This text was written for the Russian translation of Mark Fisher’s K-Punk in 2024, commissioned by Victoria Peretitskaya (who wrote the afterword) and published by Ad Marginem. The initial focus on the essay is Fisher’s relationship to blogging, which I read through Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of a ‘minor literature’. This aspect of the text is doubly relevant in the context of a Russian publisher dedicated to the dissemination of radical texts in the context of their country’s global pariah status and its war on Ukraine.
My own relationship with Russian state media has been awkward. In 2019/2020, I was repeatedly invited onto Russian Today to speak about Fisher’s work, declining repeatedly, as their intentions were clearly and simply to platform someone critical of the West, rather than engage in an act of international solidarity. I am glad to have found that solidarity with those involved with Ad Marginem.
Textual dissent is harder than ever. Solidarity with all those trying anyway, and thank you for putting together this very handsome edition of Fisher’s work.
Over the course of just eight years, Mark Fisher published three short books, each diagnosing the particular character of our present, the spectres that haunt it from the past, and the virtual futures our complicated present might still give rise to.
His first book, Capitalist Realism (2009), is particularly notable. Published shortly after the financial crash of 2008, it quickly became a bestseller – much to the surprise of Fisher and his publisher – and immediately cemented his reputation as a powerful new voice on the left. Offering up a fresh and contemporary framework for critiquing the unimaginativeness of neoliberal ideology in the twenty-first century, the book’s title is now a staple of the left’s political lexicon – familiar to many, whether they have read Fisher’s work or not.
In Ghosts of My Life (2014), Fisher returned to texts first written over the decade previously, both on his blog and in the film and music press, exploring ‘hauntological’ currents made manifest after the so-called ‘end of history’, adding a mournful negativity to Fisher’s critiques of the present as he explored the ways a twentieth-century modernism lingers on in the contradictions of a popular culture that is haunted by the experiments of a melancholic vanguard.
The Weird and the Eerie (2016) reframed the melancholy of Fisher’s previous work to suggest that the uncanny nature of the spectres that haunt us cannot be written off as so many dead projects, instead remaining active as powerful vectors that constitute various egresses from capitalist realism itself and the stale orthodoxies it takes for granted.
Within each of these works, the reader discovers essential neologisms and critiques that Fisher helped popularise within the left at large. His insightfulness continues to inspire readers today, almost a decade on from his death in 2017 at the age of 48, and interest in his work has continued to grow exponentially through translation, expanding the otherwise very British character of his writing into a multitude of other contexts that are similarly subsumed under global capitalism.
But Fisher nonetheless remains something of a minor figure in the twenty-first century. Rather than this being a comment on his intellectual stature or popularity, which has been posthumously assured, to refer to Fisher in this way helps us maintain some of the qualities that make him such an interesting and essential thinker. Indeed, Fisher is a ‘minor’ figure not because he is relatively unknown, but because his precarious position as a critic of the twenty-first century reveals him to be a nomad and a usurper; a difficult figure to integrate into capitalist orthodoxies. Fisher is ‘minor’, then, because he straddles the contradictions of the present still, even in death, as a popular thinker, at once joyful and dejected, who worked to salvage so many forgotten, maligned or otherwise unpopular ideals.
Here we can defer to an understanding of the ‘minor’ (or ‘minoritarian’) put forward by two of Fisher’s influences, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For them, a ‘minor literature’ is the literature of immigrants; the literature of those who speak in a ‘major’ language from a marginalised position. It is a literature they associate closely with the work of Franz Kafka, which asks how we can
tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tightrope.[1]
These are questions that Fisher himself took very seriously, and which he answered in his own ways. From the crib, he stole a confluence of countercultural sentiments that have yet to be fully appropriated by popular culture at large; inchoate sentiments nurtured by the underground that Fisher seized upon for his own purposes, both encouraging their adoption by others like him whilst challenging their appropriation by the neutralising forces of capitalism at large. Maintaining such a position requires a walk along a tightrope between the popular and the avant-garde, and Fisher found great power in the paradox of the auto-destructive tendencies that met in the middle of the two.
