I met Mark Fisher some years after Alison Shonkwiler and I were lucky enough to have the opportunity to include his work in our edited volume, itself a very Fisher-derived project, Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa, 2014). I was in Cambridge, England at a conference on aesthetics and politics and Mark had come down for the day from London. This was the spring of 2016. In the United States, the presidential primaries were in full swing and, following the logic of American cultural imperialism, they were the talk of, well, the storied dining halls of the University of Cambridge. Like many progressive and Leftist onlookers, both in the United States and abroad, Mark was particularly excited about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Could it be? He wondered. Was it possible?

I said I thought it was doubtful. Not because, I, the native informant, explained Bernie didn’t have popular support. I was sure then, and remain so now, that many of Bernie’s ideas were quite popular and would be broadly endorsed were they ever to see the light of day. But, of course, voting in the United States is its own labyrinthine procedure. Observers outside the country rarely understand this; indeed, observers inside the country struggle with it, too. Every state, and we have 50, has its own voting rules. Primary elections, as opposed to general, elections have their own rules. Votes don’t count equally. Before the primary election even started, a substantial minority of super delegates—remember those? Mostly lobbyists who buy seats in the upper echelons of the Democratic party—had already pledged their support for Hillary. Then you have to find your polling station. It may have moved without notification, as mine did that year. You may not be registered to vote. Even if you are registered, it still might not work. Technical issues, voting irregularities. And this is only the primary! In the general election, the difficulties expand considerably, as people of color are regularly “scrubbed,” or removed, from voting lists. The more conservative the state, the less likely people of color will be able to vote. Formerly or currently incarcerated people can’t vote. Identification requirements change. With a system like this, the philosopher Dehlia Hannah once said, you don’t need a conspiracy.1

Mark looked amazed. “The thing is,” he said, “there is no time. That’s how they get you.” When he said that, I understood it in response to my explication of American voting impasses. And it’s true: it does take time to vote. It takes energy. It takes frustration. And it still doesn’t work. But that’s not all he meant. He hoped to indicate, too, an attenuation of time as possibility, time as community, time as both a feeling of access to the present—to respond, organize, and critique—as well as access to the past, to understand history. Likewise, time forms our conduit to the future and in it we might plan how things could be different. Of course, one thinks of Marx’s famous line from The Germany Ideology as perhaps the ur-ideal of how “having time” might take a social form:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.2

Mark did function in various capacities: teacher, critic, editor, blogger (back when that was a term), academic, theorist. But perhaps better he occupied a role increasingly needed and uncommon on the Left: that of public intellectual. And I don’t mean, it must be said, liberal intellectual. We do have plenty of those, and their thoughts occupy the pages of The Nation, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among others. Mark’s critical interests were not directed toward carbon credits or public-private partnerships; he was engaged in systemic and structural criticism of our present. There was another distinguishing difference of Mark’s critical production: not only was he a public intellectual of the Left, but his subject area was, of course popular culture, particularly music — a “post-rave John Berger” he was once called by Simon Reynolds.3 We might also call him a pre-Facebook internet critic.

What I mean with that comment is that, in retrospect, Mark’s editorial work and organizational work was at least as important as his theoretical work. To be a public intellectual means not only that one’s work circulates in public; it means now, and probably always has meant, rather, that one creates publics for one’s own work as well as the work of others to circulate in. Publics do not come to us pre-formed; the work of the intellectual is thus not to curate but to cultivate. Mark of course cultivated critique after critique and discursive space after discursive space from the consumerist effluvia in which we, the “consumer-spectator,” to use his term, find ourselves always-already immersed.

Rereading Capitalist Realism some years after its publication is then to be reminded, almost randomly it feels, of some of the more idiosyncratic content that continues to attest to the truth of Deleuze and Guattari’s famous claim that capitalism is a “motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.”4 They meant ideology, but this haunting of the discarded past permeates popular culture as well. As I re-read Mark’s book in preparation for this dossier, I can honestly say that I had not thought of Kurt Cobain or Nirvana once since, well, I last read the book. The re-emergence and stabilization of the very effluvia that destroys history is one of the risks inherent in the kind of methodology that Mark pursued. Now, again, I’m thinking about Nirvana. Object as symptom, symptom as readable, readable object as potentially utopian object.

