foreword

The strange thing is that I encountered Mark’s mind long before I actually met him. In a way, I knew him before I even knew of him.

Let me explain. In 1994, I wrote a piece for Melody Maker about D-Generation, a concept-laden outfit from Manchester whose line-up included Mark. But I only ever spoke on the phone with another member, Simon Biddell. Because I was so interested in D-Generation’s ideas, it never even occurred to me to do the basic journalistic procedure of asking who else was in the group. So it was a full decade later that I learned I’d effectively written about Mark, when he shyly revealed this fact in an email to me. And sure enough, digging out the yellowing clip — D-Generation as “Pick of the Week” in the Advance section of Melody Maker — there was Mark right in the centre of the photo: his hair in a vaguely Madchester-style bob, his eyes staring out at the reader with a searching, baleful intensity.

D-Generation were one of those groups that are grist for the mill of the music press, catnip to a certain kind of critic: the conceptual framing was piquant and provocative, the sound itself lagged slightly behind the spiel. Rereading the piece and listening for the first time in many years to D-Generation’s EP Entropy in the UK, it’s fascinating just how many of Mark’s signature fixations were already in evidence. There’s the centrality of punk in his worldview: D-Generation described their music as “techno haunted by the ghost of the punk” (literally, in “The Condition of Muzak”, which sampled Johnny Rotten’s Winterland 1978 kiss-off “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” and turned his bitter jeering laugh into a riff). There’s the love-hate for Englishness: hating the hale ‘n’ hearty, artless and anti-intellectual side of the national character (“Rotting Hill” sampled “Merrie England? England was never merry!” from the film version of Lucky Jim), loving a darkly arty deviant tradition that included the Fall, Wyndham Lewis, and Michael Moorcock (all referenced in D-Generation’s press release). There’s also early evidence of Mark’s virulent contempt for retro: “73/93” targeted what D-Generation dubbed the “Nostalgia Conspiracy”. And there’s even flickering ectoplasmic portents of hauntology, that twenty-first century current of music and thought and sensibility that Mark championed so compellingly.

Beyond those specifics, though, it’s the structure of the encounter itself that is revealing and prefiguring. Here’s a music journalist (in this case, me) hungrily on the look-out for a group with ideas, and, having found one (in this case, D-Generation), forming a symbiotic alliance with musicians who themselves think like critics. That’s how Mark would operate when he got to the other side of divide. In his fruitful relationships with Burial, the Caretaker, Junior Boys, and other artists, a mutually intensifying feedback loop between the music-theorist and the music-practitioner was set in motion. The borderline between the two fronts of activity dissolved. Both critic and artist contributed equally to the scene, pushing it ever forward in a dialectic of advance, counter-reaction, swerve, clash.

Raised on the British music press of the Eighties (primarily NME) and fuelled further by what survived of its approach and spirit into the Nineties (primarily Melody Maker and the Wire), Mark Fisher was possibly the last of a disappearing breed: the music critic as prophet. The primary mission was identifying the leading edge and proselytising on its behalf, while simultaneously directing laser beams of negativity to discredit the wrong paths being taken and to clear space for the true music of our time. But alongside weaponised praise in support of the new and radical, the messianic critic also set challenges for music — and for listeners and readers too.

Mark Fisher became the best music writer of his generation. But that is just one of his areas of achievement. Mark wrote brilliantly about the arts adjacent to popular music: television, science fiction, mainstream movies (particularly the pulp end of the spectrum — it always amazed me that he would routinely check out things like the CGI-bloated 2005 remake of King Kong, just on the off chance there was something salvageable there, something he could recruit to his “pulp modernism” concept). Mark wrote rivetingly about high culture too — visual arts, photography, literature, highbrow cinema. And he wrote penetratingly about politics, philosophy, mental health, the Internet and social media (the phenomenology of digital life — its peculiar affects of connected loneliness and distracted boredom). Often, and most crucially, Mark wrote about many — sometimes all — of these things at the same time. Making connections across far-flung fields, zooming in for vivid attention to aesthetic particulars and zooming out again to the widest possible scope, Mark would locate the metaphysics in a TV show like Sapphire and Steel, the psychoanalytic truths lurking in a Joy Division song, the political resonances stitched into the fabric of a Burial album or Kubrick movie. His subject was all of human life (even though he would characterise himself as neither a humanist nor a vitalist). The ambition was vast; the vision was total.

The exciting thing about Mark’s writing — in his blog k-punk, in magazines like the Wire, FACT, Frieze, and New Humanist, and in his books for Zer0 and Repeater — was the feeling that he was on a journey: the ideas were going somewhere, a gigantic edifice of thought was in the process of construction. You sensed, with mounting awe, that Mark was building a system. There was a feeling too that while the work was rigorous and deeply informed, it was not academic, either in terms of its intended audience or as an exercise done purely for its own sake. The urgency in Mark’s prose came from his faith that words really could change things. His writing made everything feel more meaningful, supercharged with significance. Reading Mark was a rush. An addiction.

