24/11/2019 “Mark Fisher was the intellectual leader of a generation”

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OBSERVATIONS 20 NOVEMBER 2019

“Mark Fisher was the intellectual leader of a generation”

Alex Niven on lost futures, Englishness and Corbynism.
BY JASON COWLEY

PAL HANSEN/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES

   
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T
he early weeks of 2017 were traumatic for Alex Niven. His newborn son was not sleeping. His
partner had su ered signi cant blood loss during a di cult birth. Then his friend Mark Fisher,
the founder of the K-Punk blog and the “intellectual leader of a generation” as Niven describes him,
killed himself. All this coincided with a period in which Corbynism seemed to be in retreat. Niven
could scarcely sleep and, as he writes in his latest book, New Model Island, he began listening
obsessively to Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon”. “It felt like a completely hopeless
moment,” he told me. “A moment of total disillusionment and defeat.”

He writes about this disillusionment and how it eventually lifted in New Model Island, which mixes
theoretical analysis about our disunited kingdom, polemic, memoir and cultural criticism and is
in uenced by the writings of Fisher. When we met recently at the New Statesman o ces in London, I
asked Niven about his friend’s legacy.

Fisher (pictured above) was 48 when he died and had spent much of his career feeling marginalised,
as a writer and academic. “Mark was a kind of precarious labourer on the fringes of academia,” Niven
told me. “He was marginalised in a very literal sense because apart from a year or two before he died
he only ever had temporary fellowships in further education.”

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24/11/2019 “Mark Fisher was the intellectual leader of a generation”

Fisher’s experiences resonated for a generation of millennial students who were highly educated but
did not have job security and could not a ord a home of their own. “That, in a sentence,” says Niven,
“is the basis of intellectual Corbynism. Corbynism is not really about Corbyn: it’s about this
intellectual generation that was waiting for its moment to cross over and hadn’t been able to because
of a precarious work culture.” 

What Niven calls the “neoliberalisation of education” a ected Fisher. He channelled his frustration
into writing Capitalist Realism (2009), which explores, as Fisher wrote, “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”.

Niven admires what he calls the “almost spiritual dimension to Mark’s writing. Capitalist Realism is
about how we are spiritually impoverished. We are trapped psychologically in this punitive, almost
dystopian, work culture.”

One consequence is people’s feelings of powerlessness. Another is their inability to conceptualise a

future that is di erent from the present. “The feeling that we can’t express alternative ways of being
and ways of thinking – for me that’s the main thing Capitalist Realism does well by personalising the
e ects of neoliberalism.”

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Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and he’s also worked as an editor on
the imprint Zer0 Books, which was founded by the novelist Tariq Goddard and published Fisher. His
latest project is editing the letters of the modernist poet Basil Bunting for Oxford University Press,
but as an academic he faces a conundrum. “This is the book I want to write” – he points to a copy of
New Model Island  – “and it says all the things I want to say but I will struggle to get it on to the REF
[the Research Excellence Framework] because it’s not an academic monograph. We have reduced
academic labour to quantitative measurements, to tables and targets. Capitalist Realism, which wasn’t
on a university press imprint, was marked low on the REF.”

This is regrettable. New Model Island can be dense in places. The language is often technical, in the
style of academic cultural studies. But there are passages of arresting memoir, it makes a powerful
political argument directly relevant to the constitutional moment, and it looks beyond the
(inevitable?) break-up of the United Kingdom through advocating a new kind of “radical
regionalism”. Above all else, it makes you think.

In person Niven, bespectacled and lightly bearded, is unassuming, even bashful. He speaks quietly
and slowly and, for a polemicist, is not at all combative. Like Fisher – like me! – he became a reader
because of the music press, particularly the NME. 

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“I was growing up in rural Northumberland and read the NME every week and it was a source of
education. But around 2001, after having sections on dance music and politicised letters pages, it
suddenly became very mainstream.”

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The response of Fisher and others to the decline of the NME and the conservatism of the mainstream
media was to start blogs and open up their own creative spaces. This, the architectural critic Owen
Hatherley wrote of his friend Fisher after his death, was “writing of a sort that wasn’t supposed to
exist any more”.

Or, as Niven puts it now: “The music press had sold out and we were the music press in exile.”

One of the ideas in Niven’s book is that Englishness is “de ned by absence or hiddenness”. He
struggles “to see a coherent basis for England and Englishness” and is sceptical of what he calls a
unitary patriotism. “The only time I’ve really felt English is watching the England football team. We
don’t exist as a national culture because we were an imperialist internationalist culture.”

The ultimate purpose of the book “was to try to imagine something beyond both Englishness and
Britishness if that were possible”. He’s on to something – because creating a new national imaginary
will surely be the de ning challenge of the age of Brexit.

Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman. He has been the editor of Granta, a
senior editor at the Observer and a sta writer at the Times.

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This article appears in the 20 November 2019 issue of the New Statesman, They think it’s all over

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