editor’s introduction

“We have to invent the future.”
— Mark Fisher¹

Mark Fisher (k-punk) was not, and never wanted to be, a conventional academic writer, theorist or critic. His writing was too abrasive, polemical, lucid, unsentimental, personal, insightful and compelling for that. Despite displaying the most acute understanding of the physical, psychological, economic and cultural consequences of contemporary capitalism, his work was also optimistic and strategically operative. A great deal of his writing was undertaken in vehement opposition to the all-too evident PoMo dissociation and collective alienation around us, and as a response to what he termed the “boring dystopia” of our shared present, to the increasingly depthless present of this new millennium. Mark provided original, savage and stylish dissections of our moribund culture, and continually observed how popular modernist films, books, television and music that had had a lifelong effect on him continue to “haunt” our collective present.

In the 1990s Mark studied for a PhD in philosophy at the University of Warwick, successfully completing his thesis in 1999 titled “Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction”. Whilst at Warwick he was one of the founding members of the Cybernetic culture research unit (Ccru), along with others such as Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman (Kode9), Robin Mackay and Luciana Parisi. Several years later, whilst working as an FE teacher in Kent, he began his blog k-punk. k-punk emerged in the early days of blogging, where it quickly became an important part of a community of emergent bloggers, including music journalists Simon Reynolds, Ian Penman and David Stubbs, philosophers Nina Power, Alex Williams, Lars Iyer, Adam Kotsko, Jodi Dean and Steven Shaviro, writer and activist Richard Seymour, writers Siobhan McKeown and Carl Neville, and architecture critic Owen Hatherley. One of the most vital aspects of blogging for k-punk during those early days was the simple element of re-connection, of becoming involved in a new online collective at a time in his life, after Warwick, Ccru and the PhD, when he was perhaps at his most isolated. As he recalls in a 2010 interview:

I started blogging as a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD. PhD work bullies one into the idea that you can’t say anything about any subject until you’ve read every possible authority on it. But blogging seemed a more informal space, without that kind of pressure. Blogging was a way of tricking myself back into doing serious writing. I was able to con myself, thinking, “it doesn’t matter, it’s only a blog post, it’s not an academic paper”. But now I take the blog rather more seriously than writing academic papers.²

And in a post written exactly a year after launching the blog, he writes:

It’s been my only connection to the world, my only outside line… It’s reinvigorated my enthusiasm for so many things, and pricked my enthusiasm for things I’d never previously considered…³

The early years of the k-punk blog were ones marked by intensity and informality, with regular swathes of writing and numerous dialogues. k-punk traced the positive effects of regular writing, enabling Mark to access the depths of his own obsessions and interests and refine his own powerful style. As he developed he began to connect into a kind of thematic rhythm, and over the years, one begins to see his thoughts coalesce around the themes of hauntology, popular modernism and capitalist realism. As he acknowledges, k-punk was written as a way for him to escape from the imposed bonds and pointless strictures of academic writing. Dense, allusive, theoretically rich and abrasive posts were written in response to a consistent set of personal obsessions and external stimuli (a film, book or album to be reviewed; an event to be contextualised or theorised) and were often written with a real sense of urgency, by the need to participate in an ongoing dialogue, or by a self-imposed deadline. These k-punk posts encapsulated an intellectual moment of reflection on the world: they are responsive, immediate, and provide an affectively charged perspective. Some of his references and allusions are undoubtedly challenging and potentially intimidating — Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Marcuse, Adorno, Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Jameson, Žižek, Zupančič, Berardi, Badiou, Lacan — but his writing is never marked by the zealous pedantry exhibited by so much academic writing in the theoretical humanities. Mark has faith in the intelligence and rationality of his readers; he trusts their capacity to be challenged by unfamiliarity, complexity and the new. He consistently displays the courage to take up a strong theoretical and practical position. His work rows against the tide of anti-intellectualism in the present which has tried so hard to flatten things out to a level of cretinous instrumentality and utilitarian stupidity.

