In particular, Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, a compilation of some of Fisher’s film, television, and music reviews, encapsulates so much of the modern zeitgeist it makes Fisher’s ultimate suicide wound all the more deeply. Seeing things as he does, his incisiveness regarding the fabric of modern society seems to be so intensely focused, he sees into the core of our world. That it was impossible for him to go on is an indictment of our failure to change.
As I write this review, I am listening to the drone of William Basinski’s “dlp 1.1” from The Disintegration Loops. It is one of many albums that Fisher discusses and, of the ones I’ve listened to, it is one of utmost beauty. Basinksi’s process was to play an analog tape on repeat. In the process of its digitization, the tape deteriorates and so the repetitive ambience of the song(?) is gradually superseded by its own crackle. Fisher is right; it’s haunting. It’s all the more haunting when you discover, as I just have, that Basinksi completed the project the morning of September 11th, 2001 and he then watched the aftermath of the attacks from a rooftop. This feels a prescient soundtrack and, in my view, is the perfect way to underscore Fisher’s project overall.
The first section of Ghosts of My Life is the one most explicitly dedicated to a discussion of time. Fisher begins by discussing a TV show of great interest to him as a young teenager, and notes that twenty years would pass before he would be able to see the show again. He writes that “by then, thanks to VHS, DVD, and Youtube, it seemed that practically everything was available for re-watching. In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost.” It feels to me that much of Fisher’s work deals with a future that is lost: but how can one lose something that has yet to exist? Tennyson’s “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved all” takes on a haunting new spectral dimension, a deeper sorrow at no longer even knowing the parameters of what it means to lose something.
My enthusiasm is causing me to get ahead of myself (perhaps the future is not lost, after all). To head towards a momentary retreat, however, let me give you a basic outline of Fisher’s book. Ghosts of My Life is a collection of what I would call, to borrow a phrase from Fisher himself, “orphaned memories,” largely rooted in film, television, and music (with minor references to literature). He writes about the band Joy Division, television adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a number of proto- and dubstep-adjacent artists like Burial and The Caretaker, The Shining, Kanye West and Drake, and the films of Christopher Nolan. He’s a true polymath and yet he is able to bring together these diverse mediums under his common themes to paint a broad picture of the modern world.
Much of Fisher’s work seems to be underscored by Franco Beradi’s work on “the slow cancellation of the future.” In Beradi’s work, the future is ceasing to exist, “but when [he] say[s] future, [he] is not referring to the direction of time; [he] is thinking rather of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity”. Fisher identifies the “cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever-progressive development, albeit through different methodologies.” Here, Fisher’s work on capitalism is intertwined, since he expands on the teleological and technocratic propensities in Marxism and Hegelian thought. Fisher says that this idea of constant progress was so pervasive for his generation that it is “very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it and look at reality without this kind of temporal lens.” He says, “I’ll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality.” Indeed, Mark. With our apologies.
Part of what makes the present day so challenging for Fisher, and perhaps for us all, is that the way things have turned out would suggest there is no future to look forward to. Fisher looks to artists like Kraftwerk and their supposed futurity and yet sees that “the present moment is marked by its extraordinary accommodation to the past. More than that, the very distinction between past and present is breaking down. In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.” Fisher gives the example of hearing a song on the radio that could have been released decades ago. I’m sure that I’ve had that experienced, and I would give particular examples of songs that show time is out of joint, but their very anonymity is kind of the point. Instead let me refer to the resurgence of Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill,” a blast from the past that is making the charts of today. I’m sure other examples abound of time having folded over on itself. What is lost, in my view, is the potential of what might have been had nostalgia not incarcerated experimentation—that is, we’ve lost what never was.
In one of Fisher’s lengthier passages, he elucidates this phenomenon. He notes how today, “rather than the old recoiling from the new in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognizable forms,” of which, Fisher notes, popular music is the most clear example. I myself would add television to that list so that we could clearly delineate the simultaneity of shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation or Friends and How I Met Your Mother (or the nostalgia-driven spinoff How I Met Your Father). Fisher argues that “the very sense of future shock” has disappeared in the 21st century; the acceleration of musical evolution from the 60s to the 70s to the 80s has come to a halt and if you played records from today in 1995, very few people would be jolted into consciousness—or so goes Fisher’s thought experiment. Instead, people would be shocked at how little music changes over the twenty years that follow. “While 20th century experimental culture was seized by a combinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available,” Fisher writes, “the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet.”
