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Leigh Claire La Berge. “‘Is There No Time?’ A Conversation with Mark Fisher.” Mediations 33.1-2(Fall 2019-Spring 2020) 167-172. www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/no-time “Is There No Time?” A Conversation with Mark Fisher Leigh Claire La Berge I met Mark Fisher some years after Alison Shonkwiler and I were lucky enough to have the opportunity to include his work in our edited volume, itself a very Fisher- derived project, Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa, 2014). I was in Cambridge, England at a conference on aesthetics and politics and Mark had come down for the day from London. This was the spring of 2016. In the United States, the presidential primaries were in full swing and, following the logic of American cultural imperialism, they were the talk of, well, the storied dining halls of the University of Cambridge. Like many progressive and Leftist onlookers, both in the United States and abroad, Mark was particularly excited about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Could it be? He wondered. Was it possible? I said I thought it was doubtful. Not because, I, the native informant, explained Bernie didn’t have popular support. I was sure then, and remain so now, that many of Bernie’s ideas were quite popular and would be broadly endorsed were they ever to see the light of day. But, of course, voting in the United States is its own labyrinthine procedure. Observers outside the country rarely understand this; indeed, observers inside the country struggle with it, too. Every state, and we have 50, has its own voting rules. Primary elections, as opposed to general, elections have their own rules. Votes don’t count equally. Before the primary election even started, a substantial minority of super delegates—remember those? Mostly lobbyists who buy seats in the upper echelons of the Democratic party—had already pledged their support for Hillary. Then you have to find your polling station. It may have moved without notification, as mine did that year. You may not be registered to vote. Even if you are registered, it still might not work. Technical issues, voting irregularities. And this is only the primary! In the general election, the difficulties expand considerably, as people of color are regularly “scrubbed,” or removed, from voting lists. The more conservative the state, the less likely people of color will be able to vote. Formerly or currently incarcerated people can’t vote. Identification requirements change. With a system like this, the philosopher Dehlia Hannah once said, you don’t need a conspiracy.1 168 Leigh Claire La Berge Mark looked amazed. “The thing is,” he said, “there is no time. That’s how they get you.” When he said that, I understood it in response to my explication of American voting impasses. And it’s true: it does take time to vote. It takes energy. It takes frustration. And it still doesn’t work. But that’s not all he meant. He hoped to indicate, too, an attenuation of time as possibility, time as community, time as both a feeling of access to the present—to respond, organize, and critique—as well as access to the past, to understand history. Likewise, time forms our conduit to the future and in it we might plan how things could be different. Of course, one thinks of Marx’s famous line from The Germany Ideology as perhaps the ur-ideal of how “having time” might take a social form: In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.2 Mark did function in various capacities: teacher, critic, editor, blogger (back when that was a term), academic, theorist. But perhaps better he occupied a role increasingly needed and uncommon on the Left: that of public intellectual. And I don’t mean, it must be said, liberal intellectual. We do have plenty of those, and their thoughts occupy the pages of The Nation, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among others. Mark’s critical interests were not directed toward carbon credits or public- private partnerships; he was engaged in systemic and structural criticism of our present. There was another distinguishing difference of Mark’s critical production: not only was he a public intellectual of the Left, but his subject area was, of course popular culture, particularly music — a “post-rave John Berger” he was once called by Simon Reynolds.3 We might also call him a pre-Facebook internet critic. What I mean with that comment is that, in retrospect, Mark’s editorial work and organizational work was at least as important as his theoretical work. To be a public intellectual means not only that one’s work circulates in public; it means now, and probably always has meant, rather, that one creates publics for one’s own work as well as the work of others to circulate in. Publics do not come to us pre-formed; the work of the intellectual is thus not to curate but to cultivate. Mark of course cultivated critique after critique and discursive space after discursive space from the consumerist effluvia in which we, the “consumer-spectator,” to use his term, find ourselves always-already immersed. Rereading Capitalist Realism some years after its publication is then to be reminded, almost randomly it feels, of some of the more idiosyncratic content that continues to attest to the truth of Deleuze and Guattari’s famous claim that capitalism is a Conversation with Mark Fisher 169 “motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.”4 They meant ideology, but this haunting of the discarded past permeates popular culture as well. As I re-read Mark’s book in preparation for this dossier, I can honestly say that I had not thought of Kurt Cobain or Nirvana once since, well, I last read the book. The re-emergence and stabilization of the very effluvia that destroys history is one of the risks inherent in the kind of methodology that Mark pursued. Now, again, I’m thinking about Nirvana. Object as symptom, symptom as readable, readable object as potentially utopian object. We know this method, of course; it seems a mix of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, the former provides the site for periodization; the latter offers the introduction of subject “supposed to” do any number of things: know, recycle, consume, experience anxiety and/or depression. Any account of Mark’s legacy, of course, must grapple with this question: does the methodology work? Is its critical apparatus realized? Mark’s gambit in Capitalist Realism was that, as suffocating and penetrating as the real was – presented by Jameson in his 1984 essay, “Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” – things have now gotten worse. That ethical inflection is not presented as such, of course. Rather it is presented as a narrative of an expanding capitalism that, somehow, always manages to be a little more totalizing. For me, that argument has never been persuasive. It wasn’t when Jameson made it, and it wasn’t when Mark updated it. Jameson had already said, as Alison Shonkwiler and I noted in our own introduction to Reading Capitalist Realism, that “those precapitalist enclaves of nature and the unconscious” have now, too, entered into circuits of production and reproduction. That would seem to be all of it, right? No more time, no more nature, no more unconscious. Mark would then add that the future, too, had been colonized by capital. Thus, citing Jameson and Žižek, he recycles the line that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Mark qualifies the sentiment by noting that “it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative,” to such a state of affairs (2, italics mine.). In the postmodern 1980s, he tells us, “there were still, at least in name, political alternatives to capitalism” (7). Even as Mark does provide more specificity of social texture than Jameson, for example his discussions of higher education in the UK, he too does endorse an over- arching narrative of totalizing decline. I see in this claim, however, a foreshortening not of the object of criticism, i.e., capitalism, but rather a foreshortening of criticism itself. This kind of argument confuses registers of historical time, narrative time, and argumentative sequence. It all too easily becomes yet another sacrifice on the altar of Leftist melancholia, Walter Benjamin’s well-known worry that an over-attachment to various forms of Leftist impossibility, as well as the pleasure sustained from the critique of them, may assume the place of the political and critical operation itself. Perhaps more to the point is Benjamin’s trenchant if unheeded caution in The Arcades Project that: “There has never been an epoch that did not feel itself to be ‘modern’ in the sense of eccentric, and did 170 Leigh Claire La Berge not believe itself to be standing directly before the abyss.”5 There is little currency to be found critically in attempting to supersede another epoch’s abyss; all abysses are abysmal. More interesting, I think, remains the catalytic force through which multiple registers of the present are culled together and juxtaposed. And that, in its best moments, is what Capitalist Realism does. Why has this book endured? Looking back, one thing we can certainly say about Mark’s book is that it’s short.

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