This is probably the wrong place to write this.
Everyone knows the beginning of The Communist Manifesto, where Marx talks about how society is dividing ever more into two great classes in struggle. The history of a lot of Marxism is the history of sophistry developing out of this image, as the Ragnarök failed to materialise as dramatically as Marx painted it, as it came more slowly, more relentlessly, more inconspicuously. Swap out The Bourgeoisie and The Proletariat for Capital and Labour, keep uncertain of your terms. Swap out Capital and Labour for The State and The People. There are things to be said for keeping hold nuances and distinction, for uncertainty, and there are political pitfalls all around. But those things and nuances are in truth slight and meagre.
Brecht tells a story about this. He talks about how his destructive character, Herr Keuner, receives a visit from a philosophy professor. Instead of listening to what the professor says, Keuner watches him and comments on his behaviour, how he walks and talks. The professor tells Keuner that his attitude isn’t in question, but rather the wisdom of what he has to say. Keuner replies, “you talk obscurely, and you create no light with your talking. Seeing your attitude, I’m not interested in what you’re getting at.”
Attitude, since Brecht, has been underrated by the left, not just as a way of behaving towards the world but a way of understanding it. Amongst theorists and high talkers it isn’t taken seriously. But it is because of attitude more than anything else that I’m so sad to hear of Mark Fisher’s death, and it comes a few weeks after the death of Robert Dellar who I haven’t written anything about either, not least because drugs for my mental health were stopping me writing much. So this is about both of them. I wasn’t friends with either of them but they were both friends with lots of my friends and I read their stuff. I crossed paths with both occasionally, but mainly they both had totally different canons to what I know and care about, different cultural, artistic and political interests. But the thing that marked them both out, at least in their writings or where I heard them say things, was something about attitude, and in both it was the kind of attitude that Brecht’s Keuner knew – the one that hated obscurantism and knew itself to be a weapon in struggle, albeit a tender one. And with that self-knowledge they illuminated the tenderness in other people’s struggles too, which before they had no words for.
If attitude has been underrated by the left then it has been even more so by the institutions and corporations that deal with mental health. Attitude is apparently no response to madness, torment, or torpor. But between the two of them, in quite different ways, both Mark and Robert leave us with the thought that it really might be, that it might cut through medical bunk, that it might expose the class lines that run through it. And they lent themselves to so many people who couldn’t see that otherwise – both rescued many people, and built foundations for truly radical ways to see and deal with the lived realities of the mental health system (and its opposites.)
Society is dividing more and more into two great classes, and the thing is that when you think about that in terms of attitude you could never be mistaken in knowing that both of them would always be on our side. Even when that division might seem slow, relentless, and inconspicuous. You might not always like how they were part of our side. But those of us who thought sometimes that some piece of high theoretical sophistication – actually fuck that, sophistry – could just correct that, had missed the point as much as Brecht’s professor. Today our side in this struggle is weaker, and for them we should do everything we can to make sure we win.
My love and thoughts are with all of those who were close to them.