For us, the readers of the k-punk blog, his writing always gives us reasons for continuing, against the odds, to hope for an alternative to the dystopian present. This is not just a consequence of the specific content of his writing, but is as much to do with the fact that he was there at all, for the persistence of his provocative and challenging voice. That voice — strident, angry, fiercely intelligent, sophisticated and enthusiastic, serious and animated — is so close to the way he actually spoke in person. There is always a real intimacy to his writing, and he possessed a unique and rare talent to be able to articulate his thoughts and ideas without the written words diminishing, softening or reducing them. Mark’s voice is preserved in his work, and it is preserved online.

The first two k-punk posts in this collection, “Why K?” and “Book Meme”, both written in 2005, offer us some precise insight into Mark’s reasons for blogging as k-punk, together with an understanding of his operative objectives and ambitions.

One of these is the ongoing belief in simply grasping the new technological democracy of blogging and using it as a “kind of conduit for continuing trade between popular culture and theory”. k-punk’s belief in the importance of outsider forms of discourse never wavered. There is a consistent belief in the operative effectiveness of fugitive discourses which have been legitimated by neither the official channels of the establishment (via academia or mainstream media outlets) or traditional forms of publishing. In the early days of k-punk this was something he particularly came to associate with blogging:

All that is lacking is the will, the belief that what can happen in something that does not have authorisation/legitimation can be as important — more important — than what comes through official channels.⁴

Another is his declared fidelity to the ideas of Kafka and Spinoza, along with his allegiance to a whole host of things which, by articulating and confirming his own perceptions, modernist sensibilities and thoughts of existential detachment, alternative possibilities and perspectives, he felt had first brought him to a degree self-awareness: Joyce, Burroughs, Ballard, Beckett, Selby. The early books, the music, the television, the films, the ideas, the events. The Miners’ strike, the Falklands war, Thatcherism, Blairism, post-punk, Joy Division, the Fall, Scritti Politti, Magazine, acid house, jungle, Goldie, Deleuze and Guattari, Marx, Jameson, Žižek, Foucault, Nietzsche, the Ccru, Cronenberg, Atwood, Priest, M.R. James, Nigel Kneale, Marcuse, Penman, Reynolds, Batman, and in later years The Hunger Games, Burial, Sleaford Mods, the Caretaker and Russell Brand. The performativity of the k-punk blog was, at least in part, undertaken as part of a personal survival strategy, to regain and persistently re-state fidelity to those things in which he had discovered the original ideas that had animated and inspired him. He says as much in “Book Meme”:

The periods of my adult life that have been most miserable have been those in which I lost fidelity to what I discovered then, in the pages of Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Burroughs, Beckett, Selby…⁵

This fidelity is key, because it provides the animating fibre that underpins the vast collage which he somehow synthesises into an effective and operative worldview opposed to the tedious banalities of a present ruled by the merciless logic of what he came to term “capitalist realism”, where alternative possibilities have become increasingly proscribed and reduced to almost nothing. His forensic attention was so brilliantly attuned to those often unnoticed traces of modernism in texts, music, films and television programmes, and he repeatedly worked out acute readings of popular culture as if piecing together, one by one, the fragmented pages of a lost manifesto of cultural alchemy necessary for challenging the disastrous tyranny of the present. For more than a decade, k-punk served as a critical epicentre for hauntology and counterculture, highlighting the latent radical potential of a lost and receding twentieth-century modernism. The k-punk blog warped the reality field by repeatedly and incisively piercing through the drab fabric of the early years of this new millennium. k-punk brought important, uncomfortable and original challenges to the present, interrupting it with shards of difference, elements of the past that remained out of joint with the present, that disrupted the inertial logic of our times. At its very best it served to effectively resist the tendency for things to settle into a hazy homogenous present where time equals capital, and where everything is flattened out into commodified and easily digestible consumables. It did this by keeping open a space for alternative possibilities, and by refusing to allow important things to become reduced to the mediocre, the banal, the downright stupid, and the boring.

