Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher (born 1968) is a British writer and critical theorist. He is noted for his contributions to the theory of capitalist realism, as well as for his writing on the cultural theory blog k-punk. He has published several works on politics, culture, and music, and has also contributed writing to publications such as The Guardian, The Wire, and New Statesman.

Career
Fisher earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy at the University of Hull (1989) and later completed a Ph.D. at the University of Warwick in 1999 entitled 'Flatline constructs: Gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction'. During this time, Fisher was also affiliated with the interdisciplinary research collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. He spent a period of time around the early twentieth century teaching in a further education college.

As a journalist, he has written for The Guardian, The Wire (where he spent a year as acting deputy editor), frieze, the New Statesman, Fact, Sight & Sound.

As an academic, he has been a visiting fellow at Goldsmiths College; a commissioning editor at Zer0 books, and an editorial board member of Interference: a journal of audio culture and Edinburgh University Press's Speculative Realism series.

As a blogger, Fisher has been recognized for his blog k-punk, which has been called "one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory." Fisher's writing on k-punk, in keeping with his wider work, touches on politics, literature, and music.

Capitalist realism
Fisher's most noted publication is his 2011 Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?, which promoted the critical concept of capitalist realism as a mode of cultural analysis. Fisher uses ‘capitalist realism’ in preference to postmodernism both to denote cultural production and, more broadly, the lived experience which cultural production reflects and construes in which ‘capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable’. In Jeremy Gilbert’s words, the term denotes,

"at its simplest, both the conviction that there is no alternative to capitalism as a paradigm for social organisation, and the mechanisms which are used to disseminate and reproduce that conviction amongst large populations. As such it would seem to be both a ‘structure of feeling’ [...] and, in quite a classical sense, a hegemonic ideology, operating as all hegemonic ideologies do, to try to efface their own historicity and the contingency of the social arrangements which they legitimate."

Fisher's work has inspired other scholars to adopt this frame of reference.

Books

 * The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, ed. by Mark Fisher (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009)
 * Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Winchester, UK; Washington [D.C.]: Zero Books, 2009)
 * Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014)