After that odd not-quite-encounter with D-Generation, the first time I came across the name “Mark Fisher” was a byline in the strikingly designed periodicals that emanated from an enigmatic entity known as Ccru. I can’t recall whether they sent me their tracts or whether it was our mutual friend Kodwo Eshun who turned me on. Right from the start, Mark’s work stood out. Much of the output of the Cybernetic culture research unit, a para-academic organisation loosely tethered to Warwick University’s Philosophy Department, was wilfully hermetic, closer to experimental fiction than academic work. Practically writhing on the page, Mark’s prose wasn’t scholarly either, but it was always lucid. Oh, he was partial — as we all were in those days — to gnomic neologisms and portmanteau terms; there was an exuberant play with language in amidst the apocalyptic sobriety and urgency of the tone. But —and this would characterise his entire career as a writer — Mark hardly ever made his writing more dense or difficult than it needed to be. He had the zeal of the true communicator, someone who believes that the ideas and the issues being addressed are simply too important to be obfuscated. Why put obstacles in the way of understanding? I’m sure this is why Mark’s work found a readership that extended beyond the narrow field of scholars and the university-educated that some of his more arcane and abstruse interests might have indicated. He didn’t talk down to anyone, ever, but he always invited the reader in, pulled them along with him.

I met Mark for the first time in 1998, having persuaded the academic magazine Lingua Franca to assign me a lengthy piece about Ccru and its allies in renegade academia like O[rphan] D[rift>]. Compared with the deranging strangeness of their texts, Ccru in person were surprisingly mild and, well, British. But again, Mark stood out a little from his comrades, for his sheer intensity. I remember the way his hands shook with passion as he held forth acerbically on everything from the cyberpunk aesthetics of jungle to the decrepitude of socialism. Although soft-spoken, you could see already a distinct flair for public speaking, the aura of an orator in the making.

After that, Mark and I rubbed shoulders online as contributors to the post-rave music theory site Hyperdub, founded by Ccru member Steve Goodman, aka Kode9. But full-blown friendship really came when Mark hurled himself into the blogging fray in 2003, starting k-punk a few months after I launched my own Blissblog. With incredible speed, a rough equivalent to the old UK weekly music press reconstituted itself online. Or so I liked to think, anyway: that this was the music press in exile, a reactivation of all of its bygone best aspects that you could no longer find in the surviving print remnants (what passed for NME by then, monthlies like Q). Well, all except for the getting paid aspect. But on the early 2000s blog scene, the broader perspective that the golden-era rock press had — where music held a privileged status, but film, TV, fiction, politics bubbled in the mix too — was miraculously and unexpectedly resurrected.

“It wasn’t only about music and music wasn’t only about music”, is how Mark put it, talking about what NME had meant to him growing up, a working-class boy with limited access to high culture. “It was a medium that made demands on you.” The same applied to the blog circuit, whose population of autodidacts, independent researchers, disenchanted academics (like Mark) and assorted oddballs formulated theories and ransacked the works of famous thinkers for concepts and analytical tools to misuse. In compensation for not being able to make a livelihood off your ravings and rantings, the blogging platform afforded extra powers: incredible speed of response, flexibility of format (you could blog extensive think-pieces or miniature thought-bombs), and the ability to illustrate the writing using images, audio, video. Best of all, there was an interactive and collective aspect to blogging that had only ever been glimpsed in the music press (with the readers’ letter page, writers arguing amongst each other week by week, and the regular uptake of malcontents from the fiery fanzines). The blog circuit was a true network.

Fizzing with fervour, k-punk soon became the hub of the community. Mark was a dynamo, hurling out provocations, ideas that demanded engagement. He became a cult figure. A catalyst. He was also the perfect host, convening a salon-style energy in the k-punk comments section, igniting debate and defusing dispute when things got a little testy (as they inevitably did). That amiably fractious spirit would then inform the message board Dissensus that Mark co-founded with Matthew Ingram (whose Woebot was our community’s other hub). In some ways, it was in these comments sections and message board threads that Mark was in his truest element: arguing, sometimes agreeing, but always building on his interlocutor’s point, pushing the conversation further along. Some of his best insights and lines emerged out of this back-and-forth: jewels that are hard to disentangle from the discursive thicket of their moment, countless brief exchanges and interactions in which his mind flexed itself most playfully and merrily.

