Mark Fisher has become, in our not-so-idle hands, the one who wrote about our depression and about how everything under late stage capitalism is a ghost which simply repeats the empty shell of a lost future which never was, an idea repeated so often by his acolytes it has become the subject of a micro-genre of YouTube videos. In the span of a decade, the complexities of his work – and his literary neurosis, too – have been hollowed out by us, his fans (so to speak) and they have been replaced by an uncritical, never-ending sadness regarding the present and the future (or, more often than not, the lack thereof). It is surely my encounter with those words plus the collective dreamwork that his readers have been weaving around them from their publication onwards.Īfter all, since Capitalist Realism saw the light of day – and even more so after his untimely death – Fisher’s work has been spoiled by a special kind of melancholia we all fell in love with, an almost fetishistic fascination with the most harrowing and ghostly sides of his pop cultural critique. It is clearly not my raw experience of Mark’s writings – it is far too romantic to be the real deal, even though I would swear that the whereabouts are correct and that it is just how it happened. I was a corpsed traveller in the arteries of a cold world, a world which Fisher dissected like no other.Īs autobiographical as this first, depressing encounter might be, it is also artificial, constructed by the cultural landscape which inherited Fisher’s work. I started murmuring under my breath, almost compulsively, “Take care… it’s a desert out there”, the mantra which Fisher had dedicated to the Caretaker’s sonorous recreations of the halls and toilets of the Overlook Hotel, to protect myself from the clarity and the familiarity of this vision. They presented frighteningly natural theses which reflected my existential and emotional landscapes in a surgical and precise way. It was the mid-2010s and I had just read Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life, my first real encounter with his writings and a work which has latched onto the back of my skull ever since.Īs a millennial with a bone to pick with the world, the idea – vital to those essays – that pop culture and its emancipatory futures have been desiccated and stored somewhere out of my reach was more than appealing it felt almost like the air I breathed. The metro was clinking and clacking away.

Mark fisher capitalist realism review