Haunted by Mark Fisher
These are my opening remarks from Kramerbooks Nov 15 Mark Fisher event, honoring the launch of K-Punk, his collected writings.
—
I never met Mark Fisher. I was graduating college in 2013. Only a few months later, Fisher would publish “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” one of the most fearless and honest essays on the condition of the contemporary left I’ve ever read. “This summer,” it began, “I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics.” Fisher went on to describe the world of online leftism which, through endless recriminations and spasms of internal purging, had almost managed to dispirit one of the most spirited thinkers of our age. I was a little bit younger then, and much more fragile. Someone sent me “Vampire Castle” late the following year, when I was overly worried about some internet conflagration or another. I read it, and I thought: Here’s somebody far too acute, compassionate and perceptive for me to ever approach. Here’s the real deal.
Whether through that kind of moral support or his dizzying number of theoretical contributions, those of us writing on the left today universally owe Fisher a debt of gratitude. If you’ve used or read the phrase capitalist realism — that’s Mark. “The vampire’s castle”, of course, belonged to Mark. Today’s most salient usage of hauntology — Mark’s. Between his blogging, his online essays and his books, the odds are good that, if you’ve read around on the left, you’ve read Mark Fisher whether you knew it then or not.
After all that contribution, it’s hard to ignore the fact that his voice has gone silent. Where is Mark? He ended his life in 2017, only a little while after the publication of “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle.” Despite everything he mentioned there and the depression and clinging gloom he seems to have struggled with his entire life, he never did abandon politics. He published two more books after that essay, and then another posthumously, and now we have K-Punk, collecting the rest. In some sense, the fact that it contains the last new work of Fisher’s we’ll ever read has made K-Punk hard to digest.
But it’s well worth the read for a whole host of reasons.
The first, to my mind, is that Mark’s vision was extremely wide and expansive, because socialism was, for him, an entire frame of mind. Politics is a part of it, and maybe the most obvious part of it, but the way we live and the way we feel and the way we express ourselves through art are also areas of socialist inquiry — which have been served by nobody better than Fisher in contemporary times. He scrupulously, consistently analyzed all kinds of media — and not just the elite, good shit everyone agreed was fantastic — but the ordinary stuff, the mass-marketed stuff, the stuff that truly came from and returned to the ether. He goes at The Silence of the Lambs and savors The Shining, contemplates Beloved and Children of Men, Star Wars, knows his way around Pink Floyd, Joy Division, Kanye West, Amy Winehouse. That he brought an amazing, dizzyingly edified mind for theory to bear on stuff we all know was, I have to think, intentional — and generous, an act of intellectual solidarity.
You may have noticed that most of Fisher’s preoccupations tended toward the dark. Nowhere does he go deeper into the, well, weird and eerie than in his book The Weird and the Eerie, which I suggest everybody pick up if they can — especially if they have a Lovecraftian bent. Fisher thought deeply about ghosts and monsters and grotesques and dark magic, sure, but what he thought most deeply about was fear, in all its manifold incarnations, and the way it dominates life under capitalism.
Which is another important point about Fisher’s work, and another reason it’s so vitally important: Mark didn’t see capitalism the way capitalists want it seen. When you read capitalists writing about capitalism — think Ayn Rand, for instance — you get gleaming trains, soaring buildings, the fierce abundance of ever-churning machinery, the sense that the world is rocketing into the future with sparks trailing behind it. Capitalist cinema and rhetoric tend to emphasize this vision. Things are always getting brighter, shinier, bigger, better.
But that wasn’t how Fisher saw it. He not only saw but deeply internalized the strangeness of capitalism, it’s eerie and eldritch generative powers, its almost unspeakable power. “Capital is at every level an eerie entity,” Fisher wrote, “conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” That contemporary life is dominated by capital isn’t just a political problem, in other words, it’s conceptually disturbing. Fisher had an extraordinary talent for peering into the ways our culture expresses its unspeakable fear — he turned his attention to David Lynch and Christopher Nolan and Margaret Atwood, and in all of these analyses revealed a vision of capitalism that is clearer and more focused, even in its remove from “politics” per se, than what is commonly adduced.
And Fisher did not ever consider himself immune from those forces. He was as subject to them as anyone, he thought, and he was open about how he struggled with depression and anxiety. “Depression is the most malign spectre that has dogged my life, and I use the term depression to distinguish the dreary solipsism of the condition from the more lyrical (and collective) desolations of hauntological melancholia,” he wrote in Ghosts of My Life. “I started blogging in 2003 whilst still in such a state of depression that I found everyday life scarcely bearable…it’s no accident that my (so far successful) escape from depression coincided with a certain externalisation of negativity: the problem wasn’t (just) me but the culture around me.”
Ghosts of My Life, he then wrote, was an attempt to engage with traces in the culture that spoke of other possibilities — of futures not dominated by capitalism, of a recovery of what he mourned as the “slow cancellation of the future.”
I have struggled throughout these notes with the impulse to address the author formally, by his surname — Fisher — as I would in print, and the feeling that, having read K-Punk and listened to so many of his remarks on his painful battles with mental illness, I know Mark somehow, like a mentor or a friend. A comrade, maybe. It’s impossible to read him and feel any other way, I think. I also long for a cancelled future, one with Mark in it. There are so many things I would like to say to him.