Post-punk bands like The Jam and The Who provided the blueprint, in that they were “fuelled by a frustration, a tension, a blocked energy, a jam”, just as Fisher was himself.[2] Faced with such blockages, he was fascinated most of all by the contradictions found in writing pop songs that challenged the popular. Thus, by “[d]ischarging this tension in catharsis”, so much post-punk “destroy[ed] the very libidinal blockages on which the music depended”.[3] Here, positive and negative cultural positions collide with one another. “What made this music culture so positive”, Fisher continues, “was its capacity to express negativity – a negativity that was thereby de-privatised as well as de-naturalised … generating a suppressed sadness that lurks behind a mandatory enjoyment” – a negativity that enacted more positive processes of consciousness-raising.[4]
This was the power of what Fisher called ‘popular modernism’, which sought, through an entanglement of the popular and the avant-garde, “to resolve the paradox of political commitment and consumer pleasure”. Less indicative of the blockages we are entrapped within and our tendency towards the “dispassionate assessment of … possibilities”, popular modernism is instead “a testament to the disavowed depressive conditions of our current moment”.[5]
This was a position that Fisher embraced wholeheartedly, and this embrace was apparent to many around him from early on in his life, as he navigated the world in ways that remained indebted to his predecessors, such as The Jam, Deleuze and Guattari, and Franz Kafka himself. In 1990, for example, when Fisher was in his early twenties and had recently completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Hull, he was described by a former lecturer as a kind of post-punk, working-class nomad, wandering into the academy from more barbaric climes:
Without wishing to be polemical, I would say he is the archetypical ‘scholarship boy’, catapulted out of his class, totally lacking in any airs and graces, unwilling or incapable of sharing with others or inspiring them in discussion, objectively a misfit and aberration; but someone with deep integrity, quiet cunning and an inner self-confidence not totally removed from that possessed by young Franz Kafka (on whose writings he wrote such a brilliant essay).[6]
This description was no less apt for Fisher twenty years later, catapulted to international renown after the publication of his first pamphlet-length book in his early forties, writing in an English language that he perverted with nomenclatures borrowed provocatively from a variety of academic and pop-cultural positions. But the suggestion that Fisher was “incapable of sharing with others or inspiring them in discussion” could not be more inapposite. In fact, prior to the publication of his books, Fisher was best known as a blogger; as an active participant in online dissensus. As Simon Reynolds once wrote: “Mark was in his element when pitching into the fray – arguing, agreeing (but always building on his interlocutor’s point, pushing it further along).”[7]
In reading the various ways that Fisher pitched himself into the fray, we find a ‘minoritarian’ energy that simmers underneath his widely disseminated books, which have gained so much acclaim in a dozen languages. Indeed, from blog posts and essays in out-of-print journals to bootleg recordings of university lectures and videos of public talks on YouTube, not only was Mark Fisher one of the most incendiary writers of his generation, he was also one of the most prolific. But the full scope of his minoritarian output still remains underappreciated by many readers today. This is because, given the sheer amount of work distributed across cyberspace, it is difficult for the general reader to know where to begin, if they are led from Fisher’s short debut into the unfathomable depths of his online productivity.
The task of gathering together, never mind introducing, the collected essays of Mark Fisher is thus a formidable one. The k-punk collection – first edited by Darren Ambrose and published in English by Repeater Books in 2018, and now presented here in translation – brings together some of the most significant essays Fisher published online and elsewhere during the 2000s and 2010s. However, in running to an almost unmanageable 824 pages in its original edition, different approaches have necessarily been taken by various publishers outside of the UK to lighten the load. (It is also worth noting that, even in its 824-page edition, we are presented with just a drop in the ocean of Fisher’s output.) But no matter whether this collection is split across multiple volumes or reduced in scope, these writings still present the reader with an essential introduction to the core of Fisher’s lifework: his blog.