Of course, Fisher draws on a range of thinkers and theorists to help elucidate his claims. Again drawing on a Marxist theorist, Fisher cites Fredric Jameson’s claim that we long for a reinvention of form, rather than content. Fisher gives the example of Star Wars, which in its originals was new and used technology of the time to excel beyond itself. Now the spinoffs follow the proven formula but its sense of futurity has waned as technology advanced. Where technology used to drive us forward, Fisher argues, “the nostalgia mode subordinated technology to the task of refurbishing the old.” It’s a theoretical move that I think echoes so many theatregoer complaints: “Everything is a sequel. Everything is a remake. Everything is based on a book.” Instead of creating new ways of telling stories, instead our forms “disguise the disappearance of the future as its opposite.” From a stylistic standpoint, Fisher’s grammar is evocative and clever in this respect: “The future didn’t disappear overnight. Beradi’s phrase ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ is so apt because it captures the gradual yet relentless way the future has been eroded over the last thirty years.” The use of present perfect continuous in “the future has been eroded” states something in the present which relies on a continuous past of erosion in response to something that has yet-to-happen, namely the future. The future has slipped away before we ever shared in its moment.
It’s equally interesting to see where exactly Fisher does not draw his alliances. In particular, “hauntology” as a term was popularized by Jacques Derrida [it’s worth noting that hauntology and ontology sound the same in French]. Fisher admits to his frustration with Derrida and deconstruction, arguing that it “installed itself as a pious cult of indeterminacy which at its worst made a [...] virtue of avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of scepticism, which included hedging, infirmity of purpose, and compulsory doubt in its followers.” As someone who finds a lot of pleasure in deconstruction, this is inflammatory. As someone who values actually making change in the world, it’s refreshing to see such a direct criticism. Fisher notes the “quasi-theological imperatives” of Deconstruction that are fueled by “Heidegger’s priestly opacity” and “literary theory’s emphasis on the ultimate instability of any interpretation.” I quite like how Fisher puts a fine point on it: “Derrida’s circumlocutions seemed like a disintensifying influence.” The debate has often occurred in the academy: is Deconstruction simply meant to tear down? To examine the gaps in language alongside its slippage? To what end? While many claim that it can and does serve a meaningful function, the pragmatism of Fisher is given a particularly scathing voice, one that would be well-worth examining in—that’s funny, I was about to say in the future(!).
But what of Fisher’s actual reviews? We’ve gotten bogged down in some of the theoretical framework of his approach, but it would be worthwhile to consider the quality of Fisher’s reviews as reviews. A good critic, in my mind, elucidates central ideas in texts. The critic opens the work for exploration and, when possible, is charitable to the text in question. Fisher has a great knack for description, noting for instance that “it is as if the mould growing on the archives is the creative force behind the sound.” What a beautiful description of a musical project. It could have been lifted from a poem or novel. Fisher’s insightfulness and the beauty of his descriptions sent me exploring the source material. If we are at all familiar to one another, you’ll be surprised to know that Fisher had me hunting down dubstep and learning to appreciate, at least a little bit, of what Drake is up to in his music.
As I alluded to earlier, Basinski’s Disintegration Loops are playing right now. The first track has finished (it was over an hour). The second one is now playing. Fisher illuminated for me the importance of this project that I may not otherwise have appreciated. He notes how “the sources of sound have retreated from sensory apprehension” and continues on to discuss how “the mp3 can neither be seen nor touched, still less manipulated by hand in the way that the vinyl record could be.” In reference to Basinski, Fisher says that “the digital seems to promise nothing less than escape from materiality itself”---does the record force us back into materiality? Into dialectical materialism, as in Marx?---and then presents Disintegration Loops as a “parable almost too perfect for the switch from the fragility of analogue to the infinite replicability of digital. What we have lost, it can often seem, is the very possibility of loss.” I suppose this would be a good time to note that Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” would be a worthwhile intertext to explore. In any case, Fisher identifies the loss of “fugitive evanescence that long ago used to characterize, for instance, the watching of television programs—seen once and then only remembered.” There’s something beautiful in irreplicability. The nights I’ve driven on a highway listening to the radio and hearing a song I’ll never hear again are near and dear to my heart; should I be able to find the songs again, they will be disinterred from memory and lose all the magic in their reterritorialization from their entwining with the night. As beautiful as irreplicability is, it is proportionally eerie how things can now not only “recovered but endlessly repeated.”