We know this method, of course; it seems a mix of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, the former provides the site for periodization; the latter offers the introduction of subject “supposed to” do any number of things: know, recycle, consume, experience anxiety and/or depression. Any account of Mark’s legacy, of course, must grapple with this question: does the methodology work? Is its critical apparatus realized? Mark’s gambit inCapitalist Realism was that, as suffocating and penetrating as the real was – presented by Jameson in his 1984 essay, “Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” – things have now gotten worse. That ethical inflection is not presented as such, of course. Rather it is presented as a narrative of an expanding capitalism that, somehow, always manages to be a little more totalizing.

For me, that argument has never been persuasive. It wasn’t when Jameson made it, and it wasn’t when Mark updated it. Jameson had already said, as Alison Shonkwiler and I noted in our own introduction to Reading Capitalist Realism, that “those precapitalist enclaves of nature and the unconscious” have now, too, entered into circuits of production and reproduction. That would seem to be all of it, right? No more time, no more nature, no more unconscious. Mark would then add that the future, too, had been colonized by capital. Thus, citing Jameson and Žižek, he recycles the line that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Mark qualifies the sentiment by noting that “it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative,” to such a state of affairs (2, italics mine.). In the postmodern 1980s, he tells us, “there were still, at least in name, political alternatives to capitalism” (7). Even as Mark does provide more specificity of social texture than Jameson, for example his discussions of higher education in the UK, he too does endorse an over-arching narrative of totalizing decline.

I see in this claim, however, a foreshortening not of the object of criticism, i.e., capitalism, but rather a foreshortening of criticism itself. This kind of argument confuses registers of historical time, narrative time, and argumentative sequence. It all too easily becomes yet another sacrifice on the altar of Leftist melancholia, Walter Benjamin’s well-known worry that an over-attachment to various forms of Leftist impossibility, as well as the pleasure sustained from the critique of them, may assume the place of the political and critical operation itself. Perhaps more to the point is Benjamin’s trenchant if unheeded caution in The Arcades Project that: “There has never been an epoch that did not feel itself to be ‘modern’ in the sense of eccentric, and did not believe itself to be standing directly before the abyss.”5 There is little currency to be found critically in attempting to supersede another epoch’s abyss; all abysses are abysmal. More interesting, I think, remains the catalytic force through which multiple registers of the present are culled together and juxtaposed. And that, in its best moments, is what Capitalist Realism does.

Why has this book endured? Looking back, one thing we can certainly say about Mark’s book is that it’s short. I mean that as a compliment. It’s easy to read, and it has circulated with ease across multiple continents and locations. We might encounter it at a museum, a gallery, an activist space, a community bookstore. And it uses a sonic and felicitous term, capitalist realism, to tell us directly something that many of us already know, or already think we know, even if we’re not sure how or why we know it. Namely, that what is real is always pre-selected, thus it is realism, and that the social forces doing the selecting hope that the selecting itself will be a site of capitalization, that they will engender and re-engender an object and subject of capital. Thus, it is capitalist realism. It hardly matters that the term wasn’t Mark’s originally; it became his.

What kind of book is Capitalist Realism?Perhaps the historian of science Lorraine Daston and the literary critic Sharon Marcus might provide a clue. They have recently introduced the idea of the “undead text,” which they define as a text whose claims resonate beyond its autochthonous discipline — that may even have become outdated in its original disciplinary setting — yet continues to live a transdisciplinary life.6 Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one such example, they suggest. Kuhn’s book is short, essayistic, lacking in long scholarly engagements as often found in cumbersome footnotes; in its first printing, it even lacked an index. An undead text seems in retrospect to be oriented around a single claim, a big claim, one that often resonates in a single phrase. Kuhn offered “the paradigm shift” to explain how scientific knowledge is structured historically. Benedict Anderson, another of their examples, offered the “imagined community.” Simone de Beauvoir suggested that women were “the second sex,” yet noted that “one is not born but becomes a woman.”7

It seems to me now that Capitalist Realism might very well join this august pantheon of undead texts. In what discipline should we place Mark’s book? Cultural Studies? Media Studies? Literature? Film Studies? A cursory glance around the internet shows it appearing on courses in each of these disciplines. In fact, I located it on a political science syllabus as well. Indeed, I actually found a class simply called “Capitalist Realism.” It seems to have many homes. But it could also have no homes. This is the risk and the pleasure of making the big claim, of generalizing, of refusing the genres of so much academic writing and then, of course, of refusing the genres that separate our own habits of thought, otherwise known as academic disciplines. These habits Mark refused, and we are all better for it.