Finally, there is his exemplary antipathy and negativity towards PoMo hyper-ironic posturing, dreary hopey-feely liberal leftism, delibidinised culture, upper-class superiority, vampiric trolls, vitalist positivity, and Deleuzo-creationism, which was always evident on the k-punk blog. The sentiments and positioning of his challenging and controversial piece “Exiting the Vampire Castle”⁶ in 2013 is no less evident in earlier k-punk posts like “New Comments Policy”⁷ in 2004 and “We Dogmatists”⁸ in 2005. His savage, cold-rational polemics are often in full force throughout the life of the k-punk project. Take this for example from “Noise as Anti-Capital”:

THERE IS NO DIGNITY. Don’t confuse the working class with the proletariat. Thatcher inhibits the emergence of the proletariat by buying off the working class with payment capital and the promise of owning your own Oed-I-Pod. The comforts of slavery. She gives the replicants screen memories and family photos. So that they forget that they were only ever artificial, factory farmed to function as the Kapital-Thing’s self-replicating HR pool, and begin to believe that they are authentic human subjects. The proletariat is not the confederation of such subjectivities but their dissolution in globalised k-space. The virtual population of nu-earth… The heroism of the proletariat consists not in its dignified resistance to the inorganic-inhumanity of the industrialisation process… but in its mutative Duchamp-transformation of its body into an inhuman inorganic constructivist machine.⁹

In 2007, Mark left his teaching job in Kent and moved to Woodbridge in Suffolk, where he began working on what would become his first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, published in 2009 with Zer0 Books, the alternative publisher he had helped to co-found with his friend Tariq Goddard.¹⁰ This book, which synthesised some of his strongest early posts on k-punk, firmly established Mark’s reputation as one of the important contemporary theorists. The publication of Capitalist Realism crystallised new forms of collective connection for Mark at the very point the original blogging community had begun to fragment and become a much more fractious and difficult space in which to operate. Although Mark continued to blog as k-punk, it became less and less frequent as he pursued his work, thought and activism in the form of invited lectures, talks and Q&As, as well as the pieces he wrote as a freelance writer having to earn a living. Mark’s frustration with the direction that blogs and forums had taken is clearly evident in a number of charged and polemical k-punk posts regarding the etiquette of comments and discussion, as well as his numerous interventions found on online forums.

After a precarious period of freelance writing Mark began to teach again, teaching courses in philosophy for City Lit and the University of East London, and later had a permanent position at Goldsmiths. He went on to produce two further volumes of published work, Ghosts of My Life for Zer0 in 2014 and The Weird and the Eerie for his newly formed Repeater Books at the end of 2016. Both volumes cull work from k-punk and from his commissioned reviews and interviews for the Wire, a magazine he had acted as Deputy Editor for in 2008. During this period he also published significant amounts of writing for online and print publications in the form of book chapters, music reviews, film reviews, opinion pieces, pieces of activism and theoretical essays, as well as continued posts for k-punk. It is the aim of this volume to bring together for the first time a significant portion of this writing.

The editorial task of putting together this collection was, at times, akin to a peculiar form of digital archaeology and memento mori. It involved excavating a decade of digital layers, often confronting digital lacunae where the reconstruction of lost dialogues from online fragments, interlocutors having gone missing, became necessary. Sometimes the task was one of recovering lost memories from pages haunted by dead links, a task that felt oddly appropriate given Mark’s emphasis on hauntology. It was accompanied by a strange melancholy, contemporary since it had been birthed by the first layers of the online age, but also weirdly resonant with previous forms of melancholy and memory associated with found photographs, diary fragments, carvings, etchings, paintings. I will confess that I had some trepidation that much of the writing by k-punk from the last decade, once excavated, would have lost something with the inexorable passing of time. But I quickly discovered that this is in fact not the case. There is so much here that remains vital, fascinating, inspiring and insightful, and a great deal of this writing is gathered together for this collection.

There were inevitably difficulties regarding the decision about what to include and exclude. It was immediately evident that there is a vast reservoir of writing, almost overwhelming in terms of its scale and scope. Yet, what also became sadly evident is its sheer finite quality. As one reads through Mark’s collected writings one is simply led to the incredibly sad realisation that this is all there is, and all there ever will be. As David Stubbs wrote for the Quietus, Mark’s death “leaves a gaping crater in modern intellectual life”.¹¹ The loss of Mark’s voice from the present situation is incalculable, let alone his companionship, camaraderie, and friendship. I will now provide a few words about the working criteria for inclusion that governed the assembly of this volume.

