Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher (born 1968) is a British writer and cultural theorist. He is noted for his writing on radical politics, culture, and music, and initially achieved recognition for his blogging as k-punk in the early twenty-first century. In recent years, he has published several books on politics and culture, most prominently 2009's Capitalist Realism. Over the course of his career, he has contributed writing to publications such as The Wire, The Guardian, Fact, New Statesman, and Sight & Sound.

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 affiliated with the interdisciplinary research collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. He spent a period in the early twentieth century teaching in a further education college. 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.

Fisher has received acclaim for his blog k-punk, which has been called "one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory." 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. His writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The Wire, frieze, New Statesman, Fact, and Sight & Sound.

Capitalist realism
Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? popularized the critical concept of capitalist realism as a mode of cultural analysis in relation to neoliberalism. 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