But of course, Mark was not simply struggling against history even though, as Jameson has said, “history puts its worse foot forward.” He was also fighting the feeling that contemporary history generates in so many of us, those who intercept its worse foot. We, or at least I, can’t know the vicissitudes of his depression, but, his work encouraged us to consider the fact that there is certainly something deeply impersonal, un-individual, and deeply uninteresting about depression. And this, I think, relates to time. Depression often generates the feeling of an endless time that is accompanied by an acute enervation. When will this feeling dissipate? Hopefully in the future. But there is no future as depressive time doesn’t seem to advance; it stalls. In the midst of a depression, there is no access to a reparative past nor is there the fantasy of a reparative future. But capitalism has a cure for that. Perhaps there is no better illustration of the real of the capitalist realist than the doctor who shows up to cure the pain, for a price, of course.

One of our most-cited popular (non-medical) studies of depression, namely Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, is deserving of more study in this regard.8 The author relates his own struggles with severe depression and shows us—indeed tells us—again and again, that money saved him. Fittingly, Solomon’s father was the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company that distributed, among other things, anti-depressants. Solomon’s Wikipedia page is instructive:

Solomon is the oldest son of Carolyn Bower Solomon and Howard Solomon, former chairman of Forest Laboratories and founder of Hildred Capital Partners; he is brother to David Solomon, also of Hildred Capital Partners. Solomon’s subsequent depression, eventually managed with psychotherapy and antidepressant medications, inspired his father to secure FDA approval to market citalopram (Celexa) in the United States.9

As a result of his best-selling and prize-winning book, Solomon became and continues to be a kind of progressive public intellectual who claims, among other things, that depression is a real disease, it is not the subject’s “fault,” and that, with the proper medical treatment, it can be managed. More can and should be written about this liberal narrative of depression. I introduce it here to demonstrate a certain possibility and freedom to be found in Mark’s own writings about depression and to show, again, that it is possible to cleave the boundaries of capitalist realism.

Echoing what he had written in Capitalist Realism,Mark noted in The Guardianthat “depression is the shadow side of entrepreneurial culture, what happens when magical voluntarism confronts limited opportunities. We need to reverse the privatization of stress and recognise that mental health is a political issue.”10 He there cited the late David Smail who he called a “radical therapist” and who was part of the anti-psychiatry movement.

Smail talked of friendship and support as the mechanism for managing depression. He himself was an anti-establishment thinker. But we need not be too quick to condemn the master. In fact, Freud himself once said, in a letter to Karl Jung, that “psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.” But love takes time and, as we all know, time is money.

1. Dehlia Hannah, in conversation with the author, March 19, 2013.
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich, The German Ideology. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
3. Simon Reynolds, “Mark Fisher’s k-punk blogs Were Required Reading for a Generation,” The Guardian,Guardian News and Media(18 Jan. 2017). www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/٢٠١٧/jan/١٨/mark-fisher-k-punk-blogs-did-٤٨-politics
4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1994) 34.
5. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000) 545.
6. “Undead Texts: Grand Narratives and the History of the Human Sciences,” Columbia Department of English and Comparative Literature (Accessed November 2018).www.english.columbia.edu/events/undead-texts-grand-narratives-and-history-human-sciences
7. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex(New York: Vintage, 1973) 301.
8. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
9. “Andrew Solomon,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation (28 Nov. 2019). www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Solomon
10. Mark Fisher, “Why Mental Health is a Political Issue,” The Guardian,Guardian News and Media (16 July 2012). www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue