Reviews
Sitting up all night reading this: A Bad Idea, in hindsight. Lots of interesting-but-saddening stuff about the slow cancellation of the future, and how we're haunted by the past and can never really progress. Even though I wasn't familiar with all the artists he talks about, I could still understand what he was driving at. Good stuff
Mark Fisher was a fantastic writer, thinker, and critic; where this book fails is in its editing. Compiled of blog posts, essays, articles, and reviews from ~2006-2013, Ghosts of My Life's organization would lead one to believe that Fisher's scope of experience and knowledge were extremely limited - that he had only read Ballard, only heard Joy Division, only seen Tarkovsky. In addition, the book contains a distracting amount of typographical errors. All things considered, however, Fisher's insight and knowledge shine through these inadequacies, allowing for an enjoyable and enlightening read. He highlights the postmodern failure to deliver the future promised by the social democracy of the 1970's; rather, neoliberalism has left us in a state of haunted dejection, ghosts of a society that could have been. Note: Fisher has written extensively on depression at the personal level, but, despite Ghosts of My Life's subtitle, very little of that writing is in this book; the through-line of hauntology in media takes center stage.
I picked this up as part of my effort to start implementing a “smart notes” system, since I’ve been intrigued with the Zettelkasten concept lately and have been reading How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking. The subjects of past and present, time, and nostalgia are really intriguing for me, and I’ve wanted to read more perspectives on hauntology. (Some parts of this were drawn straight from the notes—smart indeed…) (Full disclosure: I only read, at least as of now, “‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’”, his two bits about the Caretaker, and the Joy Divsion essay. Those were the main ones I was interested in, and given this is a collection of seperate peices, I don’t feel bad about that, but just keep in mind these are what I’m reviewing here.) Fisher was certainly super smart, and he examines a lot of interesting topics, asking interesting questions. Unfortunately, though, he frustates me to high hell with some of his conclusions. The introductory essay (“‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’”) was the one that really drove me nuts, because so much of it has aged really poorly, or just didn’t ring true to me. There’s two particular quotes that demonstrate what I mean: Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? I actually laughed at this, because with the advent of genres like hyperpop this is hilariously inaccurate. Play 100 gecs to someone in 1995 and they’d probably be exrtremely confused. Interestingly, they’re an example of hauntological music (at least in my opinion), because they’re drawing on crunkcore (e.g. 3OH!3) and experimental electro-pop (e.g. Crystal Castles) from about 2008. Maybe one could argue that Crystal Castles was drawing on 80s music, but I’d ultimately say that it still proves my point contra Fisher, because Crystal Castles too likely wouldn’t be mistaken for something pre-1995. His points about this topic also made me think of Radiohead, because OK Computer came out in ‘97, and from then on they made music that was both distinctly their own and commenting on many of the same topics Fisher brings up. (Perhaps their electronica work could be seen as derivative of experimentalists from the 60s and earlier, but again, I think they added their own take to it rather than merely repackaging it.) It’s clear to me that now the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised – not in the far distant future, but very soon – as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s. This aged poorly, at least for my generation and people a bit older. That time period is remembered pretty fondly, and I think it will remain so compared to the decade since Fisher wrote this. Of course the Bush/Blair era was dark in many ways, and the optimism of the early Obama years might be off-putting to someone like Fisher, but I highly doubt the Trump era is going to be much more fondly recalled: maybe others feel differently, but contrary to what many of us expected, I don’t think we ended up with much great art in defiance of these new dangerous forces. (Not to say there was none—Parquet Courts came out with some of their best work as a response to these changes. Along with the 1975, who I think were engaging in a very deliberate form of hauntology, albeit one much different from Fisher’s vision.) I do wonder how much of his feeling about 2003-2011 is a result of his generational placement and plaxce of origin; I’m not too familiar with his k-punk work, so I don’t know how in touch he was with the youth of the time. The piece about Joy Division was far less frustrating, because I think he did capture a lot of what made them interesting. His remarks on depression (“Depressive ontology is dangerously seductive because, as the zombie twin of a certain philosophical wisdom, it is half true…he sees himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junky hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions”) are quite on-point—-perhaps for quite sad reasons. I do feel like he ignores some of the more hopeful-feeling songs Curtis wrote towards the end (“Atmosphere” and “Ceremony” in particular), although this might be because of a suspicion that this hope was actually suicidal ideation—I don’t beleive that, but there’s a case for it. I think Fisher is far more effective, at least for me, in his assessment of particular works, rather than as a theorist. I probably won’t read Capitalist Realism any time soon, because if these essays are any indication I’ll end up wanting to vent into the void—although perhaps that’s more productive than I’d like to admit.
i love mark fisher so much, everything about his work is so meaningful and so important. i love how he writes and how his mind works. this, after capitalist realism, is essential reading.
