Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 4: The Stain of Place

Laura Oldfield Ford Ferrier Estate (2010)

 

 

I.

 

Many years before Laura Oldfield Ford published her Savage Messiah [a], the Specials had already famously declared that London - like many other cities across the UK - was coming like a ghost town [b]. And I'm surprised, as a matter of fact, that Mark Fisher didn't mention this in his introduction to Ford's work. 

 

But then, having said that, I suppose it could be argued that whereas the Specials were bemoaning the state of the country - the poverty, unemployment, crime, and shut-up shops they witnessed in city after city as they toured the UK - Ford was more concerned by the loss of character and the displacement of long-time residents as working-class areas were redeveloped. 

 

In a nutshell: the Specials hated to see neighbourhoods run down and Ford hated to see them done up. Who really has the best interests of the poor and dispossessed at heart is debatable. But, according to Fisher, it is Ford who is a kind of medium through whom ghostly voices speak:

 

"The [...] voices she speaks in - and which speak through her - are those of the officially defeated: the punks, squatters, ravers, football hooligans and militants left behind by a history which has ruthlessly photoshopped them out of its finance-friendly SimCity." [184] [c] 

 

If these are the people that Ford and Fisher choose to romanticise on the one hand, on the other are those they deem the enemy: young professionals who sit outside Starbucks sipping coffee and "'gently conversing in sympathetic tones'" [185]; those who advocate neoliberal modernisation, which, in practice makes London "safe for the super-rich" [185]. 

 

At the risk of being accused of being a middle-class wanker or a class-traitor, I have to say that this reading of things in such stark terms strikes me as a little simplistic. I don't particularly like the way in which East London is being gentrified, but don't really see the aesthetic appeal of abandoned factories and slums. 

 

Nor, as a matter of fact, do I very much care for brutalist architecture and "'a virulent black ecomomy of scavengers, peddlers and shoplifters'" [185] - i.e., the kind of people who "could not be regenerated, even if they wanted to be" [189].

 

 

II. 

 

Ford studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and did her Masters at the Royal College of Art. For her graduation show at the latter in 2007, she exhibited a four-section painting depicting herself in each panel against a scene of urban chaos and one wonders if she regrets the passing of old London primarily because it deprives her of an aesthetic backdrop.

I suspect she's precisely the kind of bourgeois anarchist that Rotten railed against; friends with and celebrated by all the usual suspects, including Fisher, who, like Ford, also fantasises (in a quasi-erotic manner) about a punk London full of "spaces that could be temporarily occupied and squatted" [186] in which one could drift and daydream; "a labyrinth of side streets and spaces resistant to the process of gentrification" [187].  

And she is precisely the kind of figure whom Jarvis Cocker so brilliantly skewers as a class tourist i.e., one who wants to live like common people and do whatever common people do; one who thinks that poor is cool, but who will never fail like common people or understand how it feels to live a life with no meaning or control [d].

 

For when not drifting round city streets mapping the psychic contours of the city or taking part in a protest - for she's an activist as well as an artist - the author of Savage Messiah is arranging her latest exhibition at a posh gallery or lecturing across the UK and internationally on issues surrounding urbanism, architecture, and memory. 

 

Her life, in other words, is full of meaning and purpose and she's very much in complete control of her own professional destiny (even if she tells us her existence is precarious).  

 

III.

Ironically, if you take Fisher's word for it, then Savage Messiah was written precisely for someone like me; "born too late for punk but whose expectations were raised by its incendiary afterglow" [189]. 

 

But, for much the same reason I hated Crass [e], Ford's work is really not my cup of tea ... 

 

Certainly not in its radical politics, although I am rather drawn to the hauntological aspects; to the fact that it is imbued with a sense of mourning and that it stains London "with particularly intense moments of time" [191] [f].   

 

At it's best - when it "invites us to see the contours of another world in the gaps and cracks" [192] of an urban landscape - then Savage Messiah is inspiring. 

 

But, at its worst - when Ford keeps banging on about the need to forge collective resistance to the occupying powers of neoliberalism and suggests that the truth is to be found "'in the burnt out shopping arcades [and] the boarded up precincts'" [192] - then Savage Messiah bores us to tears.   

 

 

IV.

 

In a k-punk post date 4 March 2006, Fisher tries to foist another neologism on us: nomadalgia ... i.e., the sense of unease induced by anonymous environments that are more or less the same the world over. These spaces are uncanny only in their power to replicate sameness.

