We are assembling a post about Mark Fisher and,
now that you're reading this, so are you ...
I.
There was an interesting piece in The Guardian a couple of days ago, by Lauren Kelly [1]. It was on Mark Fisher; a cultural theorist who, somewhat ironically, continues to haunt the media almost ten years after his death and seventeen years after he published the slim volume - Capitalist Realism (2009) - that ensured he would be born posthumously.
It's a good book [2]. But, like many other works regarded as seminal, it now risks becoming a kind of foundational text - i.e., essential reading for those who wish to have an understanding of contemporary neoliberal culture conveniently packaged and given a stamp of approval by critics, commentators, and other left-leaning intellectuals who secretly envy its astonishing popularity and sales figures [3].
Ultimately, it's easier to keep referencing Fisher c. 2009 and regurgitate his critique, rather than imagine an alternative future oneself. Of course, that's not Fisher's fault and, in his later work, he seemed keen to stress that Capitalist Realism was only ever intended as a starting point and not meant to be the last word on any of the subjects it touched upon.
Fisher spoke about developing post-capitalist desire and acid communism, but it's his debut book that most readers seem to fixate on and find most relevant [4], in the same way that orthodox punk fans still think Never Mind the Bollocks was the Sex Pistols' finest moment, rather than The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.
II.
Whatever one thinks of Fisher, the fact is he's an increasingly influential and pervasive figure and there's currently an experimental documentary doing the rounds that aims to disseminate his ideas to a still wider audience by mixing theory with real-world footage.
Titled We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025), this 65-minute film written and directed by Simon Poulter [5], cheerfully places itself outside the world of mainstream production; it was funded by Poulter and fellow artist Sophie Mellor (who edited the work), using an Instagram account to recruit a network of seventy collaborators - including a technical crew - to assist with the project.
There was no advance budget; no studio backing; and no institutional permissions - just the determination to make a film that affirmed Fisher's belief that decapitalised
cultural production and collective agency was still possible among the ruins of neoliberal atomisation.
Methodologically, the work draws from both situationism and the rhizomatic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari - rejecting arborescent models in favour of open systems of
exchange:
"By way of archival recordings, interviews and fictional performance, Fisher's philosophy of 'hauntology' recurs throughout [...] maintaining that modern society, as a result of 'capitalist realism', is haunted by futures that failed to happen [... as] narrator Justin Hopper explains." [6]
Since the autumn of last year, Poulter's film has been screened "in universities, back gardens, cinemas, living rooms and art galleries located everywhere from Coventry to Brisbane, Australia, via Malmö, Sweden" [7].
I've not seen it yet - I'm hoping to attend the screening at the ICA on 19 May - but would like to offer support to the work carried out by Mellor and Poulter working as Close and Remote. I might not share all their political views and moral values, but, nevertheless, I feel a certain level of comradeship - not least of all because Poulter is an old punk rocker and a man who loves butterflies ...
Notes
[1] Lauren Kelly, 'The man who saw the future: the legacy of cultural theorist Mark Fisher', in The Guardian (17 April 2026): click here.
[2] Funnily enough, I haven't written a post critically reviewing the book, even though I have done so for other works by Fisher: click here, for example, for fragmened remarks on Ghosts of My Life (2022); or here for part one of a two-part post on The Weird and the Eerie (2016). I am planning to examine Fisher's most well-known text shortly.
[3] According to Lauren Kelly in her Guardian piece: "As of December 2025, more than 250,000 English-language versions of Capitalist Realism have been sold, with translations available in Spanish, Italian, Arabic Mandarin, German, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Hebrew, Korean and Danish."
[4] I think it's fair to say that Fisher's concept of acid communism has not attained the same widespread cultural recognition as his thinking on capitalist realism. Primarily, that's because his work in this area was cut short by his suicide in 2017 - acid communism exists only as an introduction and a few notes - but it's also the case that the former was a far more speculative concept, whereas the latter is a tangible malaise experienced here and now.
Given the choice, most people, it appears, prefer to feel depressed by the present, than imagine their future happiness based on the retrieval of old dreams and unrealised desires. A few academics, artists, and old school k-punk fans might be excited by the concept, but acid communism is a bit niche for mainstream readers (and maybe - since it relies on a certain level of political and countercultural utopianism rooted in the late 1960s and early 1970s - it seems a tad nostalgic and old-fashioned for younger readers who don't remember this time).
[5] Torpedophiles will recognise the name of artist and aurelian Simon Poulter from a post published on 1 Feb 2026: click here.
[6] Lauren Kelly ... see reference and link in note 1 above. It should be pointed out that Justin Hopper doesn't narrate as himself, but in character as Professor Parkins; a spectral guide to Mark Fisher's life and work.
[7] Ibid.
Bonus: click here to play the trailer to We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (2025).
