessimism about the our capacities as creative agents. He’s infatuated with J.G. Ballard, Cronenberg and David Lynch (there are stunningly profuse elegiac essays about each) and imagines that there’s no one my age capable of matching them. Which is annoying. It’s normal to find the next generation uncanny and maybe kind of threatening but you should make sure you know what you’re talking about before you call them a bunch of dead-eyed copycats.
Humor me a slightly vulgar comparison; I don’t really watch boxing but a friend of mine does, and complained to me recently that there’s been minimal development in the sport since the 1980s. He said that the champs from those days could go toe-to-toe with the guys today, which reminded me of Mark Fisher’s morose dirges for better pop music. Well, I’m a Mixed Martial Arts hobbyist, follow the sport closely across several promotions and pay money to get kicked in the solar plexus at a local muay thai gym a few times a week, and let me tell you, the top fighters from a few years ago would get mauled by today’s top talent. MMA’s a young sport full of life--stymied and shackled by repulsive old men steering the ship--but its still innovative, dynamic and unpredictable. The moral of this little aside is not to let a curmudgeonly frustration that your favorite hobbies have become obsolete and irrelevant to metastasize into a misanthropic condemnation of the entire culture. Just as talented athletes are these days more drawn to MMA than boxing or wrestling, very few of the intelligent and creative people I’ve known have wanted to make films or shitty synth music because these things seem boring and old fashioned.
Mark Fisher’s a good writer and a smart person and there’s some interesting stuff collected here. Genuinely deep insights nestled in the bog water of a sad old man who’s scared by the present. I mean, I am too, I just don’t think that the declining quality in network TV is the death-faced herald of cultural collapse. We may very well be living in the end times and perhaps the 20th century’s dominant styles and mediums have played themselves out. But there’s still some interesting art accompanying the tailspin--you just need to be willing to try new things.
December 30, 2018
I’ve read three of this guy’s books now in quick succession and there is another I was thinking of reading – Ghosts of My Life – but I’ve flicked through it and decided I’m not going to now. Having read two in a row, reading another book filled with a majority of cultural references I don’t really understand seems a little absurd, even for me. Fisher was only five years younger than me, but I got bored with music and film much younger than he did, if he ever did, and so I left this feeling infinitely older than him. A lot of his discussion of the rave scene in London and of dance cultures could hardly be further from my experience or understanding. Still, it was interesting reading about it all from someone who was clearly passionate about music in ways I haven’t been since I was very young, probably since my teens.
And because he is British he also alludes to lots of UK politics that I’ve only a sketchy knowledge of too. So, this book spent far too much time skirting about at the edges of my understanding. All the same, I still liked this and suspect that if you are more interested in, say, The Fall, The Cure, Roxy Music, Joy Division or The Smiths than I have been, this would prove to be even better than I found it.
You are left in little doubt that he didn’t particularly like Tony Blair. In his other book, Capitalist Realism, he explains that we now live in a time when even imagining that there is an alternative to capitalism seems a near impossibility. He quotes Thatcher who said, when asked what her main achievement had been, Tony Blair and New Labour. Hard to think of a more damning assessment. But Blair here is as a kind of cypher – a man who desires power, but has hardly any intention of wielding it. Someone who is so focused on looking the part, he forgets to play his part. He is poll driven to the point of impotence – something I’m terrified is about to occur here in Australia when the Labor Party wins next year’s election.
Blair is the embodiment of capitalist realism – someone who knows there is no alternative to capitalism, and so makes it clear that the only reason a voter might choose Cool Britannia under Labour rather than the standard Cruel Britannia under the Conservatives is that Labour might just be a little less nasty. Blair is presented here as what we have grown to know and loath about our politicians. The example given is of the death of Lady Di, who Blair called ‘the people’s princess’ in a moment of spin-cerity (whether it was sincere or not is almost beside the point – since it is said because of how it will play in public).
Central to Fisher’s vision of present-day capitalism is his concerns with the individualisation and atomisation of people and the impact this has upon them in all senses – politically, psychologically and socially. Fisher suffered from depression for much of his life and then took his own life only a couple of years ago. That said, this is often a remarkably optimistic and even joyous book. He sees a new world struggling to be born in ways I’ve never been able to sustain, and saw hope in ways I would like to be able to, as slithers of light, if not showing that the doorway was actually open, then at least showing us where the doorway was.
I don’t own a television, however, I get to see things, often snippets of things, sometimes on other people’s televisions, although, this rarely involves my seeing an entire program. The programs I most often get to see generally involve murder mysteries (Midsomer Murders, Agatha Christie, other things set in the 1940s or 1960s – although, it is really years and years since I’ve seen one of these all the way through to the end), Grand Designs and Antiques Roadshow. I’m going to talk mostly about those three types of shows, although, I do sometimes see quiz shows, news satire programs and cooking shows – I think similar deconstructions of these types of shows could easily illuminate the role they play as forms of capitalist realism, but I’ll stick to the first three.
One of the things I’ve noticed about all three of these forms of TV show is that they involve a kind of taming of chaos, and it is often tamed following the advice of an expert. Antiques Roadshow is particularly instructive in this. I think this show has been going for decades and decades in the UK – and yet, it is really a one-trick-pony. Someone brings something along to an expert to assess. The owner of the object will generally know next to nothing about it – other than what they paid for it, or where they found it and when. The expert will then get to put themselves on display – although, obviously, they do this via the arcane facts they know about the object. The most important part of this little dance is the reveal at the end – and that is always expressed as the monetary value of the object. Naturally, they say something equating to, ‘sentiment has no price tag’ – but no one believes this for a second. The real highlights of the show are when the expert reveals that the cracked pot is actually Elizabethan and worth 5,000 pounds, that is, it would be if it came to auction, and the right people where in the room, and it was a Thursday in June, and…
Everything has its value, experts know that value, your understanding of the value of something is always secondary, and of limited interest, after that of the experts. Even ugly things can become suddenly beautiful if the right price tag is attached. This is the inverse of Marx saying that money buys the rich man beautiful women and so on. Sometimes the extent of an experts knowledge seems exhausted by being able to read Faberge in Cyrillic, still, this is enough, since the audience can be assured to have learnt through repetition the connection between that name and monetary value.
Grand Designs works in much the same way – but what is interesting here, particularly in relation to a major theme of Fisher’s, is the notion that we should all be able to design our own house in a way that will best express what is essential to our personalities. Here architecture is personalised and becomes a manifestation of our essential being and identity. More than this, as another trope of these shows makes clear, money is always about to run out, and at times the dream home will even need to be put on hold for a time, or potentially abandoned altogether. As such, this is proof of the worth of the people building their dream, more than of economic realities. I’ve not seen enough episodes of the show to know how frequently the whole thing turns to shit and the owner/builders are forced to sell up or lose everything. I suspect this never happens. And that tells you something important about the nature of the show, given running out of money seems the one constant theme of the show. This plays too well into one of the founding myths of capitalism – that if you have a dream, and you pursue that dream with enough vigour, then it is inevitable that you will succeed. This is related to the notion of meritocracy – and similarly, is mostly nonsense wrapped in wishful thinking.
The role of the experts in this show is also interesting. It isn’t at all clear to me how people might think they would be better at designing a house than an architect – it would seem to me like assuming you would be better at heart surgery than a surgeon. All the same, the appeal to the expert is obvious in these shows (particularly when people stuff up because they have tried to save money by not going to one, only for doors to open into hallways and block them entirely or other mistakes that would presumably have been avoided if only…). But expert advice is also generally elided too. I mean, if you have gotten an architect to draw up your dream, it suddenly reverts to and remains ultimately your dream and you receive the praise at the end for your grand design. The centrality of the individual and the importance of that individual leaving their mark beyond themselves, externalised and concretised in ‘their’ home is central here. Veblen’s conspicuous consumption rings in my ears throughout these shows – it is, of course, hard to ignore among the shining appliances and ocean views visible from floor to ceiling glassed in rooms.