The first priority was to avoid any unnecessary repetition of previously existing published material in his three published books — Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of my Life and The Weird and the Eerie — together with his essays in the two edited and co-edited volumes on Michael Jackson and post-punk.¹² As was noted above, he had culled material for all of these publications from k-punk and his writings in the Wire, and therefore much of that material is excluded from this collection. Where there are exceptions it was felt necessary to include original posts which had been either significantly truncated or modified by Mark for subsequent publication in these volumes, and these pieces have been clearly indicated in the endnotes.

There was a clear need to reflect the full range of his k-punk writing on many different subjects from 2004-2016, rather than concentrate on just his music or film writing. The aim was always to provide as comprehensive a picture as possible of the blog throughout its lifetime by selecting pieces that reflect both its eclectic content, its theoretical pluralism and most of all its remarkable consistency. His earlier pre-k-punk writing, including that undertaken as part of the Ccru, is not included here. For this collection the decision was made to concentrate solely on his writing after the inception of the k-punk blog, and for his earlier work to be the province of another volume. A very small number of early k-punk posts, e.g. on antinatalism, were excluded by virtue of the fact that they seemed wildly out of step with Mark’s overall theoretical and political development, and because they seemed to reflect a temporary enthusiasm for a dogmatic theoretical misanthropy he repudiated in his later writing and life. There was also a need to represent the sheer breadth of Mark’s other writings — his freelance reviews, commissions and activism, including his writing for the Wire, Frieze, New Humanist, the Visual Artists’ New Sheet, Electronic Beats, the Guardian, etc. Sometimes these resonate with and reflect on pieces he published on k-punk, but more often he wrote on a range of subjects and themes not found on the blog.

The pieces chosen for the collection needed be of sufficient length and depth to work in a published volume — there are so many insightful one or two paragraph blog posts on k-punk that are excluded for that reason. Their effectiveness is largely down to the context of the blog architecture and community, whether they are interventions in ongoing online conversations and dialogues, or immediate response pieces to something happening in the media, online, or in the everyday. There are, however, a few exceptions to this where it just seemed criminal not to include them, usually because they were exemplary bursts of critical savagery or brilliant pieces of brutal polemic.

For the purposes of this single-volume collection, there was a need to abstract k-punk posts, to a certain extent, from the old blog community architecture, and yet, at the same time, try to retain a certain flavour of that community of blog writing. In abstracting posts it was important not to completely lose sight of the fact that they were originally written as blog pieces, and to try and retain a sense of their immediacy, informality, collaborative qualities and the sense of them as being part of an ongoing online continuum. This was a delicate balance to achieve, sometimes necessitated by the simple fact that many of his online blog interlocutors have long disappeared from online or abandoned their blogs, leaving them like ghost ships in cyberspace. Where this balance was simply not possible or unworkable, pieces have been excluded. The advantage of a collection of writings such as this lies in the fact that it allows readers to access a vast range of Mark’s work on a whole host of different topics and themes, all in one place. It allows for an appreciation of the sheer scale, depth and originality of his work. However, I have been conscious of the peculiar disadvantages of doing this with Mark’s writing, the vast majority of which appears on his k-punk blog, in that it extracts and abstracts his work from the very specific context of the blog — its immediacy, its dialogic nature, its hyperlinked architecture and its sense of a holistic continuum. I have tried very hard to retain some important aspects of that particular quality of his writing in transposing it to a collection such as this, and where possible I took guidance from the way Mark himself carried this out when he culled his k-punk writing for his published books. All titles of the pieces are either Mark’s own or those of the editors of the publications for which he wrote. Each piece includes a reference indicating when and in which publication it first appeared. The spelling and punctuation have, with some exceptions, been regularised and rendered consistent across the collection.

