Mark fisher, the English writer and cultural critic, is still perhaps best known for his trenchant first book, Capitalist Realism (2009).footnote^＊ The maiden title of an insurgent publisher, it was an unexpected success upon publication, translated into several languages. Its excoriation of the shrunken imaginative horizons of neoliberalism had been formulated during the market triumphalism of the boom years—developed and rehearsed by Fisher on his cult blog, k-punk—but the book appeared in a dramatically different context, as the world reeled from financial crisis. It was a propitious moment. As Fisher emphasized in his diagnosis, the effect of the crisis had been Janus-faced, at once calling the system into question and yet, by governmental response, seemingly only to confirm it as without alternative. Developments in Britain would compound this: the following year the Conservatives were returned to power, with austerity measures soon provoking a fresh wave of dissent. Fisher, though primarily a cultural theorist, became part of a galvanized milieu in this new conjuncture, emerging in the more turbulent climate as an outlying but influential presence on the British left.

Yet after the resurgence of the parliamentary left that followed, Fisher became muted and soon fell silent. A second book, Ghosts of My Life (2014), had followed Capitalist Realism; a third, The Weird and the Eerie (2016) appeared shortly before Fisher took his own life in January 2017, aged 48. His death can perhaps appear even more tragic for its timing: personally, because he had at last acquired a relatively secure academic post after a career of piecemeal teaching and precarity, to help support his beloved companion and son; politically, because mental illness had not only inhibited his involvement in a sea-change that he had longed for, but ultimately prevented him from witnessing Corbynism’s surge in the snap election of that summer. Following his death, a series of reminiscences from his friends and comrades provided moving, often illuminating portraits of Fisher as a person and a writer.footnote¹ But to date it seems there has been no sustained attempt to situate his work within the broader context of cultural criticism. The publication of K-Punk, an extensive, posthumous collection of Fisher’s shorter writing—blogposts, articles, essays and other material—provides an opportunity to survey his achievement.footnote²

As a starting point, it may be helpful to compare Fisher’s thinking to that of Stuart Hall, one of the foremost cultural theorists of an earlier generation. Gifted writers of the left, both were profound diagnosticians of British culture in the broadest sense, and of its enabling conditions: Hall analysed the basis for Thatcher’s hegemony as ‘solution’ to British capitalism’s malaise; Fisher mapped the landscape to which Thatcherism’s consolidation under New Labour gave rise. Both read popular culture—in Hall’s term, ‘the popular arts’—for what Fisher described as ‘traces of other possibilities’, other worlds. Hall spoke of applying the procedures of close criticism to popular works, distinguishing those of real quality from the meretricious or ersatz. The distinction of value was crucial to Fisher’s writings on contemporary music.footnote³ Both, in their different ways, were outsiders. Born in Jamaica, Hall came from a genteel middle-class family with domestic servants; a Rhodes Scholar, he arrived in a 1950s Britain where lodging houses had ‘no blacks’ signs in their windows. Fisher’s working-class origins in the East Midlands also furnished an outsider vantage-point; but while geographically closer to the metropolis, his background endowed him with a far more visceral, and longstanding, sense of estrangement and marginality. Both combined teaching with interventions in left culture: for Hall, Universities and Left Review, nlr, Marxism Today and Soundings; for Fisher, the blogosphere and Zer0 Books, followed by its avatar, Repeater, the indie publishers he established with Tariq Goddard and other friends; more tangentially, Mute, Wire, Compass.

The major contrasts between them speak to the trajectory of the culture that was their common subject. Hall, born in 1932, came of age in a period of optimism and widening possibilities for the left. The British economy was at the summit of its post-war growth, the welfare state still new and shiny, the unions at the height of their power. While the enormous international success of British working-class pop music—Beatles, Stones, The Who—provided the cultural buoyancy of the period, of a piece with a budding youth culture, experimental works were being pioneered in drama, tv and film. Universities, polytechnics and art schools were expanding. In the late fifties, Hall had abandoned his Oxford thesis on Henry James to work for left magazines, teaching English in a London boys’ secondary-modern school, the bottom grade of a class-defined system, and later film at Chelsea Technical College.footnote⁴ In 1964, on the basis of The Popular Arts—an attempt, co-authored with Paddy Whannel, to bring film and jazz into the school curriculum—Richard Hoggart recruited Hall as a research fellow at the newly launched Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, initially paying him out of his own pocket. When Hoggart left for unesco, Hall stepped up as director of the Centre until 1979, when he took up the chair in sociology at the Open University. He benefited from consistent institutional backing, and as a public intellectual of the television age was a frequent participant in the national conversation.