Fisher also illuminates the particular appeal of Joy Division, a stylistic departure from Basinski’s work but nonetheless relevant. Starting the text—or rather, at least presenting Joy Division early in the text—seems to be a good way of grounding the book as a whole. Joy Division seems representative of the depressive state for Fisher. In one of his more startling passages, Fisher writes the following:
“Depressive hauntology is dangerously seductive because, as the zombie twin of a certain philosophical wisdom, it is half-true. As the depressive withdraws from the vacant confections of the life-world, he unwittingly finds himself in concordance with the human condition so painstakingly diagrammed by a philosopher like Spinoza. He seems himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junkie hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions. The depressive cannot even lay claim to the comforts that a paranoiac can enjoy since he cannot believe that the strings are being pulled by anyone.”
I find this passage so illuminating in a number of ways, not least of all in how he characterizes the paranoiac as someone equally depressed but at least given the illusion that someone is controlling things so that it is just so. Instead, Fisher suggests that Joy Division recognizes the pain of satiation, the horror of being a “serial consumer of empty simulations.” Elsewhere, Fisher talks about the depressive bent to Arthur Schopenhauer, one of my early favourites in my philosophy studies. In a comic moment, he notes that one of his students wrote on an exam that “they sympathise with Schopenhauer when their football team loses,” as though that were the height of existential sorrow. Comic layer aside, Fisher then discusses how the “true Schopenhauerian moments are those in which you achieve your goals.” Essentially, you “realize your long-cherished heart’s desire and feel cheated, empty [...] voided.” Satiation does not precede tristesse. It is tristesse. Since the essays are a collection, they don’t always follow from one another and it would be worthwhile to note that we are perpetually satiated by nostalgia; we have received what we wanted (so why do we all complain when a film offers nothing new; same story structure, same characters, same symbolism—perhaps this gives credence to Jameson’s suggestion that our frustration comes from a lack of new forms).
I’ll preempt the conversation somewhat here (for what is the future, anyway, if not something we should invite into the present?) to discuss some of Fisher’s comments on Christopher Nolan, about whom I think Fisher has an excellent understanding. Of some surprise is Fisher’s response to Inception, which he finds a lacklustre film that uses a high concept to justify an action movie (or even video game) rather than explore those concepts in meaningful ways. He notes how the dream structures in Nolan’s film are so rigid, so linear. If our dreams are simply action sequences, we are missing a significant part of the human experience. Alongside the future, Fisher suggests, we have lost the ability to dream (cf. Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves). When I think of dreams, I think of the possibilities of one person being multiple people at once, that intuition where you know someone is someone despite having a different face, the threads that are picked up and dropped seemingly at random, the sudden transformations. None of that comes to mind in the meticulously plotted Inception.
What’s interesting to note though is how Fisher traces the lineage of Christopher Nolan’s films. He finds a parallel with the metadetective fiction novels of Paul Auster, a connection I hadn’t made before but find apt. Moving from a film like The Usual Suspects, which Nolan cites as an influence, Fisher says that “there’s a shift from the epistemological problems posed by unreliable narrators to a more general ontological indeterminacy in which the nature of the whole fictional world is put into doubt.” To put it more simply, The Usual Suspects troubles us in terms of what we know and don’t know. The answers are revealed, but the experience is one of learning how we can know what we know (cf. the falling mug). In Nolan and beyond, though, Fisher notes that the very rules of the world are mysterious: there are unknown elements that will trouble us, like whether Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Inception is in a dream or not. With reference to Memento, Fisher cites critic Andy Klein’s assertion that “after repeated viewings [...] he wasn’t able to come up with the truth of what transpired prior to the film’s action [because] every explanation seems to involve some breach of the apparent rules [...] not merely the rules as he explains them but the rules as we witness them operating throughout most of the film.” Fisher leads us on an interesting path through Nolan’s method and the necessity of rules: “its impossibility is generated not via an ‘anything goes’ ontological anarchy but by the setting up of rules which it violates in particular ways.” Nonetheless, Nolan maintains that his films always have a definitive truth that he knows and will not reveal. In his mind, everything “needs to be based on a true interpretation” and “ambiguity needs to come from the inability of the character to know and the alignment of the audience with that character.”