 

In other words, nomadalgia is a form of travel sickness born of what Byung-Chul Han terms hyperculture [g].

The problem is, nomadalgia is such a clumsy-sounding term and I really can't imagine anyone ever using it other, perhaps, than hardcore members of the Fisherati [h]. 

V.

We've almost reached the end of Fisher's book. 

 

In fact, I've nothing to say about Chris Petit's Content (2010); or Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald) (2011); or Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010); or John Akomfrah's Handsworth Songs (1986); or Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Ruins (2010) ... 

 

I've not seen any of these films and, if I'm being completely honest, I don't particularly want to (although the inhuman eco-alien perspective of the latter sounds interesting and, if forced to watch one of the above films I'd choose Keiller's, as I'm all for a little biophilia and a "dark Deleuzean communion with Nature" [228]). 

 

Also, I'm getting a little tired of Fisher's lazy and predictable ideological take on everything: capitalism is evil and therefore anything which frustrates it - strikes, riots, financial crises - have to be for the good. In an Afterword, Simon Reynold's acknowledges that Fisher had allowed his political thinking to settle into "a compassionate and anguished Leftism" [246] - i.e. all too humanist for my tastes.

 

Thus, there are surely questions about hauntology's durability as an aesthetic and philosophy - as there are about the political importance of Fisher's (unfinished) book on Acid Communism, intended as a joyful - even vital - alternative to capitalist realism (i.e., a sort of fantasy philosophy inspired by hippie ideals of community and caring for one another). 

"We can barely guess where he would have taken Acid Communism if he'd lived to pursue its ideas" [249], says Reynolds. 

 

But, unfortunately, I think we can. For "confronted by a world  run amok with the competing delusions and [...] fantasies of right-wing Hyperstition" [250-51], Fisher might have returned to an old idea of truth to provide him with a foundation; who knows, he may even have ended up at the foot of the Cross! [i].

Notes

[a] Laura Oldfield Ford (aka Laura Grace Ford) is a British artist and author (born in the magical year of 1973). Her work explores political themes in the context of British urban spaces. Her zine Savage Messiah (2005-09) examined the changing character of London during this period. It was later published in book form (Verso, 2011), with an introduction by Mark Fisher.

 

[b] The number one single 'Ghost Town' by the Specials was released in June 1981. To me, evoking as it did themes of urban decay and inner-city violence, it was the last great punk single. 

     Although the Specials were from Coventry and residents of the latter assumed that the group were referring to their home town - angrily rejecting the song's characterisation of the city as being in a state of terminal decline - the video for the song, directed by Barney Bubbles, was actually shot in East London and ends with the band standing on the banks of the River Thames at low tide: click here to play on YouTube.   

[c] Mark Fisher, '"Always Yearning for the Time that Just Eluded Us" - Introduction to Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011)', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (ZeroBooks, 2022), p. 184. 

      Future page references to this edition of Fisher's book will be given directly in the post. 

[d] Jarvis Cocker is the lead vocalist and lyricist with the Britpop band Pulp. Their hit single 'Common People' was released from the album Different Class (Island Records) in May 1995. The song is a critique of those who ascribe authenticity to working-class culture (and I'm pretty sure Mark Fisher would also disdain such an idea - but may be wrong about that). 

      Click here to play on YouTube and watch the video directed by Pedro Romhanyi, featuring the actress Sadie Frost as the unnamed art student from Greece with "a thirst for knowledge" and a desire to experience real life. And click here to read a post dated 2 October 2018 in which I discuss 'Common People' (and it's brilliant interpretation by William Shatner).   

[e] Crass were an English art collective and punk band from Essex. Formed in 1977, they promoted anarchism as a political ideology, an aesthetic, and an alternative way of life. Dressed in black military-surplus style clothing, they were, for me, the anithesis of the Sex Pistols.

      Mark Fisher in his introduction to Savage Messiah notes how Ford's work is reminiscent of Gee Vaucher's work for Crass. 

 

[f] Fisher returns to this idea of staining in a later piece included in Ghosts of My Life on Mark Gee's film Patience (After Sebald) (2011). He writes of how Thomas Hardy stained the landscape of Wessex with his passions - just as the Brontë sisters stained Yorkshire. I can't help wishing Fisher had said rather more about this intriguing idea, one that reminds me of something D. H. Lawrence writes about the way in which the living souls of men and women subtly impregnate their material environment; see his essay on Edgar Allan Poe in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). 