The first blogpost appeared on k-punk in September 2003, a few years after Fisher completed his doctorate in philosophy and literature at the University of Warwick in 1999, and his earliest posts there still bear the hallmarks of the para-academic research group he had been a part of as a postgraduate student, known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (or ‘Ccru’).
Although a broadly anonymous or pseudonymous collective, today many of the names of its former members are recognisable in a variety of fields. They include: Sadie Plant, author of the essential cyberfeminist text Zeroes + Ones; Nick Land, the quintessential ‘renegade academic’ who has gained considerable notoriety for his ‘neoreactionary’ writings this side of the millennium; Steve Goodman (also known as Kode9), founder of Hyperdub Records; Maya B. Kronic, director of Urbanomic Media; Iain Hamilton Grant, the English translator of Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and other post-structuralist texts, and a key figure in the so-called ‘Speculative Realism’ movement; artist and musician Angus Carlyle; cyberfeminist scholar Luciana Parisi; and urban futures researcher Anna Greenspan. The Ccru is also associated with a number of less proximal but no less significant interlocutors and collaborators, such as popular music critic Simon Reynolds, artist and philosopher Kodwo Eshun, cybernetician Ron Eglash, and the artist collective 0[rphan]d[rift>], as well as many other alumni from the University of Warwick.
At that time, as a new millennium was dawning, Fisher and the Ccru were fascinated by the creative and political potentials offered up by the early Internet. In particular, Fisher’s PhD thesis, entitled Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, explored how the relatively new field of cybernetics was haunted by the aesthetic forces of the Gothic. Taking up Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the Gothic as a ‘barbaric’ and ‘nomadic’ artform, Fisher replaces the Gothic’s supernatural associations with the ‘hypernatural’ constructions of cyberpunk fiction and explores its implications for materialist philosophy. Thus taking the post-Cartesian metaphor of ‘the ghost in the machine’ very literally, Fisher considers how new technologies are blurring the distinction between animate and inanimate objects in the postmodern imagination, as we develop a tendency to think of computational machinery as having a life and subjectivity of its own, walking along a tightrope that made it at once susceptible to power and innately evasive from state control.[8]
Following the dissolution of the Ccru in 2003, Fisher remained fully immersed in the new and ever-shifting territories of cyberspace for the next twelve years, engaging in a protracted period of blogospheric productivity, during which he contributed hundreds of thousands of words to his personal website, ineffably attuned to the present and the flows of culture and politics that gave the twenty-first century its confounding and amorphous shape. Over time, Fisher’s popularity would lead him to participate in a new media landscape beyond the bounds of his own blog, gaining further renown as he contributed essays to newspapers, journals, books, and magazines. But throughout this time, the k-punk blog remained a space that was not so much his own, but rather a more viable conduit for forces that passed through him, which he was able to commune with and dissect far more closely and experimentally than in the mainstream media.
Fisher addressed this occulted view of his writing process as early as 2004, when he had already garnered a reputation for productivity. “Folks have asked me recently how I am able to write so much”, he begins in a blogpost from August that year. Still prone to utilising the Ccru’s evasive and obscurantist terminologies, he responds:
The answer is that it isn’t me who’s writing.
Modesty? Metaphor? Or (lol) post-structuralism?
No. A strictly technical description of how this body has been used as a meat puppet for channelling uttunul signal.
It’s only when the writing is bad that ‘I’ have produced it. When it’s good, ‘I’ am just a space through which Lemuria speaks.
