I have read all of his books now. I completely missed them when he was alive. I find this kind of amazing. We both come from East Anglia, have similar interests in TV, music, and films, he wrote for Wire Magazine, and he’s fucking brilliant.
I just finished K-Punk, his collected writings, and jesus, the book’s bloody huge, and it took me a while to finish it. It made me think to a degree I have not had to in a while. By that I don’t mean I’ve been an unthinking zombie with fluff between my ears, but we often buy things that coincide with our world view or at least don’t challenge much about it.
I feel like Laurie Penny was the last person to engage me like this. There is something rooted in the Britishness of it that also was key. Perhaps your forties is where you start looking more at the reflective surfaces around you, and deconstructing the way that your life is put together.
I know, being in a place where I am an alien, where the prevailing attitude is not alien friendly, where intellectualism is a diminishing currency, I have started to think more carefully about what I am doing and how I am doing it.
Late capitalism has to be of interest to anyone living through it with half a brain. How much does it take to see that things aren’t working? The current pandemic making obvious the threadbare nature of many institutes and iterations of the organisational infrastructure of different countries makes Fisher and his ideas even more relevant.
The fact that there are people out there able to peer through the obfuscating layers of bullshit into the place where the truths can be located is essential when we are be run into the ground by an ill-informed oligarchy. Do I agree with everything he says? No. But that seems beside the point. Don’t we need more intellectual whetstones upon which we can sharpen ourselves and the overall thinking of the groups we belong to?
If you haven’t read anything by him, you need to. Now.