 

[g] See the post dated 30 Jan 2022 entitled 'Travels in Hyperculture with Byung-Chul Han', click here.

[h] Another neologism - this time coined by Fisher's pal and comrade-in-arms, Simon Reynolds; see 'Spectres of Mark: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New Fisherati', Afterword to Ghosts of My Life ... pp. 233-252.

[i] Obviously, I'm just speculating here about Fisher's direction of travel. Although, in 2013, he did admit that, like many other thinkers, including Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Marx, he sometimes struggled with his atheism, saying: "It's all very well professing a lack of belief in God, but it's much harder to give up the habits of thought which assume providence, divine justice and a secure distinction between good and evil." It can be difficult to recall that such moral ideas "are not written into the universe, but exist only in ourselves, in relation to our desires and interests".  

      See Mark Fisher, 'Beyond good and evil: Breaking Bad' in the New Humanist magazine (18 Dec. 2013): click here to read online. 

 

Bonus: click here to enjoy a ten minute drift with Laura Oldfield Ford ... Part of the exhibition entitled There is a place, at the New Art Gallery Walsall (Jan- April 2012).

Travels in Hyperculture With Byung-Chul-Han 1: We Are All Tourists Now

 

In nil sapiendo vita iucundissima est

 

 

I.

 

As Jarvis Cocker correctly observed back in 1995: Everybody hates a tourist [a]. 

 

However, according to German philosopher Byung Chul-Han, writing ten years later in his 2005 study Hyperkulturalität [b] - and in agreement with the British ethnologist Nigel Barley - we are all more or less tourists dressed in Hawaiian shirts today; not because of a universal desire to explore faraway lands and experience foreign cultures, but because there are now no faraway lands or foreign cultures in a globalised world [c].

All that remains post-globalisation is hyperculture, or what some refer to as supermodernity; an era of accelerated technological change that results in a transformation of time and space - and, indeed, our very humanity. 

 

Hyperculture goes way beyond anything foreseen by Zarathustra, though perhaps he glimpsed something of it when he flew into the future [d]. To understand it a little better, let's take a closer look at Byung Chul-Han's study ...  

 

 

II.

  

The Greeks, of course, had a profound understanding of culture in terms of harmonious manifoldness; that is to say, unity in diversity cultivated on the very soil of discord and difference. Culture, for the Greeks, is what Nietzsche regards as the giving of style to various forms of life (whereas barbarism - the very opposite of culture - is precisely a "lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles" [e]).  

 

Byung Chul-Han also returns to the ancient Greeks on the question of culture. His reading, however, is informed by Hegel rather than Nietzsche, although in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), the former also speaks of the genesis of Greek culture in terms of heterogeneity and otherness in need of being overcome. 

 

In other words, whilst Greece was born of an original chaos of peoples, it was only via a long process of discipline and breeding that the true spirit of Greece could unfold. 

 

But whilst Hegel "tries to do justice to the fact" [3] that heterogeneity is an elementary aspect of the Greek character, once they have forged a European identity he stresses the importance of belonging to a happy home in which there is no longer any desire for that which is outside or alien; the foreign is now dismissed and it's all about family and fatherland.

 

This might have some negative consequences - such as being unable to see beyond one's own position or hear strange sounds - but, as Herder argues, it is precisely this myopia and deafness that allows for a state of cheerful self-contentment: "'National happiness' emerges because the 'soul' forgets the 'manifold dispositions' that dwell within it and elevates a part of itself to the status of the whole" [5].   

 

This type of happiness is unknown or of little interest to tourists in Hawaiian shirts. For they lack style, that is to say, lack the self-discipline needed for culture in the old sense characterised by closing one's eyes and one's ears to certain sights and sounds in order to see what is near to hand and hear the song of one's own soul. 

 

Han writes:

 

"Their happiness is of an altogether different kind; it is a happiness that emerges from an abolition of facticity, a removal of the attachment to the 'here', the site. In their case, the foreign is not 'sickness'. It is something new to be appropriated. The tourists in Hawaiian shirts inhabit a world that unbounds itself, a hypermarket of culture, a hyperspace of possibilities." [5-6]

 

Thus, these tourists in a hypercultural reality - which some, like Ted Nelson, term Xanadu - are just as content as natives living in a spiritual homeland bound by borders and rooted in bio-terrestrial reality (blood and soil), and they are certainly freer in many regards.  

