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Mark Fisher 12:35 - Jan 20 with 3752 views

I don't know how many people on here knew of Mark Fisher - k-punk blogger, and political and cultural theorist - but I was shocked to learn that he'd taken his own life last weekend, after a long battle with depression, an affliction he wrote candidly about. Met him a while ago, at an event I was involved with, lovely lovely guy, and a genuinely important thinker on the contemporary left.

This is a lovely obituary, with some links to his work. I can't recommend Capitalist Realism highly enough, and his k-punk blog is wonderful, combining music and film with political thought -- as all his work did.

http://thequietus.com/articles/21572-mark-fisher-rip-obituary-interview

[Post edited 20 Jan 2017 12:36]

Mark Fisher on 14:43 - Jan 20 with 3589 views

RodneyHarsh

Still in shock about this tbh. Mark Fisher was the best cultural commentator in the UK by a country mile - the big (br)other I never had.

Showed me that theory didn't have to be about w*nking about in universities, and that you didn't need money or a privileged background to live a life of genuine class.

A devoted trees fan, but in spirit he was more like the Rangers of the 70s: an aristocracy of style.

For the mods over the rockers, glam over prog, post-punk over lumpen punk, jungle over most other things. Brilliant on Kubrick, Tarkovsky, his bete noir Tarantino. Definitive on Joy Division, Roxy Music, Grace Jones, etc etc.

There's an entire education laid out in that K-punk blog for anyone who wants it.

RIP MF.

Mark Fisher on 15:01 - Jan 20 with 3543 views

FDC

Mark Fisher on 14:43 - Jan 20 by RodneyHarsh

I was trying to explain to my other half why, considering I barely knew him in real life, this had upset me so much. Obviously for someone (with a young family) to take their life is tragic no matter what, but it's also to do with the loss of the clarity of his voice on so many things, which now of all times feels particularly potent. We were involved in the same political organisation at one stage, and his optimism and infectious belief in the potential to build a better world will be sorely missed.

Speaking of 'the big other', I was listening to a recording last night of a talk he did a few years ago and was reminded of that phrase, and so many other insights that have shaped my views on things. It's not often you come across someone who genuinely clarifies and informs your thinking.

Mark Fisher on 16:23 - Jan 20 with 3443 views

RodneyHarsh

Yeah, s'funny that. In France you get full on national mourning when someone like Foucault or Sartre carks it - literally front page of Le Monde, snaking queues, gridlock, convulsions, not a dry seat in the house. A loss of a figure like that wouldn't need explaining. Which makes MF all the more singular and important in this little corner of the anglosphere, where public intellectuals, such as they, tend to be decrepit Oxbridgians stroking their rings on supine tea time telly. I'm fully with the 'anti-experts' brigade on this one: expertise is the technocratic boneyard where knowledge goes to die. Fisher's insistence on 'anti-representation' and living your ethics was pretty much untenable, but serious.

Found k-punk pretty forbidding at the time, but am finding it immensely rewarding combing it over now. & v heartening to see MF bigged up on this board. As S Reynolds indicated in his Grauniad piece, Mark's influence will probably grow with time - something to be thankful for.

Mark Fisher on 17:10 - Jan 20 with 3394 views

MrSheen

Mark Fisher on 16:23 - Jan 20 by RodneyHarsh

I didn't know Fisher's work at all, but I'll have a look. However, Simon Reynolds and David Stubbs, both quoted in the obituary, fit the description of "ring-stroking Oxbridgians" perfectly. Stubbs, in particular, was a pretentious ninny and intellectual faker of the first order when I knew him decades ago.

Mark Fisher on 17:46 - Jan 20 with 3327 views

FDC

Mark Fisher on 16:23 - Jan 20 by RodneyHarsh

I thought it quite apt that one of the last posts on k-punk was "No more miserable Monday mornings... From anger and sadness to collective joy …. from work that never ends to endless free time …."

http://k-punk.org/no-more-miserable-monday-mornings/

Mark Fisher on 18:24 - Jan 20 with 3258 views

JohnMcCo

Thanks for the introduction, shamefully he was a new one on me but the obituary was ace and I will check out some more of his stuff.

Mark Fisher on 18:43 - Jan 20 with 3224 views

JohnMcCo

Just reading some more about him and his works, one of them being Ghosts Of My Life. Someone was reading that sat next to me in a cafe yesterday!

Mark Fisher on 18:50 - Jan 20 with 3207 views

FDC

As a massive Nirvana fan as a kid, this passage from Capitalist Realism is one of my favourites

“Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. No-one embodied (and struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliché. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain is precisely the one that Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’. Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed. But the high existential angst of Nirvana and Cobain belongs to an older moment; what succeeded them was a pastiche-rock which reproduced the forms of the past without anxiety.”

Mark Fisher on 19:20 - Jan 20 with 3156 views

FDC

For anyone interested in an overview of Capitalist Realism, this interview on Novara from 2011 is an excellent place to start

t http://novaramedia.com/2011/09/13/capitalist-realism-in-discussion-with-mark-fis

Mark Fisher on 20:01 - Jan 20 with 3101 views

bosh67

Very sad. There has been nothing, or almost nothing that has said what he died from? Anyone know what actually happened. 48 is no age.

	Never knowingly right.
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Mark Fisher on 21:15 - Jan 20 with 2992 views

isawqpratwcity

Mark Fisher on 20:01 - Jan 20 by bosh67
Very sad. There has been nothing, or almost nothing that has said what he died from? Anyone know what actually happened. 48 is no age.

See FDC's post at 15:01. Sad, very sad.

Poll:

Deaths of Thatcher and Mandela this year: Sad or Glad?

Mark Fisher on 15:10 - Jul 31 with 2363 views

TacticalR

I have just finished reading Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right (2017) and Nagle makes a number of glowing references to Fisher. This is from the conclusion:

'During the period examined in this book, Mark Fisher stood out as one of the few voices not on the right who had spoken out against the anti-intellectual, unhinged culture of group hysteria that gripped the cultural left in the years preceding the reactive rise of the new far right online.'

Air hostess clique

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