Many of these same themes are repeated in murder mysteries. Clearly, there is the chaos of the murder itself which presents the challenge to capitalist realism. The world is presented as out-of-joint, but yet another expert is called upon to restore order. What is interesting is that there is always only one truth and the expert eventually will uncover this truth that through the application of a mixture of deduction and bloody-minded persistence – again, all things come to those who apply themselves. But what is important here is the restoration of order. The motives that drive people to murder are rarely life like – I suspect most real-life-murders are impulse rather than elaborately planned. I would love to see how many plots resolve around murder for financial gain compared to murder for romantic gain. My guess would be that finance is the much more frequent motive. And again, this fits nicely with capitalist realism, since the protection of property and relations to property are much more important to the maintenance of social order than mere interpersonal relations. The point is to reinforce where the money ought to have gone – the proper ownership of property – and to ensure it is restored to its proper owner – and therefore the state’s role in sustaining relations of ownership.
I’ve tried to play with these forms of entertainment in much the way Fisher does in this book. His influences are from the Frankfurt School, Jameson and even Deleuze and Guattari and as such these are fairly obvious in his various texts – and he doesn’t hide these influences. All the same, he can be highly perceptive and it is nice when I actually get the references to see how he plays with cultural productions in ways that aren’t, as mine are here, more or less a straight application of left political ideology to television programmes. He is much more interesting, in that he sees a reinforcing of capitalist realism even in programmes that seem to blame capitalism for our current problems – but since there is no alternative, we are left just to ‘suck it up’. I’ve tried to do a bit of the opposite here – to show that certain fundamental ideas are rarely, if ever challenged by the media and that these include the centrality of the individual, the ability of the individual to manifest their identity via their purchases, and an individual’s rights to property being the central concern of society and the rule of law in cultural productions.
This was an interesting read – even if I flicked over a lot of it given my lack of knowledge of the music or films being discussed. I have the exact same problem with another writer I’m very fond of – bell hooks – but more so with Fisher, since only some of the books that hooks writes are about films.
And because he is British he also alludes to lots of UK politics that I’ve only a sketchy knowledge of too. So, this book spent far too much time skirting about at the edges of my understanding. All the same, I still liked this and suspect that if you are more interested in, say, The Fall, The Cure, Roxy Music, Joy Division or The Smiths than I have been, this would prove to be even better than I found it.
You are left in little doubt that he didn’t particularly like Tony Blair. In his other book, Capitalist Realism, he explains that we now live in a time when even imagining that there is an alternative to capitalism seems a near impossibility. He quotes Thatcher who said, when asked what her main achievement had been, Tony Blair and New Labour. Hard to think of a more damning assessment. But Blair here is as a kind of cypher – a man who desires power, but has hardly any intention of wielding it. Someone who is so focused on looking the part, he forgets to play his part. He is poll driven to the point of impotence – something I’m terrified is about to occur here in Australia when the Labor Party wins next year’s election.
Blair is the embodiment of capitalist realism – someone who knows there is no alternative to capitalism, and so makes it clear that the only reason a voter might choose Cool Britannia under Labour rather than the standard Cruel Britannia under the Conservatives is that Labour might just be a little less nasty. Blair is presented here as what we have grown to know and loath about our politicians. The example given is of the death of Lady Di, who Blair called ‘the people’s princess’ in a moment of spin-cerity (whether it was sincere or not is almost beside the point – since it is said because of how it will play in public).
Central to Fisher’s vision of present-day capitalism is his concerns with the individualisation and atomisation of people and the impact this has upon them in all senses – politically, psychologically and socially. Fisher suffered from depression for much of his life and then took his own life only a couple of years ago. That said, this is often a remarkably optimistic and even joyous book. He sees a new world struggling to be born in ways I’ve never been able to sustain, and saw hope in ways I would like to be able to, as slithers of light, if not showing that the doorway was actually open, then at least showing us where the doorway was.
I don’t own a television, however, I get to see things, often snippets of things, sometimes on other people’s televisions, although, this rarely involves my seeing an entire program. The programs I most often get to see generally involve murder mysteries (Midsomer Murders, Agatha Christie, other things set in the 1940s or 1960s – although, it is really years and years since I’ve seen one of these all the way through to the end), Grand Designs and Antiques Roadshow. I’m going to talk mostly about those three types of shows, although, I do sometimes see quiz shows, news satire programs and cooking shows – I think similar deconstructions of these types of shows could easily illuminate the role they play as forms of capitalist realism, but I’ll stick to the first three.
One of the things I’ve noticed about all three of these forms of TV show is that they involve a kind of taming of chaos, and it is often tamed following the advice of an expert. Antiques Roadshow is particularly instructive in this. I think this show has been going for decades and decades in the UK – and yet, it is really a one-trick-pony. Someone brings something along to an expert to assess. The owner of the object will generally know next to nothing about it – other than what they paid for it, or where they found it and when. The expert will then get to put themselves on display – although, obviously, they do this via the arcane facts they know about the object. The most important part of this little dance is the reveal at the end – and that is always expressed as the monetary value of the object. Naturally, they say something equating to, ‘sentiment has no price tag’ – but no one believes this for a second. The real highlights of the show are when the expert reveals that the cracked pot is actually Elizabethan and worth 5,000 pounds, that is, it would be if it came to auction, and the right people where in the room, and it was a Thursday in June, and…
Everything has its value, experts know that value, your understanding of the value of something is always secondary, and of limited interest, after that of the experts. Even ugly things can become suddenly beautiful if the right price tag is attached. This is the inverse of Marx saying that money buys the rich man beautiful women and so on. Sometimes the extent of an experts knowledge seems exhausted by being able to read Faberge in Cyrillic, still, this is enough, since the audience can be assured to have learnt through repetition the connection between that name and monetary value.
Grand Designs works in much the same way – but what is interesting here, particularly in relation to a major theme of Fisher’s, is the notion that we should all be able to design our own house in a way that will best express what is essential to our personalities. Here architecture is personalised and becomes a manifestation of our essential being and identity. More than this, as another trope of these shows makes clear, money is always about to run out, and at times the dream home will even need to be put on hold for a time, or potentially abandoned altogether. As such, this is proof of the worth of the people building their dream, more than of economic realities. I’ve not seen enough episodes of the show to know how frequently the whole thing turns to shit and the owner/builders are forced to sell up or lose everything. I suspect this never happens. And that tells you something important about the nature of the show, given running out of money seems the one constant theme of the show. This plays too well into one of the founding myths of capitalism – that if you have a dream, and you pursue that dream with enough vigour, then it is inevitable that you will succeed. This is related to the notion of meritocracy – and similarly, is mostly nonsense wrapped in wishful thinking.
The role of the experts in this show is also interesting. It isn’t at all clear to me how people might think they would be better at designing a house than an architect – it would seem to me like assuming you would be better at heart surgery than a surgeon. All the same, the appeal to the expert is obvious in these shows (particularly when people stuff up because they have tried to save money by not going to one, only for doors to open into hallways and block them entirely or other mistakes that would presumably have been avoided if only…). But expert advice is also generally elided too. I mean, if you have gotten an architect to draw up your dream, it suddenly reverts to and remains ultimately your dream and you receive the praise at the end for your grand design. The centrality of the individual and the importance of that individual leaving their mark beyond themselves, externalised and concretised in ‘their’ home is central here. Veblen’s conspicuous consumption rings in my ears throughout these shows – it is, of course, hard to ignore among the shining appliances and ocean views visible from floor to ceiling glassed in rooms.
