Mark Fisher

Objective

By the end of this volume you know the counter-movement to everything the fourth module contained. You know what Fisher understood by capitalist realism, why he held depression to be a political matter, and what his hauntology has to do with the lost future. And you see how two people out of the same room arrived at the same diagnosis and answered it in opposite ways.

Exposition

Fisher was born in 1968 in Leicester and grew up in the East Midlands, father an engineer, mother a cleaner. He belonged to a generation of British working-class children for whom the post-war state had cleared a path, through free education, through public libraries, through a broadcaster that ran adult education and worked with pop music while doing it. He came to Warwick, took his doctorate there, and belonged to the CCRU's circle in the nineties. His origin matters more for his work than for anyone else in this course, because what he later formulated as a historical diagnosis is first the description of a path that still existed in his time and afterwards did not.

After the group's end he found no academic living and from 2003 wrote a blog under the name k-punk. The tone was different from Land's. Clearly built sentences, no incantation, no invented sources. Fisher wrote about a television series, an album, a book, and a political situation in the same motion and treated them as of equal rank. Around that blog formed a circle of readers out of which grew an entire counter-culture of theory, written by people outside the university, for people outside the university.

Out of the blog grew, in 2009, a slim book titled Capitalist Realism. It runs under a hundred pages and became the most-read text the CCRU's milieu produced. The term it coined denotes no state of the economy but one of the imagination. Capitalist realism means the situation in which capitalism appears as the only thing possible and every alternative is not refuted but unthinkable. Fisher opened the book with a sentence he attributed to others and whose provenance he left open, the thought that the end of the world is easier to picture than the end of this economic order. Cinema screens the collapse of civilisation by the dozen and not one of them another way of running an economy.

From the postmodern, with which you might confuse that diagnosis, it differs on one point. The postmodern condition still knew a memory of what was vanishing and lived off the tension with its own prehistory. Fisher's realism sets in where the memory drops out. He describes people for whom there was no before, who have never encountered an alternative and therefore miss nothing. Capitalism no longer has to assert itself, because it has nothing beside it.

What that means in daily life he demonstrated with a term he called business ontology. It's not enough that firms get run like firms. The school gets run like a business too, the hospital, the university, the broadcaster, and finally the individual person, who manages their CV, their appearance, and their relationships as assets. Fisher taught for years at a college and described what he saw there. His students knew exactly that the order they stood in promised them nothing, and they still couldn't move. He called that reflexive impotence. The insight is present and changes nothing, because it is itself already part of the exhaustion.

A second finding is directed against a common story. The market was supposed to abolish bureaucracy and multiplied it. Where performance no longer gets measured against the thing but against its presentation, an apparatus of reports, metrics, audits, and target agreements arises that eats more time than the work it measures. Fisher had a bitter phrase for it that barely translates, and by it he meant a planned economy oriented on the image of its results rather than on the results. Anyone working in the public sector or in an organisation that knows audits recognises the description without further explanation.

The part of the book that worked furthest is about depression. In Britain, in the years Fisher was writing, mental suffering was the most common cause of incapacity for work, and the answer to it ran individual throughout. An imbalance in the brain, a question of chemistry, at most a consequence of childhood. Fisher countered that a society declaring everyone the entrepreneur of themselves automatically privatises every failure. Whoever fails has positioned themselves wrongly. He spoke of the privatisation of stress and meant by it a process in which a social imposition gets booked over into a personal failing. His demand was not to explain the suffering politically and abolish the treatment, but to permit the question of why so many fall ill in the same way.

The second strand of his work bears the name hauntology and comes from a pun of Derrida's, who wrote in 1993 about the spectres of Marx and put the term on a being that isn't present and nevertheless works. Fisher turned it into a description of contemporary music. It struck him that the pop music of the 2000s no longer sounded like something new but like citation, resumption, recourse. A track from 2005 would have been hard to tell apart from a track from 1995, while between 1965 and 1975 there were worlds. The music that interested him made that circumstance audible. Burial works with noise, crackle, and fragments of voices that sound like a recording of something you can no longer reach. In Fisher that's no question of mood. This music mourns a future that was once promised and never arrived.

Which future he meant he said clearly. The British post-war order had a direction, in which education was public, housing got built, the broadcaster experimented, and a child from Leicester could reach a doctorate without debt. That direction was broken off, and what followed was no other future but the end of future as such. The phrase about the slow cancellation of what's to come he took from Franco Berardi and made it the core of his second book, which appeared in 2014.

With that the place is reached that Volume 14 pointed forward to. Fisher and Land share the diagnosis. There is no outside, capital has no limit at which it ends, it integrates its critique and lives off it. Both learned that finding in the same room at Warwick, and neither ever retracted it. The answer separates them completely. Land finds in the limitlessness a ground for fascination and goes along. Fisher finds in it a loss and refuses to accept it, without being able to claim that the refusal achieves anything. He never dismissed Land and stated expressly in a text of 2012 that the left answer to this thinking is so far no good. It lacks coldness, reach, the willingness to grant its own opponent the weight he has.

His last project stayed unfinished. Under the title Acid Communism he gathered material on the late sixties, on a time when the notion that consciousness and society can be changed at once briefly had a reality. The text exists as an introduction and as notes. Fisher died in January 2017 at the age of forty-eight from the consequences of a depression he suffered from all his life and had written about publicly.

Core Claim

Mark Fisher described with capitalist realism a situation in which capitalism appears without alternative because the imagination for something else is missing. His business ontology shows how every institution and finally the individual gets run on the form of the firm, his thesis on depression books a privatised suffering back into the political, and his hauntology describes a culture mourning a future that was broken off. He shared Land's diagnosis completely and drew the opposite consequence.

Bridge to the Next Volume

Fisher wrote, Land thought, but the texts of both would have scattered had there not been someone who collected them, edited them, and put them into circulation. Volume 24 turns to Robin Mackay and the press Urbanomic, along with the philosophical current that emerged from the same milieu and bears the name speculative realism. What's at stake there is the least conspicuous and most effective form of aftermath, the conversion of a fleeting milieu into infrastructure.