Influential art & music writer and political theorist Mark Fisher, known as K-Punk, has died
Influential music writer and political theorist Mark Fisher, known as K-Punk, has died. Zöe Fisher, his wife, confirmed the news on his personal Facebook page, after his publisher Repeater Books broke the news on Twitter Saturday.
Fisher’s influential K-Punk blog used a cultural theorist’s lens to examine underground and mainstream music throughout the aughts. 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 chronicling topics such as his mental health struggles. The book also explored Fisher’s ideas on “hauntology,”which is a method 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).”
In 2009, Fisher released Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, which argued that after 1989, capitalism presented itself as the only viable political-economic system. The Weird And The Eerie, his final book, was published two weeks ago.
As news of Fisher’s death broke, musicians, writers and other theorists took to social media to pay tribute.
source: vice
