At the heart of the work of Mark Fisher is something he called “popular modernism.” By this, he meant a kind of culture — most often found in music — that straddled the experimental and the mainstream. While popular, it required work to be fully understood, doing away with past forms, following a modernist “make it new” imperative. As an idea, it was based on the claim that the most interesting postwar culture had developed out of a flourishing welfare state, made by the students of municipal art schools and the recipients of higher education grants.

Pop modernism, Fisher argued, embodied a sense of possibility that never fully recovered from the thoroughgoing attack it underwent in the 1980s. However, he was by no means ignorant of contemporary pop music: he went from praising the “sadness” and “ambivalence” of early Rihanna to applauding the “existentialism” of Dido. While he found a natural habitat in polemic, Fisher’s primary work was a matter of fleshing out alternative realities, breathing form into the lost futures that haunt our present.

An 800-page volume, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, was released in 2018 by Repeater Books, the publishing house Fisher set up with Tariq Goddard after leaving Zero Books. It collects writings, interviews, and blogs from 2004 to 2016 and attempts to set in order the thinking of a figure whose 2017 death was a great loss to socialist intellectual life.