Rather than simply arrange the writing in chronological order, the decision was made to separate the work chronologically into several different themed sections. This decision clearly has the advantage of thematic coherence for the reader, but the disadvantage is that it obviously creates an artificial division between the k-punk posts, articles, reviews and essays, and breaks up the hyperlinked quality of much of his writing. As one reads across these pieces one will discover the clear theoretical resonances between pieces written on say film, music or political activism in 2006 or 2007, where Mark is weaving the operative influence of a particular theorist’s ideas or set of principles between a range of different topics and themes at the same time. There is a slight tendency for this quality to be lost in the thematic arrangement of this volume, but efforts to mitigate this have been made in the footnotes where possible. However, despite arranging the writing thematically, the sheer consistency of his work across the different topics remains absolutely evident. These include Mark’s ongoing fidelity to theory in order to provide different and challenging perspectives, alternative narratives, and for producing important truths. One also finds across all of the work a consistent concentration on the themes of class and collectivism, precarity and insecurity, depression and mental illness, dogmatism and purpose, attempts to trace post-capitalist forms of desire, the need to expose egregious forms of reality management, efforts to express forms of collective memory, and a nostalgia for popular modernism, hauntology and lost futures. I feel confident that the thematic arrangement of his work in this volume does nothing to diminish the sheer lucidity of his work in this regard.

It is also the case that one of the most significant qualities of online writing, namely the ability to embed shortcut hyperlinks to references and sources, is somewhat difficult if not downright impossible to reproduce in traditional published form in a book. However, where possible, every effort has been made to track down and reproduce in the footnotes all of the surviving hyperlinks contained in k-punk’s posts and other online writing.

Finally, it was important to include any unpublished work. What is included here represents all that is considered unpublished, and takes the form of the final and sadly unfinished k-punk post “Mannequin Challenge”, which addresses the US presidential election of 2016; a piece titled “Anti-Therapy”, taken from a talk Mark gave in 2015, which was then translated into German and published as part of a collection by Matthes & Seitz and appears here in English for the first time; and the unfinished introduction to Mark’s proposed book titled Acid Communism. The introduction to this final proposed work is extremely suggestive and significant. It is clearly the case that a great deal of Mark’s work was written in response to Fredric Jameson, in particular Jameson’s work on postmodernism (in Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and A Singular Modernity). Mark repeatedly notes Jameson’s extraordinary prescience, back in 1991, in identifying and analysing the postmodern condition:

Jameson [writes of] a depthless experience, in which the past is everywhere at the same time as the historical sense fades; we have a “society bereft of all historicity” that is simultaneously unable to present anything that is not a reheated version of the past.¹³

And:

Could the only opposition to a culture dominated by what Jameson calls the “nostalgia mode” be a kind of nostalgia for modernism?¹⁴

What becomes evident in his late work on acid communism is how he became more and more drawn to a problematic identified by Jameson between Marcuse’s cultural exceptionalism or the “semiautonomy” of the cultural realm — “its ghostly, yet Utopian, existence, for good or ill, above the practical world of the existent” — and the question of whether this semiautonomy of the cultural sphere “has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism”.¹⁵ As Mark knew only too well, for Jameson this dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture does not imply its disappearance. Rather, its dissolution is to be

imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life — from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself — can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and yet untheorised sense… Distance in general (including “critical distance” in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new sphere of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our new postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation… It is precisely this whole extraordinary demoralising and depressing original new global space which is the “moment of truth” of postmodernism.¹⁶

And Mark, in his unfinished introduction to Acid Communism, insists upon revisiting the issue of the utopian vision that is the legacy of the Sixties, taught by Marcuse and raised here by Jameson:

The ultimate political coordinates of the problem of the evaluation of postmodernism is one of the Utopian impulses to be detected in various forms of the postmodern today. One wants to insist very strongly on the necessity of the reinvention of the Utopian vision in any contemporary politics: this lesson, which Marcuse first taught us, is part of the legacy of the Sixties which must never be abandoned in any reevaluation of that period and of our relationship to it.¹⁷

Here, towards the end of his life, in the unfinished introduction to Acid Communism, we find Mark reaching for “a new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving: this is the promise of acid communism”.

Covering over a decade of writing, reading this collection is like taking a trip through recent cultural and political history with Mark as your guide. Hopefully these writings, together with his other published books, will serve as further reminder of Mark’s own utopian vision, how vital, necessary and exciting k-punk was, his fidelity to the possibility of alternatives, and simply of how much we all have lost.

Darren Ambrose
Whitley Bay, February 2018