Sad news from the UK is the passing of Mark Fisher, cultural theorist
and inspirational music writer.
Fisher's influential K-Punk blog
was widely admired and wide read. Fisher used a cultural theorist's perspective
to examine underground and mainstream music, from his original
fascination with Roxy Music and The Jam through to Burial, via Japan and
Rufige Kru. He was also a founding member of Warwick University's Cybernetic
Cultural Research Unit (with musician and label boss Kode9), and a lecturer in
the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths in London.
In 2004, Fisher released Ghosts Of My Life, a book that
covered a wide range of topics and shared his personale mental health
struggles. The book also explored Fisher's ideas on "hauntology," which is a method/theory of understanding the
world when culture has lost momentum at the "end of history."
"Hauntology is a coming to terms with the permanence of our
(dis)possession, the inevitability of dyschronia," Fisher wrote in a blog
post in 2006. "I repeat, I re-cite: hauntology is the closest thing we
have to a movement, a zeitgeist, at the moment (and one of the uncanniest
aspects of it is the fact that there seem to be very few lines of explicit
influence among the artists involved)."
Fisher followed up in 2009 with Capitalist Realism: Is there no
alternative? Which argued that since 1989 capitalism had
portrayed itself as the only valid economic-political system.
His final book The Weird and the Eerie was published in January
2017. His loss will be keenly felt by many, not least for the that fact that
the most recent book he was working on, had a truly mouth watering title Acid
Communism. One can only dream...
A fund has been set up to help his wife and son. Please donate if you
can.
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