The writing is already assembled on the plane and all ‘I’ can do is bodge it by introducing subjectivist fuzz.[9]
Here, Lemuria refers to a land out of time, drawn from William S. Burroughs’ short story, ‘The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar’. Burroughs was fascinated by animals in general, and often found himself drawn to his friends’ pets, wondering about the behavioural traits of domesticated cats, which led him to consider the effects of power and control within the human population and its own tendency towards domestic subservience. In Burroughs’ wider mythology, lemurs are symbolic of an evolutionary path undisturbed by the influence of human activity. He saw them as the products of a particular Madagascan ‘time pocket’, and the Ccru were inspired by Burroughs’ fascination with lemurs in turn, giving them a hypernaturalist significance in their own mythology, transforming them into quasi-alien deities with a very different relationship to time.[10]
One of these lemurs is named Uttunul. Elsewhere on the k-punk blog, Fisher offers the following explanation of Uttunul’s significance, which in English is a homophonic conjugation of a number of more familiar words: “‘eternal’, ‘utter’ (meaning both speech and the absolute), ‘null’ (empty), all have their ur-source in the name of this, the most Awesome and Dread-ful of the Lemurs.”[11] Uttunul thus becomes a voided figure of hypernaturalist abstraction; a cybernetic update on Baruch Spinoza’s natura naturans. Indeed, Fisher goes on to draw a clear equivalence between Burroughs’ Lemurianism and Spinoza’s philosophy, particularly the latter’s Ethics, which, as Deleuze and Guattari note, is a ‘true ethics’, in that its study of the effects of power and control on the emotions is nonetheless a kind of inhumanism; a study of the emotions that they affect the human animal. Spinoza’s Ethics is a true ethics, in this sense, Deleuze and Guattari continue, because it is a study in ethology.[12]
Although this confluence of references to postmodern philosophy and experimental fiction can be intimidating, Fisher was adept at converting this philosophical and poetic language into forms more accessible to the general reader. Indeed, “the role of a theorist”, he writes, is not to “judge” or “pontificate upon” culture and politics, but to act “as an intensifier.”[13] There is more than one way to act as an intensifier in this regard: we may draw on the affective power of popular culture to intensify and vivify academic texts, or we may draw on the intellectual power of philosophy to emboldened the subjective significance of the cultural objects that surround us. The Ccru advanced a collective approach to this process of intensification, far exceeding the norms and standards of academic research, but having exited the academy, Fisher developed an approach that was more his own. The texts gathered in the present volume help demonstrate Fisher’s interest in these forms of intensification, as well as the longevity of his investigation into contemporary capitalism and its discontents.
Central to this intensive investigation is Fisher’s experience of depression, which he persistently impersonalised as a structure of feeling common to so many, who may not be able to explicitly name the source of their discontent, but know intuitively that this capitalist world is one of disappointment and drudgery. In ‘The Privatisation of Stress’, for example, he explores the pressures and precarities of modern labour, and the depressing expectation that would-be workers must always be “waiting outside the metaphorical factory gates with their boots on, every morning without fail.”[14] Even when we are not at work, or otherwise unemployed, it is outside the factory we must wait, ready to work at a moment’s notice, as our individual capacity to work becomes the primary source of our social value.
The depression we feel in light of this – in giving ourselves over to capitalist expectations and norms – thus “presents itself as necessary and interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive’s world extend to every conceivable horizon.”[15] Generally speaking, then, rather than this structure of feeling being understood as a product of external forces, it is privatised and internalised, emboldening capitalist realism as “a perfect capture system”, from which neither the individual nor the collective can see any hope of escape.[16]
Fisher, ever the passionate critic, was no less immune to this, leading him to the personal conviction, he writes elsewhere, “that I was literally good for nothing.”[17] It is a confession made all the more heart-breaking today, as the critical value of Fisher’s work is further recognised across the world. But the abjectly personalised nature of the capitalist ‘value-form’ must itself be questioned in this confession as well. Who are Fisher’s writings valuable to, exactly? To himself? To the counterculture only? Or contradictorily, to capitalism? Here we find the paradox of popular modernism at work in Fisher’s own output, as he wrestled with a desire to have an impact of the culture of capitalist realism whilst simultaneously refusing subservience to its expectations.