Fisher, born in 1968, developed in a period that he would powerfully characterize as one of retrenchment and dissolution. The crucial determinant of his formation was an adolescence that unfolded across the cusp of epochs, as the world economy turned from long boom to long downturn, throwing the post-war settlement into crisis. The exact parameters of his periodization were subject to change, but the bifurcation tended to be presented starkly: ‘1979–80’, he writes in an essay about the depressive sounds of the post-punk band Joy Division, was ‘a threshold moment—the time when a whole world (social-democratic, Fordist, industrial) became obsolete, and the contours of a new world (neoliberal, consumerist, informatic) began to show themselves’.footnote⁵ The economy was put through the Thatcherite wringer, with high levels of unemployment and growing insecurity; the trade unions were ground under, austerity and marketization became permanent conditions, and the universities were subject to remorseless pressures. The mass-cultural landscape was increasingly commercialized and monopolistic, dominating a fragmented subcultural scene in which class and culture had become largely disarticulated. By contrast to Hall, Fisher was himself a subcultural figure, in his relation to institutions, in his audience, in his chosen forms and many of the cultural phenomena he discussed. Relegated to precarious employment, his writing was eventually enabled by the internet, and the reputation that he garnered existed largely outside the academy and below the radar of mainstream journalism. His work was also characteristically subcultural in the emotional investment it engendered, inspiring a following more akin to the post-punk and electronica that composed the home territory of his criticism.

Operating at different points of the neoliberal restoration, this was, for both figures, the political reality that consumed their energies. In their distinct considerations of neoliberalism’s emergence, modalities, effects and endurance, culture was in both cases granted primacy as an analytic tool as well as in the substance of their conjectures. More prominently, the opposition they mustered was in both cases framed as an explicitly modernizing one—their attention trained on the need to adapt to changing times, their critique levelled at what they identified as the left’s failure to apprehend the character of the age and develop an appropriate response to it. Critics of the Labour Party from its left flank, both would try to influence its direction during spells out of office, Hall during the Conservative rule of the eighties and early nineties, Fisher in the subsequent period that began in 2010 and which continues at the time of writing. It was during this parallel engagement with parliamentary politics and the practicalities of political change, in fact, that Fisher most overtly engaged with Hall’s work, not only paying tribute to him, but also hailing the enduring relevance of his diagnoses and prescriptions. Having begun his intellectual life as an antagonist of cultural studies, and thereafter following a trajectory at some distance from Hall’s, in the last years of his life Fisher came to find common cause with his predecessor.

Fisher’s precise origins were in Leicestershire. Born in Leicester, he grew up in Loughborough, a small semi-industrial town. Son of a small-c conservative family, his father an engineer for a local firm, his mother a cleaner, Fisher attended the local comprehensive school, later recalling an education of ‘middle-brow dreariness’. Of his formative political experiences, Fisher alluded to the ‘bitter sense of total existential defeat’ he felt at Labour’s electoral rout in 1983 and confessed that he could not recall the day when the miners’ strike was broken two years later ‘without weeping’.footnote⁶ Yet culture initially escaped Thatcher’s onslaught. Britain’s music magazines were flourishing during Fisher’s teenage years. At the New Musical Express, Ian Penman and Paul Morley were self-taught intellectuals whose passionate, serious-minded writings on music culture—an early, but enduring model for Fisher—developed a reputation for a hectic, promiscuous use of continental theory and philosophy. ‘No sob stories, but for someone from my background it’s difficult to see where else that interest would have come from’, Fisher later reflected.footnote⁷