 

 

III. 

 

The irony, of course, is that we were promised by the globalists that new modes of transport and new communications technology would open up the world and expand our horizons. But globalisation has shrunk cultural space and condensed everything:

 

"Heterogeneous cultural contents are pushed together side by side. Cultural spaces overlap and penetrate each other. This unbounding also applies to time. Not only different sites but also different time frames are de-distanced [...] Cultures implode; that is, they are de-distanced into a hyperculture." [9]

 

Again, some seem perfectly okay with this (although their happiness is reminiscent of that experienced by Nietzsche's letzter Mensch, which he describes as the happiness of a flea). Others, however, are not so pleased and feel obliged to offer resistance:

"There are many for whom [hyperculture] means the trauma of loss. Re-theologization, re-mythologization and re-nationalization are common reactions to the hyperculturalization of the world. Thus, hypercultural de-siting will have to confront a fundamentalism of sites." [10]

That doesn't sound great. Deleuze and Guattari, who famously discuss all this in terms of de- and reterritorialization, warn of the dangers of attempting to recodify the world and form neo-territorialities based upon past ideals and the invention of new falsehoods. Ultimately, such neo-territorialities are, at best, "artificial, residual, archaic" [f] and, at worst, prone to quickly becoming fascistic.   

But I'm not sure how much we need to worry: mythical time (in which everything and everyone has a fixed place) is surely over. And so too is (linear) historical time. We are left, then, like it or not, living in this time; the time characterised by Vilém Flusser as that of the bit (rather than the image or the book):

 

"It lacks any comprehensive horizon of meaning. It is de-theologized, or de-teleologicized, into an 'atom-like' 'universe of bits', a 'mosaic universe' in which possibilities 'buzz' like points, or 'sprinkle' like 'grains', as 'discrete sensations' [...] 

      In this 'universe of points' [...] Dasein is surrounded by freely hovering possibilities. In this way, the 'universe of points' promises greater freedom. After all, the future is 'everywhere' that I 'turn to'." [12]

 

Heidegger might not like it - may think it compromises authenticity, dis-inherits Dasein, and produces a dictatorship of the They - but  I have to admit, I rather like the sound of this space-time that is more vortex than void, particularly as it allows also for increasing interconnectedness (with others and with things), expanding the future by creating an abundance of relations and possibilities. 

 

Whether this is driven by Eros, or a more perverse inclination, is debatable. But it's certain that even though hyperculture may help to bring about new forms and possibilities of being, Heidegger would not be persuaded to consider the upside of life today: "Faced with a colourful patchwork society, he would invoke the 'we' of a community of fate." [14]       

 

Ultimately, Heidegger is interested in dwelling, not travel and tourism. And he would fail to see that hyperculture is not merely universal monoculture. Sure, you can buy a Big Mac anywhere in the world - but it's fusion food that really defines what's going on today: 

 

"This hypercuisine does not level the diversity of eating cultures. It does not just blindly throw everything into one pot. Rather, it thrives on the differences. This allows it to create a diversity that would not be possible on the basis of preserving the purity of local food cultures. Globalization and diversity are not mutually exclusive." [16] [g]

 

 

IV.

 

As might be clear, devising a (non-essentialist) model of contemporary culture that is able to capture the dynamism of what's unfolding today isn't easy. And to be fair, Byung-Chul Han does a pretty good job. 

 

One understands from reading his essay how hyperculture is detached from any origin and brings heterogeneous elements together in such a manner that ideas of near and far, indigenous and foreign, become untenable; how culture is now boundless and unrestricted and we are all tourists within it. Not so much nowhere, as prepared to bid farewell to a here "that used to give Being its auratic depth, or rather the semblance of an aura" [34].           

