Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher took his own life this day five years ago. And it felt too emotional, to say that I’d never ever really met him.

And I feel like a prick writing about it, because I have met friends of his, and I could see how much pain their loss gave them. However, Mark Fisher’s work had such a big impact on my life that I remember how absolutely fucking gutted I felt on this day in 2017.

I miss waiting for his next blog, article or book. I waited and waited, because I knew that when it arrived I’d feel like I wasn’t the only person who felt like I lived in a fucking mundane horror-show (or ‘Boring Dystopia’ as he called it). It was always worth getting up when there could be a new Mark Fisher blog.

It seems like another world ago since I began reading the first couple of chapters of Capitalist Realism, in a Cafe Nero in Sheffield, wondering where the hell this book had come from. I’d never read anything like it before, yet at the same time it said everything I knew I thought, but couldn’t say I thought.

The world feels somehow the same as when I first read ‘Capitalist Realism’ in 2010, but also somehow wholly different. Fisher left us in January 2017, just before the peak optimism of the Corbyn movement, and then all that would follow – all that shit that somehow feels inseparable. I wonder if he could have cognitively squared it and put it within our grasp. Bit I also wonder if he would have found the sheer allure of the ‘touch screen capture’ in the ‘pandemic fog’ too much to resist also.

Admittely, I have been thinking about finding salvation from less politically critical realms recently. My mental state, marked by a sense of failure, feeling unable to picture myself ever escaping my parents’ house, and living independently, seems inevitably doomed to produce the repetitive self-destructive cycles, as my critically-leaning mind lures me back into a world of suspicion and self doubt.

However, impossible as it may currently feel in sorting ‘my shit out’, it is ‘my shit’.

But, when reading Fisher it never did like just ‘my shit’; it felt liberatingly collective – and this was in even his darkest texts, way before the unfinished project ‘acid communism’.

I no longer felt feckless, like a loser, or a failure, because Fisher so powerfully convinced me that these were just ailments of something that, although it convinced us it was permanent, was all-so temporary.

Oh, I wish you were here with us now…

Thank you Mark.