Matt Colquhoun - Egress : on mourning, melancholy and Mark Fisher

Published by Repeater Books

An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

Unit 11 Shepperton House

89-93 Shepperton Road

London

N1 3DF

United Kingdom

www.repeaterbooks.com

A Repeater Books paperback original 2020

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright Matt Colquhoun 2020

Matt Colquhoun asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design: Johnny Bull

ISBN: 9781912248872

Ebook ISBN: 9781912248889

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd

Colquhoun shuttles along the filaments of Mark Fisher's work with scholarly and deeply personal insights offering not only an introduction to his thought but a sense how we might apply it in the contemporary moment. I can't recommend this book enough. Laura Grace Ford, author of Savage Messiah

Through his Xenogothic blog, and now this often touching book, few have done as much to channel, ruminate around and speculate beyond the spectre of Mark Fisher. Steve Goodman (Kode9)

A remarkable (and inventive) tribute to Mark Fisher's capacities as a thinker, writer, and, perhaps most importantly, teacher. Filled with brilliant new insights into Mark's philosophies and contexts, Matt Colquhoun's book is at once a moving, deeply human act of mourning, as well as a call-to-arms to bring forward the future that Mark's writings make possible. Hua Hsu, The New Yorker

A remarkable interlacing of ambitious theoretical enquiry and raw personal memoir, Egress asks why collective thought and practice today is so broken that it takes a lacerating calamity to rediscover something like community. This is a work of thought in motion and in emotion, searching, deeply wounded but undefeated. Robin Mackay, Urbanomic

By turns a deeply personal memoir, a scholarly and readable introduction to Mark Fishers work, and a powerful extension of the apparatus of Fishers thought to new application. Colquhoun perfectly captures the feeling of despair in a time when political and personal hopelessness is ubiquitous, but shows a way through it. Michelle Speidel

The dead return to us as our world falls apart. Love and loss ripple into our lives and test our integrity every day. Brutal and provocative, this book is a haunting elegy to Marks crystalline mind. He sat on the shores of endless worlds. Mark Stewart, The Pop Group

at the limit of discursive thought experience tends not only toward the outside, toward death; it also tends toward contact with another, toward community. Indeed, so much that [t]here cannot be inner experience without a community of those who live it. Inner experience requires a community of lucky beings drawn together, bound together in their excessive movement, in their fall away from themselves. This, then, is where community is located: in the chance movement of insufficiency; in the openness that my being is in exceeding the requirements of homogenization, preservation, and justification in the movement outside oneself, which falls in love, dies, laughs, cries, mourns, celebrates, suffers.

Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, Editors Introduction in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication

14th January 2017

Saturday one week into the new semester at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The library is busy, as it always is.

The winter sun is making the days dark early and it has been raining heavily all week.

My friends and I all of us postgraduate students are stationed on the second floor, each working on two essays simultaneously, both due on the following Tuesday. I am trying my best to be productive and not procrastinate when my phone lights up on the desk in front of me.

Taking any excuse for a five-minute Twitter break, I pick it up mindlessly to read a push notification on my phones lock screen, telling me that a tweet from the account is proving popular within my social network:

In memory of Mark Fisher (1968-2017), an inspiration and a friend. Our thoughts are with his family.

Im confused. I pass my phone over the desk divide to a friend writing an essay for Marks class. They, in turn, pass it to the person next to them. The tension passes like a wave from one person to the next. No one knows what to say. We start to quietly panic as our minds race, exchanging concerned looks rather than words, unable to make sense of such little information and still aware of the fact that we are in a library.

I soon start receiving messages from others about the tweet, asking if Ive seen it or have any further information. Everyone asks the same question, incredulously, not expecting any real answer: Is it true?

At first, we assume it to be some kind of hoax or misunder standing. Wed heard from Mark just last week. Hed sent an apologetic email to his whole class saying that he would have to cancel his first lecture of the new semester because hed broken his arm and had to go to the doctor about it. We didnt know how hed managed to hurt himself but we began to wonder. Maybe it had been a bad enough break that he needed to have surgery on it? Perhaps there had been complications in the operating room? It hadnt seemed all that serious

I decided to put Marks name into Google followed by the word dead, cringing at the bluntness of the search function but not knowing how else to corroborate the rumour. A former keyboardist in the band Wham!, also named Mark Fisher, had died just a few weeks ago, in December 2016. Surely they meant this Mark

But Repeater Books were Marks publisher, having just released his latest book, The Weird and the Eerie. Furthermore, Repeater was an enterprise that Mark himself had helped set up with colleagues from his previous venture, Zero Books. They wouldnt get this wrong Surely

We sat in silence, continuing to work between short, shocked bursts of disbelief. After just a few minutes, we stopped. What am I doing? someone said. Whats the point now?

Later that evening, our worst fears were confirmed. On Friday 13th January 2017, Mark Fisher had died by suicide.

***

In the months that followed Marks death, answering the question Whats the point now? became an intense collective project within and around Goldsmiths, informing a great deal of activity, including but by no means limited to a summer term public lecture programme organised by students and staff within the Visual Cultures department that Mark himself had been a beloved part of.

Titled The Fisher-Function, the lecture series ran for seven weeks throughout July and August 2017. The sessions were built around a selection of lesser-known works made by Mark in various different registers from blogposts and academic papers to musical mixes and audio essays.