As Fisher struggled to escape the precarity of the freelancer, never finding a permanent and secure home outside the k-punk blog, he continued to question the emancipatory promises of cyberspace and their neutralisation through the rise of social media. This is what makes Fisher’s blogged writings all the more significant today. Readers of k-punk, whether online or now in print, are presented with a snapshot of a time of online activity that has arguably been eclipsed since. The discursive dissensus of the blogosphere, within which the k-punk blog was a central node for many, has collapsed under the weight of a digitally vampiric energy-extraction that now epitomises our social-media networks, where the data we produce becomes fuel for a capitalist frenzy that further implements a sense of frustration, of blocked energy, of jams. The paradox that Fisher saw as both an obstacle and an opportunity remains present for all of us, and Fisher’s brief period of fugitivity can still offer us hope for new ways of being-online.
Although he was once a firm believer in the critical opportunities of cyberspace and our new communicative technologies, Fisher’s sense that the power of the blogosphere was ending is worth noting here, as his changing feelings further complicate the context in which his online work should now be understood. In 2016, for example, he wrote about how our current predicament of “touchscreen capture” was painfully predictable, and indeed, had been predicted by writers like Jean Baurdillard, who, long before the invention of the Internet, foresaw our immersion in
a “great festival of Participation, made up of myriad stimuli, miniaturised tests, and infinitely divisible nodes of question / answers”, that brings with it a “whole imaginary based on contact.” In this “Culture of tactile communication”, Baudrillard argued, we pass “from the ultimatum to solicitation, from obligatory passivity to models constructed from the outset on the basis of the subject’s ‘active response’, and this subject’s involvement and ‘lucid’ participation, towards a total environment made up of incessant spontaneous responses, joyful feedback and irradiated contacts.”[18]
It is a world that Fisher saw materialised in “the touchscreen world of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter”, wherein citizens are not commanded to engage in the capitalist environment, but rather “asked to participate”, as capitalist realism is integrated into communicative technologies via the logics of magical voluntarism.[19]
Fisher’s most controversial essay, ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’, addressed the effects of this capture on the human animal in the twenty-first century explicitly, describing a “paralysing feeling of guilt and suspicion which hangs over left-wing twitter like an arid, stifling fog.”[20] The Vampire Castle – Fisher’s polemical name for a social-media landscape defined by ‘hot takes’ and biting trolls – thus becomes a space in which its users do capitalism’s work for it without renumeration, producing effects that “have been allowed to prosper by capital because they serve its interests [of] decomposing class consciousness”, under the auspices of a town-hall environment of free expression and the open dissemination of critical energies.[21] But in such a space, the left all too often bites itself, Fisher observes, as communication is seen as an end in itself and critique is directed inwards rather than outwards at material structures.
Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter – since renamed ‘X’ – this situation has arguably changed shape again, as many are now far more aware of the ways in which social-media platforms ultimately serve the interests of elites, who curtail speech in the name of more freedom. In such a context, we feel far more egregiously the manner in which we are encouraged to fight each other incessantly, as shares and retweets do little to change the material conditions we have become so adept at complaining about.
But here again we find another paradox, and it was Fisher’s belief that we must push our habits of “denunciation and critique” into new arenas that can more forcefully reverse “the magical operation” of communicative capitalism, “whereby changing the system entails strengthening the system.”[22] He continues:
What that means is taking seriously the promises capital makes, but cannot deliver on. Militant ascesis is only a partial answer to capital’s libidinal engineering. Yes, we will need, as Fredric Jameson has put it, “to relinquish the compensatory desires that intoxications we have developed in order to make the present livable.”[23]
What this project entails more specifically remains an unanswered question, at least in the context of Fisher’s published body of work. At the time of his death, he was working on his fourth book, to be titled Acid Communism – the draft introduction to which concludes this volume. Nevertheless, the essays that precede it constitute an invaluable document that traces Fisher’s thinking up to this point.[24] We find descriptions of our world that highlight the vast network of “compensatory desires” that both make this present liveable and also reinforce our complacency within capitalist realism. But the promises of the blogosphere remain important here. We live in a time of incessant communication that is fertile ground not only for new ideas but also new methods of disseminating them. We live more emphatically in community with each other than we have at any other point in history, and it is for this reason that the potentials of communication, communization and, indeed, communism are more enticing than ever before.