Many of these same themes are repeated in murder mysteries. Clearly, there is the chaos of the murder itself which presents the challenge to capitalist realism. The world is presented as out-of-joint, but yet another expert is called upon to restore order. What is interesting is that there is always only one truth and the expert eventually will uncover this truth that through the application of a mixture of deduction and bloody-minded persistence – again, all things come to those who apply themselves. But what is important here is the restoration of order. The motives that drive people to murder are rarely life like – I suspect most real-life-murders are impulse rather than elaborately planned. I would love to see how many plots resolve around murder for financial gain compared to murder for romantic gain. My guess would be that finance is the much more frequent motive. And again, this fits nicely with capitalist realism, since the protection of property and relations to property are much more important to the maintenance of social order than mere interpersonal relations. The point is to reinforce where the money ought to have gone – the proper ownership of property – and to ensure it is restored to its proper owner – and therefore the state’s role in sustaining relations of ownership.
I’ve tried to play with these forms of entertainment in much the way Fisher does in this book. His influences are from the Frankfurt School, Jameson and even Deleuze and Guattari and as such these are fairly obvious in his various texts – and he doesn’t hide these influences. All the same, he can be highly perceptive and it is nice when I actually get the references to see how he plays with cultural productions in ways that aren’t, as mine are here, more or less a straight application of left political ideology to television programmes. He is much more interesting, in that he sees a reinforcing of capitalist realism even in programmes that seem to blame capitalism for our current problems – but since there is no alternative, we are left just to ‘suck it up’. I’ve tried to do a bit of the opposite here – to show that certain fundamental ideas are rarely, if ever challenged by the media and that these include the centrality of the individual, the ability of the individual to manifest their identity via their purchases, and an individual’s rights to property being the central concern of society and the rule of law in cultural productions.
This was an interesting read – even if I flicked over a lot of it given my lack of knowledge of the music or films being discussed. I have the exact same problem with another writer I’m very fond of – bell hooks – but more so with Fisher, since only some of the books that hooks writes are about films.
September 1, 2022
Skutečně nejlepší překlad K-Punku, co existuje
September 29, 2019
9/29 - Thinking about this a little more, and I have to deduct a star, because the man clearly did not have very good taste. Alan Moore is clearly the ne plus ultra of "pulp modernism," and yet Fisher is totally dismissive. As a critic, the man lacked good judgment.
***
As is well known, Mark himself eventually succumbed to despair, but what makes this collection so worth reading, and indeed thrilling at times, is that he did not go down without a fight. Even as I found myself quibbling with particular evaluations (especially when it came to music), overall I felt enormously inspired by his project. Hope blasts through these pages.
Mark understood the liberatory power of being treated - and learning to treat yourself - as if you were intelligent. Here is a beautiful paean to free time:
And on the joys of discovering art and literature as an adolescent:
What he's describing here is very far from mere curatorial reverence. He has no truck with any kind of reactionary idealism. The world in which we get our minds blown by Beckett or Joyce is the same as the world where we fight the bourgeoisie.
*
now for some quibbles...
Pretty sick burn, no?
(On the other hand, this collection does include a nuanced take on the merits of the Backstreet Boys. It might be worth extending some of that sympathy to literature. I can't entirely condone dismissing libraries with the epithet 'middle-brow.' Honestly don't think Mark was a particularly sensitive or close reader of fiction.)
...
Alright, so I’d never heard of ‘Scritti’ before reading Fisher’s essay here. Intrigued, I listened to a couple of tracks, and... oh my god, I cannot take this seriously. There’s this shotgun wedding here between transparently disposable cultural artifacts and obscenely abstruse theorists. Of course this is a much broader phenomenon than just Mark Fisher. The marriage that has resulted is perhaps the truest sign of our current malaise.
This is not really meant as a diss to Mark. Nietzsche did much more than just dissect resentment; more interestingly, he also exemplified it in his writing. Perhaps all really interesting radical cultural critique is as much symptom as cure.
***
It's worth reminding ourselves of the peculiar logic that neoliberalism has successfully imposed. Treating people as if they were intelligent is, we have been led to believe, "elitist", whereas treating them as if they are stupid is "democratic." it should go without saying that the assault on cultural elitism has gone alongside the aggressive restoration of a material elite.
As is well known, Mark himself eventually succumbed to despair, but what makes this collection so worth reading, and indeed thrilling at times, is that he did not go down without a fight. Even as I found myself quibbling with particular evaluations (especially when it came to music), overall I felt enormously inspired by his project. Hope blasts through these pages.
Mark understood the liberatory power of being treated - and learning to treat yourself - as if you were intelligent. Here is a beautiful paean to free time:
These developments [ie, the postwar welfare state] precisely opened up a kind of time that is now increasingly difficult to access: a time temporarily freed from the pressure to pay rent or the mortgage; an experimental time, in which the outcomes of activities could neither be predicted or guaranteed; a time which might turn out to be wasted, but which might equally yield new concepts, perceptions, ways of being.
And on the joys of discovering art and literature as an adolescent:
Is it possible to reproduce, later in life, the impact thay books, records and films have between the ages of fourteen and seventeen? The periods of my adult life that have been the most miserable have been those in which I lost fidelity to what I discovered then, in the pages of Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Burrough, Beckett, Selby...
What he's describing here is very far from mere curatorial reverence. He has no truck with any kind of reactionary idealism. The world in which we get our minds blown by Beckett or Joyce is the same as the world where we fight the bourgeoisie.
*
now for some quibbles...
What better way to destroy something than to send in Martin Amis to praise it.
Pretty sick burn, no?
(On the other hand, this collection does include a nuanced take on the merits of the Backstreet Boys. It might be worth extending some of that sympathy to literature. I can't entirely condone dismissing libraries with the epithet 'middle-brow.' Honestly don't think Mark was a particularly sensitive or close reader of fiction.)
...
Alright, so I’d never heard of ‘Scritti’ before reading Fisher’s essay here. Intrigued, I listened to a couple of tracks, and... oh my god, I cannot take this seriously. There’s this shotgun wedding here between transparently disposable cultural artifacts and obscenely abstruse theorists. Of course this is a much broader phenomenon than just Mark Fisher. The marriage that has resulted is perhaps the truest sign of our current malaise.
This is not really meant as a diss to Mark. Nietzsche did much more than just dissect resentment; more interestingly, he also exemplified it in his writing. Perhaps all really interesting radical cultural critique is as much symptom as cure.
February 27, 2023
The greatest trick German Idealism ever pulled was pretending that Spinoza never existed.
I spent a week burrowing into the 700+ pages of the collected blog posts, articles and interviews. I don’t regard as the best use of my time. My relationship with Fisher as always been uneven, a little unsure. The whingeing reminds me of Musil’s protagonists who bemoan their historical conditions, the chief obstacle to their achieving greatness.
I thoroughly enjoyed his dissertation Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, so perhaps haphazardly I ignored my previous experiences and plunged ahead. I should also point out that Fisher's essay on Terminator and Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader easily my favorite essay. It is a shame there wasn't more of this.
There is an over abundance of cultural pieces which don’t serve Fisher’s methodology as a philosopher. The surfeit of music reviews serve a contrary purpose; if The Fall and Burial are the vanguard of something emancipatory then the forecast was always grim. Can’t blame Murdoch for this one.
There is also a glut of intra-blog positioning, all of which is painfully familiar to anyone who either composed or participated in the blog phenomenon. There’s a lesson here. I could ponder the imbrication of democracy and cyberspace but I won’t. Perhaps I take this too personally. Fisher and I are almost the same age. We obviously had similar interests regarding philosophy and the ideas which would be termed theory-fiction. I suppose the comparisons stop there.
I spent a week burrowing into the 700+ pages of the collected blog posts, articles and interviews. I don’t regard as the best use of my time. My relationship with Fisher as always been uneven, a little unsure. The whingeing reminds me of Musil’s protagonists who bemoan their historical conditions, the chief obstacle to their achieving greatness.
