The ghost of Mark Fisher haunts contemporary culture in Britain and beyond. Spread far and wide via Mark Fisher memes for hauntological teens, referenced by the writers of hit TV show Industry, and endlessly parroted by every white man in his late twenties who ever listened to Burial, the late theorist prophetically predicted the bleak reality we’re living in today. And if he was a prophet, then Capitalist Realism was his bible. With more than 250,000 English-language units sold, the book begins with the declaration: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

The quote wasn’t actually a Fisher original — he traced it back to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek — but it’s kind of appropriate that one of his key terms is so tangled up with other thinkers. Fisher was an intellectual magpie. His writing, from the blog he posted under the name k-punk, to the academic publications of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) – the experimental collective with which he was closely associated – is filled with shiny images and ideas from a wide range of sources. Where else would you find analysis of a niche 70s horror show, next to a quote about Karl Marx, next to esoteric theories that would come to serve as foundational myths for Silicon Valley?

The novelist and publisher Tariq Goddard founded Zero Books and Repeater Books with Fisher after meeting at Warwick University in the 90s, and went on to publish many of his key works. “Culture then was, on the one hand, shallow lifestyle journalism, and on the other it was heavy-going, self-referential academic texts,” Goddard explains. Neither catered to “ideal” Mark Fisher readers – young people, broadly speaking, with a desire to understand the times they’re living in, but who can’t find a job or make a living out of their passions.

Goddard recently appeared at the ICA in conversation with the filmmaker Simon Poulter, who – working with his partner Sophie Mellor as Close and Remote – is making a collaborative film about Mark Fisher titled... We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher. Made with zero budget and no studio backing (and, to be completely honest, you can tell) the film brings together 70 collaborators, plus ongoing input from audiences across the world, in an effort to reflect Fisher’s dreams of “decapitalised cultural production” and “collective agency among the ruins of neoliberal atomisation”.

So far, it seems to be working, with the film gaining traction everywhere from the UK to Italy, to Argentina, Turkey, Brazil, Norway, and Venezuela. “The interesting thing about Capitalist Realism is that, although it’s quite culturally specific to the UK and British politics, it does translate over to South America, Italy, Australia, and Eastern Europe,” Poulter tells Dazed. “Because Mark’s writing is affective, emotional writing. The author is writing as if they are next to you, and knows the experience that you’ve had of austerity, being in college with no job prospects, or failing to get on the housing ladder.”

With these experiences only growing more common, and our sense of political agency at an all-time low, we’ve gathered some key terms from Fisher’s writing and beyond. At the very least, these terms can help us get a grip on the world around us – the world Fisher predicted so acutely. At best, they might help us imagine a different kind of world altogether.

CAPITALIST REALISM

The title of Fisher’s most popular book, first published by Zero Books in 2009, describes a pervasive belief in politics and culture that there exists no alternative to capitalism. Coming in the wake of 2008’s global financial crash, the book and phrase speak to the lack of an anti-capitalist imagination among both politicians and the wider population under neoliberalism (sound familiar?). “Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided,” Fisher writes, “but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious.” (TW)

REFLEXIVE IMPOTENCE

“By contrast with their forebears in the 1960s and 1970s, British students today appear to be politically disengaged,” Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism, drawing on his own experiences as a secondary school teacher in the 2000s. “While French students can be found on the streets protesting against neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, seem resigned to their fate.” Fisher describes this state as ‘reflexive impotence’: “They know things are bad… but [they also] know they can’t do anything about it.”

Elsewhere, Fisher describes the students he taught as living in a state of “depressive hedonia”: a depressive tendency towards pleasure-seeking, or hedonism, as palliative care for stark political disillusionment. Reading these words 15 years later, amid social media and endless streams of short-form content, the concept feels only more relevant. (SPM)

THE BIG OTHER

A necessarily slippery concept borrowed from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and filtered through Žižek, the big “Other” is essentially an imaginary, gullible figure who believes in the myths sold to us by “realisms” such as capitalist realism. Fisher’s chief example centres on Soviet Communism in the 20th century. “Who didn’t know that Really Existing Socialism (RES) was shabby and corrupt?” Fisher writes. “Not any of the people, who were all too aware of its shortcomings; nor any of the government administrators, who couldn’t but know. No, it was the big Other who was the one deemed not to know.” Following this line of thought, the big “Other” becomes necessary to the functioning of society: a collective suspension of disbelief that allows social systems to present themselves as the only way. (SPM)

DISAVOWAL

Disavowal is the cognitive dissonance that allows individuals to recognise the fictions underpinning capitalist life while continuing to participate in them. Fisher uses money as a key example here – “We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value” – but he observes disavowal as a ubiquitous and, ultimately, necessary phenomenon within capitalist realism. Consider this concept in relation to the big “Other”: if we all secretly know money has no intrinsic worth, then who sustains its value? In Fisher’s reading, it is the big “Other”: the imagined authority that continues to “believe” in the system on our behalf, allowing us to keep acting in ways that sustain the collective fiction.