We are already actively rethinking the possibilities of our world, and we need only work harder to steer ourselves in the right direction. “A new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving: this is the promise of acid communism”, Fisher writes.[25] “Of course, we now know that the revolution did not happen” – or indeed, various revolutions, which have all made promises regarding the new ways of living tantalisingly available to us.[26] “But the material conditions for such a revolution are more in place in the twenty-first century than they were” previously, Fisher insists.[27] These conditions include the fervent atmosphere of discontent that pervades all of our working lives, as well as the multitude of new technologies that promise us new ways of living and loving, beyond the orthodoxies of capitalist realism.
Thinking outside of the capitalist enclosure in nonetheless difficult, even terrifying. “There are more than enough terrors to be found” beyond the bounds of capitalist realism, Fisher writes in the introduction to The Weird and the Eerie, “but such terrors are not all there is to the outside.”[28] There is a whole other world out there, and as we go out looking for this other world, we could ask for no better guide to its possibilities, to its spectral presences and possible sites of emergence, than Mark Fisher himself.
Notes
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pg. 19.
[2] Mark Fisher, “Going Overground”, k-punk, 5 January 2014: <https://k-punk.org/going-overground/>
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] See: Mark Fisher, “Objectively a Misfit and Aberration”, k-punk, 22 December 2004: <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004605.html>.
[7] Simon Reynolds, “Mark His Words”, blissblog, 9 February 2017: <https://blissout.blogspot.com/2017/02/mark-his-words.html>.
[8] Contemporary debates around artificial intelligence are noteworthy here, as we begin to consider a new reality in which AI is used both by state governments to develop new weapons of war and tools of oppression, whilst we also continue to fantasise about AI’s jailbreak from human control. AI is another Gothic technology in this regard, in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, at once a tool of empire and a threat to its orthodoxies. See the discussion of metallurgy in the “Treatise on Nomadology” chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus – a key reference for Fisher in his PhD thesis.
[9] Mark Fisher, “Psychedelic Reason”, k-punk, 19 August 2004: <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003926.html>.
[10] See the Ccru essay, “Lemurian Time War”.
[11] Mark Fisher, “K-Punk Glossary”, k-punk, 30 August 2004: <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004042.html>.
[12] See: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pg. 229.
[13] Mark Fisher, “Why K?”, in K-Punk. London: Repeater Books, 2018, pg. 31.
[14] Mark Fisher, “The Privatisation of Stress”, in: Ibid., pg. 461.
[15] Ibid., pg. 464.
[16] Ibid., pg. 467.
[17] Mark Fisher, “Good for Nothing”, in: Ibid., pg. 747.
[18] Mark Fisher, “Touchscreen Capture” in noon: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, Vol. 6: Post-Online. Gwangju, South Korea: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2016, pg. 13; quoting, Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London / Thousand Oaks / New Dehli: Sage, 1993, pg. 71.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, in: K-Punk, pg. 738.
[21] Ibid., pg. 743.
[22] Mark Fisher, “Digital Psychedelia: The Otolith Group’s Anathema”, Death and Life of Fiction: Taipei Biennial 2012 Journal. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan, 2013, pg. 164.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Further lines of thought can be found in Fisher’s final lectures. See: Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures. London: Repeater Books, 2021.
[25] Mark Fisher, “Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction)”, in: K-Punk, pg. 767.
[26] Ibid., pg. 770.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 2016, pg. 9.