Like most people, I was late to the party. I only read his landmark work, Capitalist Realism, last year, and found it to be a flawed but ultimately prescient book that described so much of the contemporary cultural landscape, even if obliquely. And it was just recently that I read Ghosts of My Life, a collection of essays on politics, music, film, and literature that describes our cultural landscape so perfectly, less through any kind of overarching vision than by hitting various touchstones, each of them with an elegant and precise critical eye.
If there is a theme, it's his notion of hauntology, a term he cribbed from Jacques Derrida, whom he admits is a frankly impenetrable writer, but which can loosely be described as a nostalgia for a time when a future seemed possible. In a world of incipient climate change, increasing global political uncertainty, and an economic recovery that seems tenuous at best, we are ultimately haunted by the futures that could have been.
This seems like a pretty abstract, even abstruse notion. And yet the more I think about it, the more I have to conclude that we live in an essentially hauntological era.
What we as a public are offered as a route forward is cold comfort. Neoliberal capitalism seems to suggest that progress is purely therapeutic, with physical wellness, self-care, positivity, and mindfulness offered as personal panaceas, an Instagram mentality that means next to fucking nothing when you look at how little is in your bank account. The only social thought given is a sort of woke neoliberalism in which it doesn't matter if you're gay, trans, whatever, as long as you keep buying, keep clicking. In which public shaming of the problematic and cancel culture are the only accessible avenues of justice.
Meanwhile, reactionary ideologies in the form of Trumpian conservatism, Putinist traditionalism, Salafist Islam, and Hindu nationalism allow for a sort of cathartic, collective rage, permitting solidarity, so long as that solidarity is done in the name of the oppression of others. And on the eastern edge of the Asian continent, Xi Jinping's China and Singapore under the People's Action Party (along with authoritarian governments in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines, as well as the essentially-colonized petits régimes in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar) marry exploitative economic theories with brutal political repression and icily efficient technocracy, suggesting that the only way out of the world's current quandaries is through state capitalism.
What Fisher suggests is emphatically not that the past was better (we all know it wasn't), but that the hope that the future would be more enlightened, more rational, more equitable has been decimated. The examples he cites include the music released on the Ghost Box label (Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, etc.) with its samples from 1970s educational films and hypnotic analog synths, or William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, a series of minimalist electronic samples played on modern machinery until they quite literally destroyed themselves as they played.
This same hauntology, Fisher believes, is found in older media too – in films like Memento and The Shining, in '90s jungle music, in the novels of J.G. Ballard which show the human tendency towards base violence triumphing over technological intervention, in the Joy Division albums made when Britain seemed to be teetering on the brink of collapse.
And I see it in the contemporary trends towards ambient music and lo-fi hip-hop. Being an American, my points of reference are more likely to be Ariel Pink, Danny Brown, Death Grips, Laurel Halo, Earl Sweatshirt, Chromatics, or SZA, all of whom seem like their frantically trying to assemble something out of the disused, analog bits of a not-too-distant past. Or in the viscerally disgusting and eerily familiar VHS world of Adult Swim shows like Tim and Eric, or the work of filmmakers like Panos Cosmatos, Nicholas Winding Refn, and Alex Garland who conjure up the imagery of '60s and '70s sci-fi.
You could say I'm cherry-picking examples from my own cultural sphere. But isn't it a major feature of the top of the charts too? Really, what's that different about The Weeknd, Drake, or Lana Del Rey, and all of their pop songs composed of distorted fragments of past hopes? Or all the Soundcloud rappers for who try to palliate their anxiety with Xanax and MDMA, only to be left as isolated and fucked up as ever? What's different about the way that young-adult dystopian novels and their filmed versions depict the tragedy of inheriting a world in which promise has been destroyed?
When there is hope, it exists purely in the realm of the magical, the unknowable. We watch Marvel movies because hope on our Earth seems so alien, witchiness and astrology trend because the world around us seems so grim, and mediocre young men buy into the Jordan Peterson bullshit because his brand of pop-Jungianism seems to give them a secret code, and gives them any easy target for blame in feminists and academic postmodernists.
People still have their dreams, after all.
And the horror of the failed present is never stated outright, it is merely alluded to. It is haunted.
It strikes me as no coincidence that the last golden age of the ghost story was in the late 19th Century. It was likewise a time of ultimate transition, as the Western world moved from an agricultural to an industrial basis of production, as the urban proletariat became cemented as an entity, as the basis for empire-building were transformed from a primitive, irrational desire for brute conquest to a coldly rational expansion of state and market power.
And in our new Gilded Age, we too are surrounded by ghosts.
Excellent work, danke.
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