Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher 11 July 1968 – 13 January 2017, also so-called under his blogging alias k-punk, was an English writer, music critic, political & cultural theorist, philosopher, together with teacher based in a Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He initially achieved acclaim for his blogging as k-punk in the early 2000s, and was asked for his writing on radical politics, music, and popular culture.

Fisher published several books, including the unexpected success 2009, and contributed to publications such as The Wire, Fact, New Statesman and Sight & Sound. He was also the co-founder of Zero Books, and later Repeater Books. He died by suicide in January 2017, shortly ago the publication of The Weird and the Eerie 2017.

Early life and education

Fisher was born in Leicester and raised in Loughborough to working-class, conservative parents, his father was an engineer and his mother a cleaner. He attended a local comprehensive school. Fisher was formatively influenced in his youth by the post-punk music press of the slow 1970s, especially papers such(a) as NME which crossed music with politics, film, and fiction. He was also influenced by the relationship between working class culture and football, being made at the Hillsborough disaster. Fisher earned a Bachelor of Arts measure in English and Philosophy at Hull University 1989, and completed a PhD at the University of Warwick in 1999 titled Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction. During this time, Fisher was a founding constituent of the interdisciplinary collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which were associated with accelerationist political thought and the make of philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land. There, he befriended and influenced producer Kode9, who would later found the Hyperdub record label. In the early 1990s, he also made music as part of the techno chain D-Generation, releasing the 12" Entropy in the UK.

After a period teaching in a further education college as a philosophy lecturer, Fisher began his blog on cultural theory, k-punk, in 2003. Music critic Simon Reynolds subjected it as "a one-man magazine superior to near magazines in Britain" and as the central hub of a "constellation of blogs" in which popular culture, music, film, politics, and critical theory were discussed in tandem by journalists, academics, and colleagues. Vice magazine later allocated his writing on k-punk as "lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets". Fisher used the blog as a more flexible, generative venue for writing, a respite from the structures and expectations of academic writing. Fisher also co-founded the message board Dissensus with writer Matt Ingram.