Mark only died two years ago and wrote a lot after Capitalist Realism. To talk about him as “dated,” or about technology “in his day” or “things [he] wasn’t around to see” (more like: “You’re talking about things I haven’t done yet”) artificially casts him as an artifact of the past, which is an especially bad fit for someone so uncommonly prescient.
Potential collectivities populate his published writing going back to the mid-90s, and I’d say his search for workable new ones became increasingly central and urgent in the last 10-12 years, culminating in the unfinished Acid Communism.
Robin Mackay:
I’ve been trying to think of what remains after the physical body’s gone, when the singularity of a life can no longer rely on that frail support and needs other carriers. I try to think about it in a way I think he’d appreciate: in terms of an abstract, impersonal force acting in the present tense. The spectre isn’t a matter of pretending he’s still here in person—as if the notion of a ‘person’ wasn’t precisely what was at issue—or of commemoration or superstition, but—to use a word of his own invention—a question of hyperstition: What is the Fisher-Function? How did it make itself real, and how can we continue to realise it? Many of us naturally feel a need to ensure this is a moment when the force he brought into our world is redoubled rather than depleted. And to do so, to continue his work and our own, we have to try to understand his life, and the consequences of his death, at once horrifying and awakening, as a part of the Fisher-Function. And I don’t simply mean the intellectual contributions that we can appreciate, extend, take forward into the future; I also mean what we need to learn in terms of looking after ourselves and each other, right now.