Of equal interest are Fisher’s explorations of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining and a film I have yet to see, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which he compares with the idea of looking through other people’s family photos and seeing how moments of intense emotional significance for them that mean nothing to you forces you to reflect on your own life with “a kind of distance that is once dispassionate and powerfully affecting.” He goes on to reference a scene in Stalker where similar symbols are given such weight as to be the most powerful scene in cinema, according to Fisher. He suggests that we see the “urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an alien god.” By contrast, he pans the W. G. Sebald novel The Rings of Saturn for its lack of attention and “middlebrow miserablism” and yet he seems to love the film inspired by it called Patience: After Sebald. It’s these types of observations that really inspire me to follow Fisher’s footsteps down the rabbit hole of these (in my mind) obscure films.
I have to admit, most of Fisher’s references were lost on me while I was reading. I would occasionally take breaks to listen to one of the albums he was referencing to ground myself, but the crux here is that Fisher sent me in the direction of music that I would not normally listen to. In reference to club music or dance music, Fisher writes “you might have expected an increase in euphoria, an influx of ecstasy. But the reverse has happened and it’s as if many of the dancefloor tracks are pulled down by a hidden gravity, a disowned sadness. The digitally enhanced uplift in the records […] is like a poorly photoshopped image or a drug that we’ve hammered so much we’ve become immune to its effects. It’s hard not to hear these records’ demands that we enjoy ourselves as thin attempts to distract from a depression that they can only mask, never dissipate.” I have intuited this kind of feeling in noisy bars before. The calls for everyone to have a good time are a commandment of what should be rather than what is already present. In that respect, Fisher has some comments about Kanye and Drake and their affectations with respect to happiness and a depressing satiation. It’s a pretty hard sell for me to listen to either of them, but at least Fisher places them in context with their times.
When it comes to pop, I feel it is often laced with a similar sadness, but perhaps it’s something more aggressive. Citing Dan Barrow, Fisher says that “to give the listener the payoff, the sonic moneyshot [is given] as soon and as obviously as possible. Pop has always delivered sugarsweet pleasure of course, but, Barrow argues, ‘there’s a tyrannical desperation about this new steroid-driven pop. It doesn’t seduce. It tyrannizes.” I find that extraordinarily compelling. Now, this book was published in 2014, around the time of “All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor, but I wonder how Fisher would respond to more contemporary artists like Billie Eilish, who reflect a more subdued perspective, if not one of resistance to the “overdetermined excess” that Barrow reflects on, “as if pop were forcing itself back to its defining characteristics—chorus hooks, melody accessibility—and blowing them up to cartoonish size.” Fisher makes the comparison between pop music and “internet pornography and drugs such as Viagra which, similarly, dispense with seduction and aim directly at pleasure.” I suspect some of our current pop stars, at least, are closer in spirit to Joy Division, where the idea of being a star is a nightmare and the idea of satiation is a fantastic sorrow.
In a serendipitous reading experience, I was reading Tom McCarthy’s C simultaneously to Ghosts of My Life and in each there was discussion of telegraphy. Given a fictionalized voice in C, Fisher references Guglielmo Marconi’s interest in the “spectral science.” Fisher writes that he was “convinced that sounds, once generated, never die. They simply become fainter and fainter until we no longer perceive them. Marconi’s hope was to develop sufficiently sensitive equipment [...] to pick up and hear these past sounds. Ultimately, he hoped to be able to hear Christ delivering the sermon on the mount.” It’s a thought experiment of profound meaning. As sounds proliferate (think of every time you’ve played a song aloud!), I can only imagine the chaos of such spectrality—that we are always amid undying sounds, swirling in their faint ghostly swirls. It is indeed haunting to think about, though it provides some contradictory comforts. When it comes to the idea of sound and time, Fisher suggests that music is integral to our experience of time. What would it mean for us to hear the past in the present? Would it be a reversal of how we seem to hear the future in the present, since the future has ceased to exist in any meaningful way?
It is not without irony that I admit to having listened to the audiobook of this particular text. The reading experience is endlessly repeatable (indeed, I ‘rewound’ parts, I skipped to sections I wanted to read again, and so on) rather than a unique irreplaceable ephemera. To that end, the book lacks its materiality. Perhaps I can be consoled in the idea that if we are in a world where sounds never die and just fade out of our current perception, having someone read Mark Fisher’s words aloud means that they are out there forever, in spite of the loss of Fisher himself, who certainly is irreplaceable.
May you all continue to revel in the sound and the fury.
With profound gratitude.
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