I thoroughly enjoyed his dissertation Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, so perhaps haphazardly I ignored my previous experiences and plunged ahead. I should also point out that Fisher's essay on Terminator and Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader easily my favorite essay. It is a shame there wasn't more of this.
There is an over abundance of cultural pieces which don’t serve Fisher’s methodology as a philosopher. The surfeit of music reviews serve a contrary purpose; if The Fall and Burial are the vanguard of something emancipatory then the forecast was always grim. Can’t blame Murdoch for this one.
There is also a glut of intra-blog positioning, all of which is painfully familiar to anyone who either composed or participated in the blog phenomenon. There’s a lesson here. I could ponder the imbrication of democracy and cyberspace but I won’t. Perhaps I take this too personally. Fisher and I are almost the same age. We obviously had similar interests regarding philosophy and the ideas which would be termed theory-fiction. I suppose the comparisons stop there.
February 8, 2019
Proper review forthcoming but just saying here: if you've never read Fisher (and especially if all you've read of his is that damned Vampire's Castle piece) you should get yourself a copy of this collection. Stat. So good, so strange and wild and beautiful.
April 7, 2019
“But then Mark ran out of time. I feel his absence as a friend, as a comrade, but most of all as a reader. There are many days when I wonder what Mark would have had to say about this or that... I miss Mark’s mind. It’s a lonely feeling.”
-Simon Reynolds, 2018
This is Mark Fisher with the whole kitchen sink thrown in (which is good! And has it’s place). I’m a little torn on to what extent it’s a good starting point for future Mark Fisher readers. I’d generally recommend the more curated essays, (Capitalist Realism, Weird and Eerie, Ghosts of My Life)... but there’s also a lot of joy and discovery in digging through the masses of (sometimes much less formal) blog posts, and seeing which titles of essays and interviews might catch your eye or attention. Admittedly I NEEDED this book because of an extreme curiosity about Acid Communism, the last thing he wrote. It doesn’t disappoint and is probably worth the book cost in itself.
The most painful part of the book for me is the fact that opening up himself to the world through writing helped save him (to an extent) from depression, but it also made him vulnerable (through the internet) to the vitriol of the worst of people. The way he was eviscerated after Vampire’s Castle remains disgusting, and doubly tragic for how on the money he was. The left needed /needs people like Mark. It’s also kind of a shame how much attention that single article got. There’s so much more to his writing that paints a much broader picture than what that one article represents.
Just like the way post-punk dropped a breadcrumb trail of philosophy and theory in its’ lyrics for Mark, he likewise drops a breadcrumb trail of references which are a huge part of the joy of reading him. (The extended reading list.. as well as the ways he viewed current cultural trends). In reading Fisher, there’s an undeniable sense of picking up the puzzle where he left off, and a surge of responsibility of wanting to be up to the challenge.
-Simon Reynolds, 2018
This is Mark Fisher with the whole kitchen sink thrown in (which is good! And has it’s place). I’m a little torn on to what extent it’s a good starting point for future Mark Fisher readers. I’d generally recommend the more curated essays, (Capitalist Realism, Weird and Eerie, Ghosts of My Life)... but there’s also a lot of joy and discovery in digging through the masses of (sometimes much less formal) blog posts, and seeing which titles of essays and interviews might catch your eye or attention. Admittedly I NEEDED this book because of an extreme curiosity about Acid Communism, the last thing he wrote. It doesn’t disappoint and is probably worth the book cost in itself.
The most painful part of the book for me is the fact that opening up himself to the world through writing helped save him (to an extent) from depression, but it also made him vulnerable (through the internet) to the vitriol of the worst of people. The way he was eviscerated after Vampire’s Castle remains disgusting, and doubly tragic for how on the money he was. The left needed /needs people like Mark. It’s also kind of a shame how much attention that single article got. There’s so much more to his writing that paints a much broader picture than what that one article represents.
Just like the way post-punk dropped a breadcrumb trail of philosophy and theory in its’ lyrics for Mark, he likewise drops a breadcrumb trail of references which are a huge part of the joy of reading him. (The extended reading list.. as well as the ways he viewed current cultural trends). In reading Fisher, there’s an undeniable sense of picking up the puzzle where he left off, and a surge of responsibility of wanting to be up to the challenge.
November 20, 2019
still not really sure what to do about capitalism
February 12, 2019
A ragbag of contemporary left cultural discourse, warts and all.
Mark Fisher is very hip among a certain cadre of young socialists of whom I am aware but not involved. Not because of some ideological difference, I just live in the countryside and don't get out much.
He's talked about a lot on the internet because he ticks a lot of boxes - his writing is succinct, he writes about depression and cultural alienation and about Batman movies and post-punk but quoting Fredric Jameson or Deleuze and Guattari to do so.
I don't mean to sound disdainful as he's generally a good writer, but ultimately a little more shallow than I'd like. Maybe I consider him shallow compared to other writers because he is much more accessible, and I confuse obfuscation with depth. That possibility doesn't change the low opinion I have when he references the world of CCRU, Nick Land and cyberpunk, from which some good music was made and nothing of substance whatsoever.
Exiting the Vampire Castle is an essay mentioned regularly on spheres of cyberspace I trawl, and if a major feature of one's intellectual legacy is on the problem of Twitter arguments, well...it's just not for me. (There's also a post from his blog which is literally just 'I'm deleting dumb comments and you can't stop me' which is...fine, but why's it in this book?)
In writing this comes across as much more negative than I'd expected. I feel an inclination to vent my problems with his writing because, following his death, there have been efforts to secure Fisher's legacy, but I think at his best and worst he is a fringe figure, and the majority of the political writing culled from his blog repeats points from Capitalist Realism in increasingly miserable tones. It would be crude to criticize Fisher's writing for being demoralising, considering how much he wrote about depression and how that affected his life and his death. Still, I didn't find him politically motivating or inspiring, and his musings here and in Capitalist Realism that depression is less a chemical imbalance and more a necessary consequence of Living in Capitalism is...not an idea to be summarily accepted.
Coming out of the end of 800 pages, I recommend Capitalist Realism to anyone interested, but doubt this will have much of an interested audience unless you have the very specific overlapping interests Fisher did. And if you do, I'd love to talk, because you're probably cooler than me and I'd like to learn.
Mark Fisher is very hip among a certain cadre of young socialists of whom I am aware but not involved. Not because of some ideological difference, I just live in the countryside and don't get out much.
He's talked about a lot on the internet because he ticks a lot of boxes - his writing is succinct, he writes about depression and cultural alienation and about Batman movies and post-punk but quoting Fredric Jameson or Deleuze and Guattari to do so.
I don't mean to sound disdainful as he's generally a good writer, but ultimately a little more shallow than I'd like. Maybe I consider him shallow compared to other writers because he is much more accessible, and I confuse obfuscation with depth. That possibility doesn't change the low opinion I have when he references the world of CCRU, Nick Land and cyberpunk, from which some good music was made and nothing of substance whatsoever.
Exiting the Vampire Castle is an essay mentioned regularly on spheres of cyberspace I trawl, and if a major feature of one's intellectual legacy is on the problem of Twitter arguments, well...it's just not for me. (There's also a post from his blog which is literally just 'I'm deleting dumb comments and you can't stop me' which is...fine, but why's it in this book?)
In writing this comes across as much more negative than I'd expected. I feel an inclination to vent my problems with his writing because, following his death, there have been efforts to secure Fisher's legacy, but I think at his best and worst he is a fringe figure, and the majority of the political writing culled from his blog repeats points from Capitalist Realism in increasingly miserable tones. It would be crude to criticize Fisher's writing for being demoralising, considering how much he wrote about depression and how that affected his life and his death. Still, I didn't find him politically motivating or inspiring, and his musings here and in Capitalist Realism that depression is less a chemical imbalance and more a necessary consequence of Living in Capitalism is...not an idea to be summarily accepted.
