Mark Fisher in conversation with Michael Schapira

Full Stop travels to the U.K. and the world of politics today to speak with blogger, teacher and author Mark Fisher about the mordant pleasures of cultural critique. Fisher has been running his blog, k-punk, since 2003, where he writes about politics, philosophy, literature, music, and cybernetics. In his recent book, Capitalist Realism, Fisher explores “some of the affective, psychological and political consequences of the deeply entrenched belief that there is no alternative to capitalism.” And what’s more, he’s a man of discerning taste, as evidenced by the fact that he made a point of finding time during his first trip to New York City to head out to Coney Island and pick up a Warriors shirt for his young child. Pay attention to one of the more insightful voices out there today!
Can you describe in broad strokes where Capitalist Realism came from?
There were a number of threads running through my blog, and one of them had to do with politics. Not politics in some distant sense, but politics particularly in relation to my working life, which through a lot of the early years of the blog was as a lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at a further education college. (Ed. note: a further education college is similar to a community college in the U.S., but most students would be 16 to 19 years old.)
One of the stories that came into the blog a bit and sits behind Capitalist Realism is the story of recovery from depression, which was a large trajectory of my life in that last decade. Having done a doctorate in philosophy and literature, I was mentally destroyed in lots of ways and felt pretty useless and unemployable. Very burnt out, I found it very difficult to read any serious work. It was teaching and blogging that actually rehabilitated me. Teaching sort of re-engaged me in the world. When you are doing postgraduate research you can feel very disconnected from the world and your work can feel very pointless. But with teenagers you really have to front up because they won’t let you get away with much nonsense; they will interrupt you every 90 seconds, etc. It was difficult, but it was also an excellent grounding and initiation back into the world.
Alongside that I started blogging. Blogging was a bit like when Zizek says that you can’t sit down and think that you’re going to write a book. You have to think that you’re just going to write a few paragraphs, and then the paragraphs will build up and build up and suddenly a book forms. In the same way, blogging for me started off as not being that serious. The dead heavy weight of scholarly responsibility can interject and cause you think that you can’t possibly write on anything unless you looked at every possible source, which is of course impossible, but nevertheless you still feel the guilt and weight that goes along with that. The blog didn’t really have that. It was just a different space. I didn’t have that weight and responsibility and maybe I could just try out some ideas.
Your rehabilitation from depression seemed to be coextensive with a growing realization of the problems racking higher education and public services in the wake of New Labour. Can you describe the political context of your book a bit for American readers?
What I started to notice very strongly in my working life were the changes that had happened over this period. In lots of ways, Capitalist Realism is really a study of what it was like to work in public services under Blairism and New Labour. We could assume that the neoliberal right would push the interests of business, but we couldn’t necessarily assume that a notionally left-wing party would be doing this as well. There is a certain novelty about that, or rather we take it for granted now, but we ought not to in lots of ways.
What I was experiencing firsthand under New Labour was the imposition of a whole battery of new measures, particularly to do with self-surveillance. For example, [as teachers] we had to fill in 50-60 page long logbooks with “strategies for improvement,” bullet pointed, etc. The year in which I was made redundant, we were required to fill in “Active Schemes of Work.” No one really knew what this meant. This is kind of the Kafkaesque nightmare of these things. Everyone is second-guessing what they think the bureaucratic authorities might want to see. The bureaucratic authorities themselves, when they emerge – these would typically be the Inspectorate, employed by the government to come and check up on colleges – wouldn’t necessarily know either what exactly was required. These people were always interpreting this set of bureaucratic criteria that are slightly Talmudic. It would be one thing to have a set of clear and determinate demands that you could meet. But it is another thing to have this vague legalese, which is capable of multiple interpretations, and which is also guaranteed to maximize the anxiety of everyone who is involved.
It was really the encounter with these kinds of procedures that was one of the main starting points for the work that went into Capitalist Realism. Beginning in a raging exasperation, in writing the book I was able to see these kinds of things as systemic as opposed to just affecting me...

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Michael Schapira @'Full Stop'