During this whole period of the early-to-mid 2000s, I found myself in a pleasantly disorienting situation: someone whom I’d influenced became someone who influenced me. There was a certain edgy excitement to turning on the computer every morning and immediately checking to see what Mark had thrown down in terms of an ideas-gauntlet — a definite feeling of having to keep up. We would often operate as a long-distance double-act (with a five-hour delay, Mark being in London and me in New York). One of us would pick up on something the other had written. It was a complementary (and complimentary) relationship, like a baton being passed back and forth, but it also fairly frequently involved respectful disagreement. Others joined in as well, of course; it was an omnidirectional free for all.

As much as it was a cooperative endeavour, this blog circuit and in particular the dialogue between Mark and myself, there was also an undercurrent of competition. (No doubt this is the case with writers in many different fields). An unusual sensation, for me, of being outflanked and out-done, and having to repeatedly raise my game. In some of our exchanges, Mark had the advantage of seeing things in starker, more black-and-white terms, whereas I tended to see shades of grey, or recognise that there were things to be said in favour of the opposing view. That might be a virtue in real life, but in writing it definitely softens your attack.

Mark could access greater resources of “nihilation” — his term for a ruthless drive, on the part of a critic or an artist, to reject other approaches and condemn them to history’s trashcan. (This dismissiveness was a feature of his print persona, I should add; in person, he was generous and open.) The improviser John Butcher described this mindset from an artist’s point of view in a 2008 interview with the Wire:

This music is here in opposition to other music. It doesn’t all co-exist together nicely. The fact that I have chosen to do this implies that I don’t value what you’re doing over there. My activity calls into questions the value of your activity. This is what informs our musical thinking and decision making.

For Fisher and Butcher alike, severity towards “the opposition” is the mark of seriousness, a sign that something is at stake and that differences are worth fighting over. Above all, it is this negative capacity — the strength of will to discredit and discard — that keeps music and culture rattling along furiously in a forward direction, not wishy-washy tolerance and anythinggoes positivity. If music-making can be a form of “active criticism”, then criticism could equally be a sort of soundless contribution to music.

To gather my thoughts and clear my head before writing this, I went for a walk. There was something of an English feel to the bright and beautiful February morning in Southern California — a blustery breeze sent huge clouds skidding across the sky, their tufty whiteness shot through with piercing sunlight, creating that somehow crazed quality I associate with partly-cloudy summer days in the UK. I would love to have shown Mark around Los Angeles, shown him some of its other sides (he had some fixed ideas about the city, largely derived from Michael Mann’s Heat and Baudrillard’s America!). And I would love to have been shown around Suffolk, the coastal landscapes Mark loved.

But the amount of time we spent in each other’s physical company was painfully small. It’s possible that the number of meetings is in single figures. Mark and I lived on different continents most of the time we knew each other. That lent a kind of purity to the friendship, based as it was almost entirely on the written word: there was a lot of mental communing via email, inter-blog debate, message boards… but not much hanging out.

That means that what I’ve written here can only be a partial portrait of Mark, as both a public figure and as a man. We knew each other mostly as virtual colleagues and unofficial collaborators (we never co-wrote anything, but we formed a united front in various joint campaigns, like the hardcore continuum, hauntology, and a general anti-retro polemic). Above all, I knew him as a reader. (Again, the disconcerting thing was to become a fan of someone who had been a fan of me). But I know that there are many other Mark Fishers. Mark the teacher, Mark the editor, Mark the son and spouse and father. I encountered him almost entirely in the rarefied realms of discourse — usually fairly fevered discourse — and didn’t get to see that much of him in more casual, everyday modes. I would love to have known better these other Marks — Mark at play, Mark having a laugh, Mark relaxing, Mark with his family.

The last time I saw Mark in the flesh was in September 2012, at the music festival Incubate in Tilburg, Holland. The theme of the festival was do-it-yourself. I gave the keynote, interrogating certain aspects of DIY ideology and wondering whether it had outlived its usefulness as a cultural ideal. Mark was set to follow and spontaneously decided to drop what he was going to say and improvise a new talk, building on my argument. It was like the old blog days, except this time happening in real-time and real-space. Where I had read from a pre-written text that I laced with the occasional ad lib, Mark spoke completely off the cuff, pulling riffs from the formidable arsenal in his brain, generating new thoughts and making electric connections. The performance was typical both of his collegiality and his mental agility. Mark likened it later to a stand-up routine — adding that it was becoming a problem that institutions and individuals were video-recording his talks and putting them up on YouTube, because people would become overly familiar with his material. But I can’t imagine that was really ever going to be a problem: Mark was an inexhaustible font of insight and overview, bubbling over with fresh perceptions and original articulations, memorable maxims and acute aphorisms. He was never going to run out of things to say.

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 hadn’t realised how dependent I had become on the surprises and challenges that Mark would throw out there at regular intervals: the spur and spark of his writing, the clarity he could bring to almost anything he shone his light upon. I miss Mark’s mind. It’s a lonely feeling.

Simon Reynolds, 2018