Another, more relatable example is that of a call centre worker charging a tenant for an unpaid bill: “I’m sorry, I know you weren’t living at the property during that period, but there’s nothing I can do. Someone needs to pay this bill to resolve it in our system.” The worker may know the demand is absurd, but the system is treated as if it must still be obeyed. Disavowal and the big “Other”. (SPM)

HAUNTOLOGY

What do you do as a creative person who finds themselves at the “end of history”? What happens to a “futuristic” genre like electronic music when it seems as if there are no more futures to imagine? For Fisher, musicians like Burial, Boards of Canada, The Caretaker, and artists on the aptly-named Ghost Box label both confronted and embodied this grim reckoning in their “ghostly” and “hauntological” records, which yearn for a future we’ve been “cheated out of” – think vinyl crackles, warped samples, and eerie atmospheres. Borrowing the term “hauntology” from Jacques Derrida and the music critic Simon Reynolds, Fisher more broadly used it to describe what happens to culture under capitalist realism, i.e. “the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live”. (TW)

THE REAL

Another concept borrowed from Lacan-via-Žižek, the Real refers not simply to external reality, but to what cannot be fully absorbed into the systems and stories we use to make reality feel coherent. For Fisher, the Real is fundamentally obscured in contemporary society. He writes: “The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality.” His chief example is environmental catastrophe, which he describes as an “unrepresentable void for capitalist culture”. One means of tackling capitalist realism, then, is to point out the Real beneath its reality – essentially, finding glitches in the Matrix. (SPM)

THE UNNAMABLE THING

Here, Fisher invokes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s description of capitalism as the “unnamable Thing”: an amorphous and elusive “dark potentiality” that has haunted previous social formations. It is “unnamable” because it absorbs and subsumes pre-existing ways of being, turning even its apparent opposites into fuel. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher compares this to the Thing in John Carpenter’s 1982 film of the same name – “a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolising and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.” A more recent analogy might be X-Men’s Rogue, who steals the powers and memories of anyone she touches. The concept is central to Capitalist Realism because it helps explain why capitalism now seems so inevitable and final: it survives by absorbing whatever tries to resist it. (SPM)

THE VAMPIRES’ CASTLE

The 2013 essay Exiting the Vampire Castle is one of Fisher’s more controversial pieces of writing, not least because it mounts a defence of Russell Brand (around a decade before the comedian was publicly accused of sexual assault and emotional abuse... but still). Nevertheless, for Fisher’s defenders, it gets to the heart of a problem that still plagues parts of progressive left-wing politics. That is, if capitalism is “capable of metabolising and absorbing” anything it makes contact with, very legitimate social struggles against racism, sexism, and heterosexism aren’t immune to its capture. 

Specifically, Fisher argued that class solidarity had been undermined by an individualistic focus on self-categorisation, with the aim of having one’s own identity recognised by the people in power... in place of, say, actually changing the people in power. This system is what Fisher called the Vampires’ Castle. Fisher himself admitted that attacking the Vampires’ Castle could look like attacking the social causes it claims to represent (see: the very real pushback against wokeness that would follow in the 2020s). But this is what it wants you to think, he suggested. In reality: “Far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements.” 

Whether or not you agree with this assessment, it’s worth questioning whether it has something to do with the self-cannibalisation of any meaningful left-wing movements in British politics over the last decade, from Corbyn’s Labour Party, to Your Party and the Greens. Fisher’s proposed solution? Start treating identity as “provisional and plastic” rather than fixed and essential. “Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital.” (TW)

ONE MORE THING…

It should come as no surprise that the Vampires’ Castle was at its most potent on the internet – a space primed for public shaming. This leads us to a little-known phrase in Fisher’s lexicon, courtesy of Tariq Goddard. “One of his favourite films was Heat,” Goddard says, “and he described the position of everyone online as the position of Robert De Niro, when he could drive away with a girl and live happily ever after, but he can’t. He’s drawn back to obsessive self-destruction, to kill the guy that set him up.” 

Like De Niro’s character, Fisher suggested, everyone online is afflicted by the urge to do or say “just one more thing”. But, as Goddard points out, this is an illusion. “No one will be able to face down the real enemy. What you’re actually doing is chasing your own tail and going further into a labyrinthine world of non-consequence. It’s ultimately very self-destructive.” You might not find this phrase in any book by Mark Fisher, but it’s not hard to see its connection to his core ideas. (TW)

ACID COMMUNISM

Prior to his death in 2017, Fisher was working on a book titled Acid Communism; naturally, the phrase has become an obsession among Fisher fans and scholars. The term is hard to pin down, as the writer and posthumous Fisher editor Matt Colquhoun (AKA Xenogothic) wrote in 2018. Does “acid” refer to industrial chemicals, psychedelics, electronic music, or all of the above? And what brand of communism are we talking about here? Some clues lie in the proposed subtitle for the book – “On Post-Capitalist Desire” – and the introduction, which quotes Michel Foucault saying that today’s challenge is “not to recover our ‘lost’ identity, to free our imprisoned nature, our deepest truth; but instead  [...]  to move towards something radically Other”. Ultimately, Colquhoun suggests that the term Acid Communism expresses a desire for an experimental kind of leftist politics, harking back to the radical counterculture of the 60s, which could corrode the current status quo and break through to an unknown way of living – a future after the end of capitalism. (TW)

Find a list of upcoming screenings of We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher here.