Coming out of the end of 800 pages, I recommend Capitalist Realism to anyone interested, but doubt this will have much of an interested audience unless you have the very specific overlapping interests Fisher did. And if you do, I'd love to talk, because you're probably cooler than me and I'd like to learn.
Read
November 16, 2020I'm willing to forgive a lot in the writing of Mark Fisher – his Gen X-inflected prose, his fondness for neologism, his desire to revive certain thinkers whose thought I believe constitutes a series of ideological dead ends (Derrida, Jameson, Badiou, Baudrillard), his presumption of certain preexisting stances among his readership (a natural move considering that these essays were originally published in blog form). I forgive this because he wrote about our particular epoch with an insight and grace I could never hope to match. He writes about depression, pop music, and the inadequacies of middlebrow taste effortlessly, and three of his neologisms – capitalist realism, hauntology, and the Vampire's Castle – convey concepts that I think about near-daily.
Here be his epitaph, this volume of essays, especially in the fragment of Acid Communism, the book he was working on at the time of his death. I felt a terrible empathy reading that last bit. I wish he was still around to write about right now. We need more voices like this.
Here be his epitaph, this volume of essays, especially in the fragment of Acid Communism, the book he was working on at the time of his death. I felt a terrible empathy reading that last bit. I wish he was still around to write about right now. We need more voices like this.
February 1, 2019
we miss you mark
January 13, 2024
My personal Bible from now on
October 31, 2023
An inspiration to any blogger who's serious about his craft.
K-Punk covers twelve years (it's crazy to think he's had it for less long than I had Dead End Follies) and a wide array of topic ranging from books and movies to politics and mental health. As it is often the case for essay collections, I was often out of my depth on certain topics like British politics or whenever he brought Spinoza in the equation, but Fisher always has the powerful, undeniable observation that makes his outlook so seductive. His pieces on Batman, Breaking Bad, J.G Ballard and The Shining had a lasting effect on me.
I loved the short section at the end with the blogging updates too. It gave his writing a jagged, human edge that most writers of his ilk (hello Hitchens!) don't have and it exemplified how important it can be to just step out of the academic frame to have fun and embrace the process of writing, thinking and being alive. I'm probably never going to read this again from cover to cover, but I'm glad that I did. Mark Fisher is awesome and sorely missed.
K-Punk covers twelve years (it's crazy to think he's had it for less long than I had Dead End Follies) and a wide array of topic ranging from books and movies to politics and mental health. As it is often the case for essay collections, I was often out of my depth on certain topics like British politics or whenever he brought Spinoza in the equation, but Fisher always has the powerful, undeniable observation that makes his outlook so seductive. His pieces on Batman, Breaking Bad, J.G Ballard and The Shining had a lasting effect on me.
I loved the short section at the end with the blogging updates too. It gave his writing a jagged, human edge that most writers of his ilk (hello Hitchens!) don't have and it exemplified how important it can be to just step out of the academic frame to have fun and embrace the process of writing, thinking and being alive. I'm probably never going to read this again from cover to cover, but I'm glad that I did. Mark Fisher is awesome and sorely missed.
Read
November 30, 2020they (I) said it couldn't be done! they (I) said I'd never finish this book!
Read
January 22, 2021worth reading 1) the privatization of stress 2) no romance without finance 3) not failing better but fighting to win 4) the happiness of margaret thatcher 5) anti therapy 6) abandon hope 7) no i've never had a job and 8) this interview
October 14, 2020
I am exhausted and exhilarated having just finished this book. There is no doubt in my mind that Mark Fisher was, and will continue to be, one of the most important thinkers of our time, may he rest in peace. The breadth and depth of material here is awe-inspiring and his intellectual curiosity and rigorousness just plain inspiring.
Regrettably, I did not take notes as I read this, but some of the standout moments that come to mind are his discussions of depression as a political symptom and the nature of capitalist realism, both of which will inform my worldview for the foreseeable future.
Whether you pick up this book, one of his others, or dip into his blog, you would be hard pressed not to come away with some challenging new concept or perspective.
Regrettably, I did not take notes as I read this, but some of the standout moments that come to mind are his discussions of depression as a political symptom and the nature of capitalist realism, both of which will inform my worldview for the foreseeable future.
Whether you pick up this book, one of his others, or dip into his blog, you would be hard pressed not to come away with some challenging new concept or perspective.
August 8, 2021
Kauft bloß nicht die deutsche Übersetzung
January 3, 2021
There is already a review on Goodreads that sums up my thoughts on Fisher better than I ever could:
"I'm willing to forgive a lot in the writing of Mark Fisher – his Gen X-inflected prose, his fondness for neologism, his desire to revive certain thinkers whose thought I believe constitutes a series of ideological dead ends (Derrida, Jameson, Badiou, Baudrillard), his presumption of certain preexisting stances among his readership (a natural move considering that these essays were originally published in blog form). I forgive this because he wrote about our particular epoch with an insight and grace I could never hope to match. He writes about depression, pop music, and the inadequacies of middlebrow taste effortlessly, and three of his neologisms – capitalist realism, hauntology, and the Vampire's Castle – convey concepts that I think about near-daily." (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
I'm only going to comment on Fisher's political analysis. His cultural critique (though the two cannot really be separated) is hit and miss depending on the extent to which you can relate to (or even know) the media that he is critiquing. For this reason, I find his analysis of Mark E. Smith and The Fall insightful and relatable, his analysis of 1970s UK public television less so.
Capitalist Realism is one of the great observations of modern political theory. Marx's analyses of the inherent contradictions within capitalism and its inevitable collapse have never been more universally observable. The apparent declining rate of profit, rampant finalisation, collapse after collapse, astounding inequality; all of it laid so bare in a way no doubt unfathomable to those who grew up under post-War embedded liberalism. And yet, capitalism has never felt more all-encompassing, more unsurpassable. If the fight between contending classes is to end with a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, not in the common ruin of the contending classes, overcoming the pervasive acceptance that there is no alternative will be key. In the 81 pages of Capitalist Realism (as long as you can feel your way around references to obscure British music and film), the budding communist may be rid of any suspicion that capitalism (let alone neoliberalism) is insuperable.
K-Punk should not be heavily critiqued for incoherence. It is mostly a collection of blogposts written in the wake of the defeat of New Labour (at least at the polls) and the GFC; the apparent twilight of "embedded neoliberalism." Where K-Punk can be critiqued, however, is in its broader - and more tenuous - applications of Fisher's theories. On Capitalist Realism in particular, Fisher applies the concept to institutions of power in a way that, admittedly quite some time since reading Capitalist Realism, I don't recall. In his analysis of the New Labour response to the GFC, for example, Fisher notes "Labour’s slowness to respond to the crisis was not merely some failure of judgement or strategy; it was a consequence of how deeply capitalist realism had saturated the party. There was no question of Labour using the crisis to impose its own programme, because, by 2008, it didn’t have much of programme beyond capitalist realism. Everything had been set up for a corporate appeasement, and there were neither the organisational nor the intellectual infrastructure to come up with anything new. Capitalist realism wasn’t something that Labour was waiting out and planning to overcome, one day; it was embedded as an effectively permanent baseline set of conditions — conditions which receded from visibility even as they imposed strict limits on what could be said and thought." For me, capitalist realism is a social (superstructural) mindset; a concept necessary in creating a populace pliant enough to undertake the violent rearrangement of "class power" in favour of elite capitalists and their bourgeois parliamentary allies. What it isn't is an explanation for how liberal-bourgeois labour parties continually and habitually capitulate to the interests of capital. The very concept of a 'liberal-bourgeois' labour party is lifted directly from Lenin's Labour Government in Australia from 1913. It is surely feasible, therefore, for the post-GFC capitulation not to be the result of a newfangled belief that no alternative is possible, rather a reflection of the historical position of Western labour parties as a crucial mediator between class interests.
And perhaps this is where K-Punk falls flat. "His Gen X-inflected prose, his fondness for neologism, his desire to revive certain thinkers whose thought I believe constitutes a series of ideological dead ends" all rankle to readers growing up not in the triumphalism of neoliberalism and the defeatism of the left, but in a 21st Century defined by accelerating collapse and decay. To a New Left coddled in the post-War welfare state, buoyed by the individualistic fervour of the 1960s and the radicalisation of the academic classes, the apparent excesses of actually-existing socialism made mediation with Western capitalism a most favourable path. Fisher recognises this, in part, stating many times the need to bridge the gap between individuated politics, the Fordist Leninist left and the New Left. However, his emphasis on the cultural, on the absolute *need* for a "post-Fordist" post-Leninist left (people may not be working in factories - the "congeniality" and "stability" of that work now gone - but they continue to work under conditions of extreme exploitation; a context not ripe for the "the traditional representatives of the working class — union and labour leaders", but certainly ripe for radicalism) and a refusal to countenance how Empire - rather than the inherent evil of an authoritarian abstract "communism" - may have precipitated the "nightmares of the twentieth century", is deeply rooted in the traditions of the academic New Left. To members of third-world or indigenous communist movements, many of Fisher's assertions would be patently absurd. To those in the imperial core young enough to live through the GFC as children, have the welfare safety net removed from under them, to pay exorbitantly for the privilege of attending university and then to never receive the economic benefits of stable employment, these arguments may seem similarly absurd for two core reasons:
1. It could not be more clear that Capitalist Realism is a thing to be overcome not from within the bourgeois institutions of the state, but from a movement very much without. A Leninist party organisation should be very appealing in achieving this.
2. The utter depravity and inequality of contemporary capitalism has made many young leftists - rightly in my opinion - yearn for a societal form many in the New Left crowd (including Fisher) believe to be a nightmare: the "actually-existing socialism" of the 20th Century. I don't know a single friend (politicised or otherwise) who does not live in kommunalka-like conditions - sharing small houses with many more people than they "should" - yet pay enormously for the "privilege." A bourgeois critique of communist cultural "authoritarianism" falls flat when living in a capitalist society that not only reproduces hollow culture (as Fisher points out) but barely enables us to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves.
"I'm willing to forgive a lot in the writing of Mark Fisher – his Gen X-inflected prose, his fondness for neologism, his desire to revive certain thinkers whose thought I believe constitutes a series of ideological dead ends (Derrida, Jameson, Badiou, Baudrillard), his presumption of certain preexisting stances among his readership (a natural move considering that these essays were originally published in blog form). I forgive this because he wrote about our particular epoch with an insight and grace I could never hope to match. He writes about depression, pop music, and the inadequacies of middlebrow taste effortlessly, and three of his neologisms – capitalist realism, hauntology, and the Vampire's Castle – convey concepts that I think about near-daily." (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
I'm only going to comment on Fisher's political analysis. His cultural critique (though the two cannot really be separated) is hit and miss depending on the extent to which you can relate to (or even know) the media that he is critiquing. For this reason, I find his analysis of Mark E. Smith and The Fall insightful and relatable, his analysis of 1970s UK public television less so.
Capitalist Realism is one of the great observations of modern political theory. Marx's analyses of the inherent contradictions within capitalism and its inevitable collapse have never been more universally observable. The apparent declining rate of profit, rampant finalisation, collapse after collapse, astounding inequality; all of it laid so bare in a way no doubt unfathomable to those who grew up under post-War embedded liberalism. And yet, capitalism has never felt more all-encompassing, more unsurpassable. If the fight between contending classes is to end with a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, not in the common ruin of the contending classes, overcoming the pervasive acceptance that there is no alternative will be key. In the 81 pages of Capitalist Realism (as long as you can feel your way around references to obscure British music and film), the budding communist may be rid of any suspicion that capitalism (let alone neoliberalism) is insuperable.
K-Punk should not be heavily critiqued for incoherence. It is mostly a collection of blogposts written in the wake of the defeat of New Labour (at least at the polls) and the GFC; the apparent twilight of "embedded neoliberalism." Where K-Punk can be critiqued, however, is in its broader - and more tenuous - applications of Fisher's theories. On Capitalist Realism in particular, Fisher applies the concept to institutions of power in a way that, admittedly quite some time since reading Capitalist Realism, I don't recall. In his analysis of the New Labour response to the GFC, for example, Fisher notes "Labour’s slowness to respond to the crisis was not merely some failure of judgement or strategy; it was a consequence of how deeply capitalist realism had saturated the party. There was no question of Labour using the crisis to impose its own programme, because, by 2008, it didn’t have much of programme beyond capitalist realism. Everything had been set up for a corporate appeasement, and there were neither the organisational nor the intellectual infrastructure to come up with anything new. Capitalist realism wasn’t something that Labour was waiting out and planning to overcome, one day; it was embedded as an effectively permanent baseline set of conditions — conditions which receded from visibility even as they imposed strict limits on what could be said and thought." For me, capitalist realism is a social (superstructural) mindset; a concept necessary in creating a populace pliant enough to undertake the violent rearrangement of "class power" in favour of elite capitalists and their bourgeois parliamentary allies. What it isn't is an explanation for how liberal-bourgeois labour parties continually and habitually capitulate to the interests of capital. The very concept of a 'liberal-bourgeois' labour party is lifted directly from Lenin's Labour Government in Australia from 1913. It is surely feasible, therefore, for the post-GFC capitulation not to be the result of a newfangled belief that no alternative is possible, rather a reflection of the historical position of Western labour parties as a crucial mediator between class interests.
And perhaps this is where K-Punk falls flat. "His Gen X-inflected prose, his fondness for neologism, his desire to revive certain thinkers whose thought I believe constitutes a series of ideological dead ends" all rankle to readers growing up not in the triumphalism of neoliberalism and the defeatism of the left, but in a 21st Century defined by accelerating collapse and decay. To a New Left coddled in the post-War welfare state, buoyed by the individualistic fervour of the 1960s and the radicalisation of the academic classes, the apparent excesses of actually-existing socialism made mediation with Western capitalism a most favourable path. Fisher recognises this, in part, stating many times the need to bridge the gap between individuated politics, the Fordist Leninist left and the New Left. However, his emphasis on the cultural, on the absolute *need* for a "post-Fordist" post-Leninist left (people may not be working in factories - the "congeniality" and "stability" of that work now gone - but they continue to work under conditions of extreme exploitation; a context not ripe for the "the traditional representatives of the working class — union and labour leaders", but certainly ripe for radicalism) and a refusal to countenance how Empire - rather than the inherent evil of an authoritarian abstract "communism" - may have precipitated the "nightmares of the twentieth century", is deeply rooted in the traditions of the academic New Left. To members of third-world or indigenous communist movements, many of Fisher's assertions would be patently absurd. To those in the imperial core young enough to live through the GFC as children, have the welfare safety net removed from under them, to pay exorbitantly for the privilege of attending university and then to never receive the economic benefits of stable employment, these arguments may seem similarly absurd for two core reasons:
1. It could not be more clear that Capitalist Realism is a thing to be overcome not from within the bourgeois institutions of the state, but from a movement very much without. A Leninist party organisation should be very appealing in achieving this.
2. The utter depravity and inequality of contemporary capitalism has made many young leftists - rightly in my opinion - yearn for a societal form many in the New Left crowd (including Fisher) believe to be a nightmare: the "actually-existing socialism" of the 20th Century. I don't know a single friend (politicised or otherwise) who does not live in kommunalka-like conditions - sharing small houses with many more people than they "should" - yet pay enormously for the "privilege." A bourgeois critique of communist cultural "authoritarianism" falls flat when living in a capitalist society that not only reproduces hollow culture (as Fisher points out) but barely enables us to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves.
June 16, 2022
wo findet man sonst ideologiekritische analysen zu drake, breaking bad oder burial und politische aufsätze über psychische krankheiten im neoliberalismus, einblicke in die welt der englischen klassenkonflikte, überlegungen zu innerlinken konflikten, ausblicke in eine postkapitalistische welt und biographische erzählungen eines depressiven linken in einem einzelnen buch?
die kirsche oben drauf ist das noch die skizze seiner theorie des acid communism
die kirsche oben drauf ist das noch die skizze seiner theorie des acid communism
November 16, 2022
-uff...depresivní, ale zajímavé, poutavé a kritické čtení. (celkově moc nedoporučuju číst obzvlášť první půlku této knížky během vlastních rozjetých depresivních stavů)
-super a dostatečné pro pochopení pojmu kapitalistický realismus (knihu věnovanou pouze jemu už asi vynechám) a pro uvědomění si, jak spolu souvisí psychické nemoci a politika, kultura, ekonomika...
-Overgrown Jamese Blakea bych ve výběru těchto textů aj vynechala (nebavilo mě číst zrovna tady hudební recenzi, ale zas chápu snahu představit Fishera jako autora různých žánrů), Odchodu z Upířího hradu dávám srdíčko :)
-super a dostatečné pro pochopení pojmu kapitalistický realismus (knihu věnovanou pouze jemu už asi vynechám) a pro uvědomění si, jak spolu souvisí psychické nemoci a politika, kultura, ekonomika...
-Overgrown Jamese Blakea bych ve výběru těchto textů aj vynechala (nebavilo mě číst zrovna tady hudební recenzi, ale zas chápu snahu představit Fishera jako autora různých žánrů), Odchodu z Upířího hradu dávám srdíčko :)
June 22, 2019
Hay mucho para decir sobre estos artículos de Fisher (y sobre Fisher en general); en cualquier caso, K-Punk es un libro de referencia obligada, indispensable. A veces parece mediar una clave generacional: Fisher piensa lo que piensa de determinados discos, libros y películas por sus coordenadas de tiempo y lugar de nacimiento: lo cual hace parecer acaso "fechadas" sus opiniones sobre, por ejemplo, Disney y Star Wars, o sobre la trilogía de Batman de Christopher Nolan. Quizá los mejores momentos del libro son aquellos en que logra saltar por encima de esta condición: cuando escribe sobre Ballard, por ejemplo.
January 10, 2021
La compilación de artículos publicados por Fisher en k-punk está editada en volúmenes que siguen temas en común. El primero, que acabo de terminar, compila artículos sobre libros, películas y series.
No leí ni miré casi ninguno de ellos, y ni siquiera conocía -por lo menos- la mitad. Aun así, disfruté mucho del libro, y esto, creo, por dos motivos.
El primero es que el entusiasmo y la estridencia con la que están escritos los artículos enganchan, y hacen que sea inevitable tener la pc al lado para ir descargando lo que nombra. Siempre es bueno entrar al universo de referencias culturales de otra persona, y más al de alguien con tanto ojo (y tantas lecturas) como Mark Fisher. A lo que ya conocía me dieron ganas de volver con k-punk en la otra mano, y a lo que no, me dieron ganas de verlo o leerlo para luego volver al texto y entrar en otra dimensión de análisis, siempre particular, y casi con seguridad superior a cualquier cosa que se le pueda ocurrir a cualquier otra persona.
El segundo motivo tiene que ver con que muchas de las conclusiones que va extrayendo cobran independencia del texto sobre el que trabaja, permitiendo al que lee entrar en la idea del artículo sin la necesidad de conocer a lo que hace referencia. Acá se encuentra una de las facetas más admirables de Fisher -acaso la que más lo caracterizaba-: su capacidad para entender y explicar el funcionamiento del realismo capitalista, por ejemplo, a partir de un capítulo de una sitcom irrelevante de los ochenta o la última secuela poco original y cargada de CGI de Hollywood, captando lo inmanente de un consumo cultural cualquiera y elaborando teoría a partir de eso. Me gustaría tener aunque sea una partecita de su talento.
Cuando pueda voy a leer el segundo volumen, que salió hace no tanto y habla de música y política, temas sobre los que sabía un montón y sobre los cuales escribía muy bien, entendiendo al arte como indisociable de sus condiciones materiales y sociales de producción y conectando esos dos universos al mejor estilo de la crítica cultural.
No leí ni miré casi ninguno de ellos, y ni siquiera conocía -por lo menos- la mitad. Aun así, disfruté mucho del libro, y esto, creo, por dos motivos.
El primero es que el entusiasmo y la estridencia con la que están escritos los artículos enganchan, y hacen que sea inevitable tener la pc al lado para ir descargando lo que nombra. Siempre es bueno entrar al universo de referencias culturales de otra persona, y más al de alguien con tanto ojo (y tantas lecturas) como Mark Fisher. A lo que ya conocía me dieron ganas de volver con k-punk en la otra mano, y a lo que no, me dieron ganas de verlo o leerlo para luego volver al texto y entrar en otra dimensión de análisis, siempre particular, y casi con seguridad superior a cualquier cosa que se le pueda ocurrir a cualquier otra persona.
El segundo motivo tiene que ver con que muchas de las conclusiones que va extrayendo cobran independencia del texto sobre el que trabaja, permitiendo al que lee entrar en la idea del artículo sin la necesidad de conocer a lo que hace referencia. Acá se encuentra una de las facetas más admirables de Fisher -acaso la que más lo caracterizaba-: su capacidad para entender y explicar el funcionamiento del realismo capitalista, por ejemplo, a partir de un capítulo de una sitcom irrelevante de los ochenta o la última secuela poco original y cargada de CGI de Hollywood, captando lo inmanente de un consumo cultural cualquiera y elaborando teoría a partir de eso. Me gustaría tener aunque sea una partecita de su talento.
Cuando pueda voy a leer el segundo volumen, que salió hace no tanto y habla de música y política, temas sobre los que sabía un montón y sobre los cuales escribía muy bien, entendiendo al arte como indisociable de sus condiciones materiales y sociales de producción y conectando esos dos universos al mejor estilo de la crítica cultural.
January 29, 2020
Contemporary popular culture actively instills feelings of nostalgia for eras that the actual persons involved in this culture never personally lived through. Let that thought work on you for a moment. It's this particular insight and the paradox behind it that drives much of Fisher’s thought. Strange to note that this collection does the same for me: Getting into his writings only after he’s no longer with us, it makes me miss him as a promising and innovative thinker, and a gifted writer on top of that. These short texts on film, music and literature will often provide completely original insights that deserve to have been explored more fully in works to come. This collection makes me experience his absence all the more in a climate that sorely needs the few original thinkers that survive in it.
Reviews I’ve read show that he’s a devisive figure. People seem to either love or hate his work, relative to political leaning. I had no such experience myself, I just felt I was reading someone who felt deeply and wrote insightfully about the world around him. I recognize much of that world and its misgivings, and I’m glad that he managed to get to the heart of many of them. I know that probably means I live in what some would call a leftist bubble. Well, if you want to know how such bubbles came to be and what to do about them, I suggest you read Mark Fisher.
Admittedly, my view of Fisher does not come from this book primarily. If you want to get the broad strokes of his thought, read Capitalist Realism. It’s incredibly well-paced, lucid and completely on point from cover to cover. That’s why it’s so brief. If you want to get a feel for his style of cultural analysis, read The Weird and the Eerie. That book condenses some of his most original insights on particular films and writers. His most incisive writing on pop music was collected in The Ghosts of My Life. The K-Punk collection is, stated bluntly, all that was left - But just because they’re writings a little apart from his central theses, doesn’t mean they’re any less valuable. I myself was overjoyed to find a number of short but brilliant pieces on J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs, both writers I’ve struggled to get in to. Just don’t expect to read 800 pages of short essays in one go and be riveted at every point. It’s just not that kind of book.
Reviews I’ve read show that he’s a devisive figure. People seem to either love or hate his work, relative to political leaning. I had no such experience myself, I just felt I was reading someone who felt deeply and wrote insightfully about the world around him. I recognize much of that world and its misgivings, and I’m glad that he managed to get to the heart of many of them. I know that probably means I live in what some would call a leftist bubble. Well, if you want to know how such bubbles came to be and what to do about them, I suggest you read Mark Fisher.
Admittedly, my view of Fisher does not come from this book primarily. If you want to get the broad strokes of his thought, read Capitalist Realism. It’s incredibly well-paced, lucid and completely on point from cover to cover. That’s why it’s so brief. If you want to get a feel for his style of cultural analysis, read The Weird and the Eerie. That book condenses some of his most original insights on particular films and writers. His most incisive writing on pop music was collected in The Ghosts of My Life. The K-Punk collection is, stated bluntly, all that was left - But just because they’re writings a little apart from his central theses, doesn’t mean they’re any less valuable. I myself was overjoyed to find a number of short but brilliant pieces on J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs, both writers I’ve struggled to get in to. Just don’t expect to read 800 pages of short essays in one go and be riveted at every point. It’s just not that kind of book.
October 12, 2020
I've finally finished it! It's gonna feel strange not having Mark Fisher as a companion anymore after reading so much of his work over the last few months. It's been a great experience and it's really changed my thinking on a number of topics in pretty huge ways, as well as giving me a vocabulary to talk about a lot of what was already whirring around in my head.
This collection itself is great, it's obviously uneven due to its length and not all the essays are necessarily worth reading for anyone but the completionists, but the vast majority of the content included is either brilliant in its own right or adds depth to his core ideas. I particularly loved the political essays that came in the wake of the 2008 crash, it feels like Fisher was at his most fired up at this point and was at once more hopeful and more scathing than ever.
The fact that he's no longer with us becomes even more poignant as you get to the later essays in the collection and see how much he had left to give. Not only was he a great writer, but he was truly committed to making real change and was well on his way to formulating a system that brought together all of his ideas into a positive program. Despite being cut short, Fisher's work has laid considerable groundwork for whatever does come next, and I have no doubt that his ideas will be indispensible when dealing with whatever that is.
This collection itself is great, it's obviously uneven due to its length and not all the essays are necessarily worth reading for anyone but the completionists, but the vast majority of the content included is either brilliant in its own right or adds depth to his core ideas. I particularly loved the political essays that came in the wake of the 2008 crash, it feels like Fisher was at his most fired up at this point and was at once more hopeful and more scathing than ever.
The fact that he's no longer with us becomes even more poignant as you get to the later essays in the collection and see how much he had left to give. Not only was he a great writer, but he was truly committed to making real change and was well on his way to formulating a system that brought together all of his ideas into a positive program. Despite being cut short, Fisher's work has laid considerable groundwork for whatever does come next, and I have no doubt that his ideas will be indispensible when dealing with whatever that is.
July 21, 2020
Obrovská kniha...
Osobně ji vnímám jako takový "Silmarillion" k ostatním Fisherovým knihám, které vydal za svého života, a asi bych ji nedoporučoval číst jako první. Jde víceméně o soubor vybraných Fisherových blogových příspěvků - především je skvělé, že jsou ty články roztřízeny do několika kategorií (texty o knihách, texty o filmech, o hudbě, o politice, ...). Vhodné, pokud člověk nemá náladu se nořit do hloubin jeho poněkud nepřehledného blogu (K-Punk).
Kromě těchto příspěvků, vydolovaných z hlubin zmíněného nultkového (2000's) blogu, jsou tu pak přidány i rozhovory s Fisherem, slavný spisek Exiting the Vampire Castle a především pak fascinující Fisherův úvod do zamýšlené knihy Acid Communism.
Jinak je to klasický Fisher se svým levičáctvím a kulturní analýzou, teoreticky vycházející z Jamesona, Lacana, Freuda, Deleuzeho etc. etc.
A také, podobně jako u většiny jeho ostatních knih, tu Fisher často analyzuje britské reálie, jako je Thatcherismus, Blairismus, rave, prapodivné pořady BBC etc. - takže kontinentální Evropan jako já je často buď zajímavě poučen, zmateně ztracen nebo ztraceně zmaten.
9/10
Osobně ji vnímám jako takový "Silmarillion" k ostatním Fisherovým knihám, které vydal za svého života, a asi bych ji nedoporučoval číst jako první. Jde víceméně o soubor vybraných Fisherových blogových příspěvků - především je skvělé, že jsou ty články roztřízeny do několika kategorií (texty o knihách, texty o filmech, o hudbě, o politice, ...). Vhodné, pokud člověk nemá náladu se nořit do hloubin jeho poněkud nepřehledného blogu (K-Punk).
Kromě těchto příspěvků, vydolovaných z hlubin zmíněného nultkového (2000's) blogu, jsou tu pak přidány i rozhovory s Fisherem, slavný spisek Exiting the Vampire Castle a především pak fascinující Fisherův úvod do zamýšlené knihy Acid Communism.
Jinak je to klasický Fisher se svým levičáctvím a kulturní analýzou, teoreticky vycházející z Jamesona, Lacana, Freuda, Deleuzeho etc. etc.
A také, podobně jako u většiny jeho ostatních knih, tu Fisher často analyzuje britské reálie, jako je Thatcherismus, Blairismus, rave, prapodivné pořady BBC etc. - takže kontinentální Evropan jako já je často buď zajímavě poučen, zmateně ztracen nebo ztraceně zmaten.
9/10
November 22, 2023
Using this as a primary source for my final paper.. who up inventing they future????? Anyone?? Ok. yeah i mean its a blog in book form which is strange and i guess also really interesting to think about…Fisher was brilliant and i think of him as a 21st century Walter Benjamin in a lot of ways. His sense of historicity is so comforting to me and i love reading him sound off on everything from drake and hunger games to burroughs and deleuze to the shining and cronenberg to burial!!!! His doomerism is ultimately not doomer-y at all, reading k-punk reminds me that theres a future to be had as long as we take hold of it. If there’s an afterlife, when i get there my first question will be “what cloud is mark fisher on???”
July 6, 2020
An amazing collection of essays, it made me a better person. Definetely should be read in a mixed manner, one essay about music, then one about politics etc in order to keep things interesting. It will take some time but you will have a very good understanding of all of Fisher's concepts and ideas by the end of it.
November 20, 2024
Damn. At times, I was unsure if this collection of blog posts and articles really counted as being a book at all. At other times, Fisher name drops Lynch, James Ferraro, or D&G as if to speak a language designed for this time and place. For every mention of Brand or diatribe against Franz Ferdinand that makes you tug your collar, there are 2 page segments of unapologetic and wholly genuine arguments that are (for better or for worse) just as prescient today.
September 30, 2019
Revisitar o blog do Mark Fisher é como reencontrar ao mesmo tempo: um velho amigo, daqueles que, para o bem e para o mal mudam o curso da sua vida, a era de ouro dos blogs, uma forma de pensar criticamente na internet que não se vê mais e boa parte da cultura pop dos anos 00.
A falta que esse homem faz a todos nós.
A falta que esse homem faz a todos nós.
March 4, 2020
Fisher rupe
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