Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher (1968 – 13 January 2017) was a British writer, cultural theorist, and noted blogger based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He initially achieved recognition for his blogging as k-punk in the early twenty-first century, and was known for his writing on radical politics, popular culture, and music. Over the course of his career, he contributed to publications such as The Wire, The Guardian, Fact, New Statesman, and Sight & Sound. He published several books, most prominently 2009's Capitalist Realism.

Biography
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 a founding member of the interdisciplinary research collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. He spent a period teaching in a further education college and began his blog k-punk in 2003. It has received acclaim and has been called "one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory." Music critic Simon Reynolds described it in 2009 as the center of a "constellation of blogs ... some of which are written by practicing philosophers or others involved in lumpen academia" in which popular culture and abstract theory were discussed in tandem.

More recently, he has been a visiting fellow and a lecturer on Aural & Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, a commissioning editor at Zer0 books, an editorial board member of Interference: a journal of audio culture and Edinburgh University Press's Speculative Realism series, and an acting deputy editor at The Wire. He is currently employed as a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. In 2009, Fisher edited the critical collection The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, and published Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?, an analysis of the ideological effects of neoliberalism on contemporary culture. In 2014, Fisher published Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, a collection of essays on similar themes viewed through the prisms of music, film, and hauntology. He also contributes intermittently to a number of publications, including Fact and The Wire.

Capitalist realism
Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (2009) popularized the critical concept of capitalist realism as a mode of cultural analysis in relation to neoliberalism. As a philosophical concept, capitalist realism is indebted to an Althusserian conception of ideology, as well as to the work of Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. Fisher proposes that within a capitalist framework there is no space to conceive of alternative forms of social structures. He proposes that the 2008 financial crisis compounded this position; rather than seeking alternatives to the existing model we look for modifications within the system. He defines the term as pertaining to:

"a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action." In Jeremy Gilbert’s words, the term denotes,

"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. ISBN 978-1846943485
 * Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?. Winchester: Zero Books, 2009. ISBN 978-1846943171
 * Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1780992266