Mark Fisher: illustration by Amreetha Lethe
'It is beginning to look as if, instead of being the end of history, capitalist realism
was a thirty-year hiatus. The processes that began in the Sixties can now be resumed.
Consciousness is being raised again.'
- Mark Fisher (2015) [a]
I.
I would guess that I'm not the only reader of Mark Fisher's work to find his cultural criticism more interesting than his political analysis. It would be foolish, however, to try and draw a hard and fast distinction between the two.
For like Nietzsche, Fisher understands how philosophy and literature have a "profound and congenial relation to each other" [b] and part of the appeal of his text is that he promiscuously draws upon all manner of considerations, including those previously regarded as irrelevant to serious investigation.
In fact, I would argue that Fisher's devising of a charmingly idiosyncratic literary-philosophical mode of language and thought and his application of such to a wide range of contemporary concerns is one of his finest achievements. Fisher demonstrates how writing - at its best - is capable of providing a sense of solidarity; i.e., "fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere" [c].
Fisher's work therefore demands - and deserves - to be read in the round; from the early k-punk pieces to his later stuff on all things weird and eerie via his seminal (but overrated) text Capitalist Realism (2009).
That being said, when tasked with editing Fisher's collected and unpublished writings from the thirteen-year period 2004 - 2016, Darren Ambrose does separate out the political writings as best he can and it is part four of k-punk (2018) that I'd like to comment on here - picking out those things that either inspire or irritate; delight or disappoint.
II.
The lines quoted at the top of the page from Fisher are found in a short piece that is included in part three of k-punk - writing on music - and not in part four containing his political writings. But these lines pretty much sum up Fisher's attitude: neoliberalism bad; acid communism rooted in the countercultural ideas of the 1960s, good [d].
Such revolutionary optimism contrasts sharply with my own rather more cynical and pessimistic philosophy; i.e., the kind of ironic nihilism that Fisher equates with postmodernism and which he despises as a form of reflexive impotence preventing radical change or commitment and thus ultimately complicit with capitalist realism.
And so, unfortunately, Fisher's political writings, combining psychedelic utopianism, pulp modernism and ghostly lost futures, more often than not cause me to sigh rather than nod in agreement - but at least they allow for a (hopefully amusing) collision of perspectives ...
III.
The danger when you produce work that is very much up to the minute - full of names in the news and references to contemporary pop culture - is that your writing is instantly dated.
And Mark Fisher's political writings are full of such names and references, although, reading his work now, in 2026, produces the rather strange effect of making the period in which he was active (2004-16) feel even further in the past than my own childhood.
Tony Blair ... Gordon Brown .... David Cameron ... I know who they are - I remember them - but they seem to have less reality than Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, and Edward Heath.
I'm not sure why that is: perhaps Mike Yarwood was a better impressionist than Rory Bremner. Whatever the reason, it perhaps helps to explain the following sentence: "There was a time when elections at least seemed to mean something." (377)
And it also helps us understand what Fisher is getting at here: "Realism has nothing to do with the Real. On the contrary, the Real is what realism has continually to suppress." (380) [e]
That's a sentence that resonates with Baudrillard's philosophy, although the latter refers to raw, unmediated experience as the symbolic rather than the Real and, being a cultural pessimist, he sees it as something that is gone forever - an extinct category - rather than something that continues to threaten realism and thus still needing to be repressed.
I might be wrong, but I get the impression that Fisher thinks we can return to the Real if only we all raise consciousness, join hands, and leap together into a lost future [f]. Baudrillard would regard this as a nostalgic delusion.
IV.
According to Fisher, Islamofascism is a pseudo-concept:
"There are any number of reasons to consider the idea that there is such a thing as Islamofascism a nonsense. Here are two. First of all, fascism has always been associated with nationalism, but, like global capital, Islamism has no respect for nationality; the first loyalty of the Islamist is to the global Umma. Secondly, fascism is about the State - Islamism has no model of the State, as could be seen in Afghanistan under the Taliban. (390)
To be fair, they're quite good reasons - though in response to the first, one might wonder then if Fisher would be more approving of the term Islamocommunism ...? [g]
What puzzles me, however, is how he then happily uses the term Islamophobia which is another highly contentious neologism and equally a pseudo-concept; one designed to stifle legitimate criticism of the religion masquerading as a term that operates within an anti-racist framework.
Christopher Hitchens - not an author referred to by Fisher and not one I would imagine him liking - is often associated with the description of Islamophobia as a word 'created by fascists and used by cowards, to manipulate morons' [h].