 

We might also describe this culture as rhizomatic in nature - and Han credits Deleuze and Guattari for developing a concept in their work which "proves suitable for the description of certain aspects of hyperculture" [27]. He also summarises it for readers unfamiliar with the idea:

 

"The 'rhizome' denotes a non-centred plurality that cannot be subjected to any comprehensive order [...] Thus, a rhizome is an open structure whose heterogeneous elements constantly play into each other, shift across each other and are in a process of constant 'becoming'. The rhizomatic space is a space not of 'negotiation' but of transformation [...] Rhizomatic distribution, even dispersal, de-substantializes and de-internalizes culture and thereby turns it into hyperculture." [27-28]    

 

We can contrast this with an arboreal model of culture with its deep roots and branches. Further - and finally - rhizomatic hyperculture is not one of inwardness or remembrance. It has, if you like, no soul; or, to use Benjamin's favoured term, no aura - "the resplendence and radiance of a specific 'here and now' that cannot be repeated there [34]. 

           

Still, as Han notes, there's no need to lament de-auratization in terms exclusively of loss (such as loss of origin, loss of essence, loss of authenticity, or even loss of Being as Heidegger would have it). Maybe - just maybe - something good will come of all this; "another reality, which shines in the absence of the auratic" [36].

 

The question is: "When the 'here and now' becomes a repeatable there and later" [37], will we have gained more than we lose? 

 

To find out how Byung-Chul Han answers, readers are invited to click here for part two of this post.

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Pulp, 'Common People', single release from the album Different Class (Island, 1995). 

[b] Byung-Chul Han, Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung, (Merve Verlag, 2005) This text has now been pulished in an English translation by Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022) and page references given above refer to this edition of the work, rather than the German original. 

[c] Just to clarify at the outset: when Byung-Chul Han speaks of a hypercultural tourist, he does not necessarily mean someone who is always jet-setting or globetrotting: such a person is already a tourist when at home; there is no here or there or any final destination to arrive at. 

[d] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'Of the Land of Culture'. 

      Han credits Nietzsche with being "one of the few thinkers capable of looking far ahead, of resonating with vibrations that came from the future" [31]. Indeed, I might be being unfair to Zarathustra in suggesting that the idea of hyperculture was beyond his ability to conceive. Perhaps the thing that ultimately lets Nietzsche down is his insistent aestheticism, which "tends towards a re-teleologization, a re-theologization, of culture" [33].  

[e] Nietzsche, 'David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer', in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). p. 6. 

[f] Gilles Deleuze and Félix, Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 257. 

[g] Interestingly, it's not just Heidegger who has an issue here. As Han reminds us: "Out of a fear of diversity, Plato already condemned the use of spices and the manifold dishes of Sicilian cuisine." [17] Amusingly, the attempt to maintain cultural purity and defend national cuisine always leaves one with egg on face. 

(Un)Common People: Jarvis Cocker and William Shatner

I.

Although it peaked at number two in the UK Singles Chart back in the summer of 1995, pretty much everyone now agrees that Pulp's Common People is the finest - maybe even definitive - Britpop single; one with all the humour, anger, energy and intelligence of punk.

So, hats off to Jarvis Cocker, who came up with the tune on a small Casiotone MT-500 keyboard and wrote the lyrics. For me, Cocker is not only a more interesting frontman, but also an eminently more likable human being than either of the Gallagher brothers or, indeed, Damon Albarn and the rather self-satisfied members of Blur.       

Having said that, I'm tempted to suggest that as brilliant as his interpretation and performance of his own song is, there's one man out there who has given us an even greater version - and that man is William Shatner ...  

II.

Whilst primarily known as an actor, William Shatner is actually a man of many talents - although, arguably, singing isn't one of them. Not that this has stopped him from recording a number of albums, beginning with The Transformed Man (1968), in which he delivered his uniquely exaggerated (cod-Shakespearean) take on songs including 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' and 'Mr Tambourine Man'.

During the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards, Shatner gave a memorable reading of the Elton John song 'Rocket Man'. It's a performance beyond parody that still leaves many viewers who watch it on YouTube in a state of utter astonishment: click here.

Shatner's greatest musical moment, however, was to come in 2004, on the album Has Been, produced and arranged by Ben Folds; an indie rock version of 'Common People', featuring Joe Jackson as a guest co-vocalist.

Critics and fans alike - including Jarvis Cocker himself - were shocked at just how amazing the result was. Shatner does an excellent job, paying due respect to the original whilst, at the same time, putting his absurdly over-dramatic spin on the song. So, hats off also to Capt. Kirk! 

Notes

Pulp, 'Common People', released 22 May 1995, from the album Different Class (Island Records, 1995): click here to watch the official video, featuring Sadie Frost, on YouTube. 

William Shatner, 'Common People', from the album Has Been, (Shout! Factory, 2004): click here.