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).
