Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures (edited and with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun). London: Repeater Books, 2020. ISBN 9781913462482 Fisher, Mark (1 January 2010). Capitalist realism: is there no alternative?. Zero Books. ISBN 9781846943171. OCLC 699737863. Fisher spent most of his career on the periphery of the academy and mainstream journalism. Despite his rising fame, he was “utterly broke”, as Gilbert puts it, “eking out a living… from sessional teaching… and from freelance writing”. It was only late on that he held a permanent, full-time lecturing position at Goldsmiths. But Fisher’s marginality was not reclusive in spirit. He was deeply committed to collectivity: “Encountering Fisher was like joining a band; you shared a sense of purpose before you knew whether you were even going to like each other,” his friend, the novelist Tariq Goddard, reflected at his memorial. Fisher had a gift for bringing people together in a purposeful – and ultimately political – way, especially those who felt similarly confined to the outskirts of official culture. The irony, given the breadth of Fisher’s appeal, is that alienation is clearly a mainstream condition. This was why, Fisher explained to his students, he was taken with the term “postcapitalism”. It suggests “a victory that will come through capitalism”. “It starts from where we are. It’s not some entirely separate space… we’re not required to imagine a sheer alterity, a pure outside.” Speaking at his memorial, Jeremy Gilbert described Fisher as “a model of the public intellectual in the internet age”; the music critic Simon Reynolds, writing Fisher’s obituary in the Guardian, similarly described him as “an exemplary engaged intellectual”. Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there's no work to do. If neoliberalism's magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fanaticism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium.”

While Fisher’s suffering as a depressive is intrinsic to his work, the explicit naming of the condition in the book’s subtitle seems to me a mistake, giving the not-quite-accurate impression that Ghosts is a downer read. While Fisher’s outlook is certainly dark, it’s thrilling rather than deflating to watch him outrun and outwit the demons of his life, switching frenetically between zealous advocacy and bitter disparagement. His prose is the kind that has you compulsively underlining passages wherein ideas are inseparable from the sensual charisma of the language through which they are expressed. He evokes music not with technical jargon but a lyrical rainstorm of evocative, synaesthesic images – Burial’s Untrueis “an audio vision of London as a city of betrayed and mutilated angels”. He can be incisively aphoristic too: “In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost”; “Depression is, after all and above all, a theory about the world, about life.” Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1780992266 My ghosts are people and events from my own past life. Things I’ve done, or haven’t, things others have done , or didn’t. They haunt me sometimes. Confronted with capital’s intense semiotic pollution, its encrustation of the urban environment with idiotic sigils and imbecilic slogans no-one – neither the people who wrote them nor those at whom they are aimed – believes, you often wonder: what if all the effort that went into this flashy trash were devoted to a public good?” In the late 2000s, Fisher re-purposed the term " capitalist realism" to describe "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it". [21]The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life – or inner death – overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty. For the depressive, the habits of the former lifeworld now seem to be, precisely, a mode of playacting, a series of pantomime gestures (‘a circus complete with all fools’), which they are both no longer capable of performing and which they no longer wish to perform – there’s no point, everything is a sham.” in 1982). Japan also performed the song live on The Old Grey Whistle Test on 4 March 1982. [9] The band line-up included Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Rhodes and this new version of Ghosts, allegedly arranged by Sakamoto, remains unique to this performance. [10] Prominently Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert, 'Capitalist Realism and Neoliberal Hegemony: A Dialogue', New Formations, 80—81 (2013), 89—101 DOI:10.3898/NEWF.80/81.05.2013; Reading Capitalist Realism, ed. by Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014).

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016) | Repeater Books | Repeater Books". Repeater Books . Retrieved 16 July 2018. The song was played in episode six in the BBC series of Ashes to Ashes, a spin-off of Life on Mars, and, since April 2008, it has been used in the trailers for another BBC series, Waking the Dead. The song is also featured in the 2008 Norwegian film The Man Who Loved Yngve, and was played extensively in the series 2 premier of the ITV series McDonald & Dodds. Fisher, Mark, Goldsmiths, University of London". gold.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 22 June 2015 . Retrieved 1 August 2015. a b Fisher, Mark (30 May 2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books. p. 34. ISBN 978-1-78099-226-6. Arcand, Rob (14 December 2018). "The Marxist Pop-Culture Theorist Who Influenced a Generation". The Nation . Retrieved 22 January 2021.Woodard, Benjamin Graham (2017). "The Weird and the Eerie". Textual Practice. 31 (6): 1181–1183. doi: 10.1080/0950236X.2017.1358704. S2CID 149095699. fragments. This is the art of collage and sampling. It is art as found object, as coincidence, as accident, as Surrealism, as Dada, as Situationism. All made possible and motivated also by the dynamo of American opportunism, but with great love and inadequacy and tenderness.' Ocr tesseract 5.1.0-1-ge935 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9896 Ocr_module_version 0.0.16 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-0000218 Openlibrary_edition the kind of nostalgia that is now so pervasive may best be characterised not as a longing for the past so much as an inability to make new memories. Fredric Jameson described one of the impasses of postmodern culture as the inability 'to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience.