It’s eight years since the passing of Mark Fisher. He was a wonderful and gentle man who was deeply loved. I wish I had a photo of him as I remember him, in a classroom on the first floor of Orpington Further Education College, Siouxsie t-shirt, slicked-back red and black hair, pacing the front of the room as his hands rolled and unrolled a pocket forcefield of Nietzschean concepts. He always spoke gently, but excitedly. He found connections between the everyday of then – Blair, reality TV, pop music, supermarkets – and the deeper weft of ressentiment, class, power and desire. Each little aphorism would be rounded off with a wry joke, sometimes self-deprecating, or a glance upward seeking knowing recognition. Unfortunately ours was not the most knowing audience. But he was loved in that classroom, and outside it.
Some years ago, Laura Grace Ford and I set up a small reading group to come together and think about some of Mark’s later texts, some unfinished, others published in often obscure places. These were works that might’ve formed a new volume, Acid Communism, of which just two parts were published in the door-stopper, the collected K-Punk. Among those was an essay I cherish, Baroque Sunbursts. It concludes with an elegant line from another late thinker, Fredric Jameson, but notice where Mark takes it:
‘From time to time’, writes Fredric Jameson in Valences of the Dialectic, ‘like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays of from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces are still possible.’ This psychedelic imagery seems especially apposite for the ‘energy flash’ of rave, which now seems like a memory bleeding through from a mind that is not ours. In fact, the memories come from ourselves as we once were: a group consciousness that waits in the virtual future not only in the actual past. So it is perhaps better to see the other possibilities that these baroque sunbursts illuminate not as some distant Utopia, but as a carnival that is achingly proximate, a spectre haunting even – especially – the most miserably de-socialised spaces.’
Two moments stand out in this weaving: the memories ‘from ourselves as we once were’, a formulation laced with melancholia, a crucial if dogged place in Mark’s thought, *but* towards a ‘group consciousness that waits in the virtual future’. Note the openness and expansiveness in Mark’s thought, its incompleteness within its thinking – something wonderfully explored in Mattie Colquhoun’s first book on the concept of the ‘eerie’. Its capacity to hold a space of possibility in full recognition of its remoteness and barriers, its out-of-timeness and out-of-spaceness, something he also recognised in the music of Joy Division or Kafka (“he who has been the most intimate and constant companion”, he wrote; like most subjects, his essay on Joy Division is the best thing ever written on them).
The second moment to note is its relation to utopia. His essay here – I’ll provide a link in a moment – is in the main focused on rave and the history of modern capitalism, a characteristic tour de force involving the kind of conceptual acrobatics only he could effortlessly perform. Mark knew and had debated, heard well, all the reactionary and as he would call, rightly, ‘de-libidinised’ critiques of socialism levelled in English culture in the last 40 years. He was aware of a deeper (English) visionary socialist tradition, one rooted in the vernacular and everyday as much as the right of the working class to bread and roses. One rooted not in a denial but an affirmation of our joys, outside of the chapel and the marketplace. It is not in the final day but the ‘achingly proximate’ carnival that something differently otherwise emerges.
Mark’s life and thought are now always foreclosed by that full stop. But throughout his life, and mine, I often asked myself what he would say about some latest political event or new TV show. People have remarked about a kind of ghost-memory of excitedly discovering and reading the latest k-punk blog setting out the bigger picture; I’ve even dreamed of reading them, though cheated as usual of recalling anything after I woke up.
After his death, Robin Mackay produced an excellent little volume of Mark’s essays, The Fisher-Function, named after a provocation he made at Mark’s public memorial. It begins with this line, taken from Capitalist Realism, the best place to begin:
‘The required subject – a collective subject – does not exist, yet the crisis, like all the other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed.’
Remembering you tonight Mark, and always. x
In the Dropbox below are some short essays and chapters by Mark that we read. I think they provide another, more direct way into Mark’s later visionary thinking:
“Baroque Sunbursts”
“Acid Communism” (Intro + Ch1)
Interview with Judy Thorne, “Luxury Communism”
“Ghost of a wound”, essay on Gillian Wearing
“Practical eliminativism: getting out of the face, again”
“The eeriness remains” (excerpt from last book)
“Democracy is joy”, and
“Abandon hope (summer is coming)”
Dan Taylor 
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