And the French writer Pascal Bruckner - one of the so-called nouveaux philosophes who came to prominence in the mid-late 1970s - wrote a famous article on the origin of the term for Libération in January 2011, arguing that it was invented by Iranian fundamentalists with the aim of declaring Islam inviolate [i].
It would seem to me, that either both terms should be avoided, or both should be free to use (whilst open to interrogation). What you can't do is declare the legitimacy of one whilst dismissing the other as a pseudo-concept [j].
V.
As a nihilist, Fisher's call for "new kinds of negativity" (432) is something I can get behind.
I'm not quite sure how we square such with his eternal optimism, but let's leave that to one side for a moment. The key thing is to abandon faith in those older forms - such as art - which some on the left still believe to be full of vital revolutionary potential; people such as the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri ...
"Art, Negri maintains, is intrinsically rebellious and subversive. Even though Negri himself recognises the dangers of taking too much consolation in art, he ends up retaining faith in it." (432)
As Fisher points out, Negri's praising of art as a source of freedom and transformation seems strangely nostalgic - and not just nostalgic, but laughably naive: "For the era of capitalist realism has also seen all kinds of synergies between art and business, nowhere better summed up than in the concept of the 'creative industries'." (432)
It's to his credit that Fisher rejects (or at least challenges) the argument that the art that dominates within capitalist realism is somehow fake art; "a betrayal and dilution of art's inherent militancy" (432).
Why not, says Fisher, simply push Negri's own logic of negativity to the point at which one recognises that "there is no readymade, already-existing utopian energy; that there is nothing which, by its very nature, resists incorporation into capital" (432).
Recognise this, and one is obliged to drop the idea that art is opposed to capitalism and that power only restricts and denies creativity (is only ever repressive). As Foucault pointed out, power is itself inventive and creative; it produces new forms and discourses, induces new pleasures [k]. Thus, overcoming capitalism "will not involve inventing new modes of positivism, but new kinds of negativity" (432).
Zarathustra would go along with that [l] - and I go along with that.
Notes
[a] Mark Fisher, 'No Romance Without Finance', in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 373. The piece, dated 9 Nov 2015, originally appeared in Bamn: An Unofficial Magazine of Plan C.
All further page references to k-punk (2018) will be given directly in the main text.
[b] Nietzsche, 'The Struggle between Science and Wisdom', in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1993), p. 134.
[c] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 18. Whether this in turn opens up the possibility of a new becoming or provides a genuine alternative to the reality principle shaped by neoliberalism, is debatable.
[d] I'm aware of the fact that the idea of acid communism was a late development in Fisher's work and that all that remains of a proposed new work with that title is the (unfinished) introduction. Nevertheless, I'm going to use the term here, somewhat anachronistically, as I don't believe Fisher would object to such retro-intertextuality or prochronism.
[e] Fisher will later describe realism as "not a representation of the real, but a determination of what is politically possible" (380-381).
[f] If Fisher does not in fact think of the Real as a location to which we might return, then he certainly does like to imagine the Real as some kind of external limit in much the same way as Deleuze and Guattari imagine schizophrenia. Or as "an event completely inconceivable in the current situation, but which will break in a re-define everything" (383).
[g] Today, we are witnessing a strange marriage of convenience between Islamists and those on the far-left; Zack Polanski and the Green Party are playing a dangerous game as they flirt with religious sectarianism on the one hand and political populism on the
other.
[h] Apparently, this was actually said by Andrew Cummins and is therefore misattributed to Hitchens - understandably so, as it closely reflects his own view of a term he dismissed as stupid and one designed to suggest that fear and prejudice lie behind perfectly reasonable concerns about a powerful and aggressive religion.
[i] The English translation of this article by Bruckner - titled 'The invention of Islamophobia' (03/01/ 2011) can be found on signandsight.com - click here.
[j] Without wishing to put words into his mouth, I suspect that Fisher would argue that Islamophobia is a legitimate sociological term identifying a factual well-documented phenomenon, whereas Islamofascism is a category error, designed to morally and politically justify Western interventionism and the War on Terror.
In other words, the former describes an effect of power (structural racism); the latter is a historically illiterate claim made by power to reduce complex geo-political issues to a simple struggle between good and evil.
[k] See Michel Foucault, 'Truth and Power', in Power, vol. 3 of the Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al (Penguin Books, 2002).
[l] For Nietzsche, only braying donkeys nod their heads all the time and only camels say yes to even the heaviest burdens - the lion, however, dares to say no and this saying no is a creative foundational act, not merely a refusal; it is, if you like, the active negation of the negative.
See 'Of the Three Metamorphoses', in part one of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and see also what Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo on the importance of No-saying as a necessary first step toward a revaluation of all values.
