Le fantôme gris
Mark Fisher (1968-2017)
I.
"Conjecture: hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension." [a]
I suppose that's true; we're all familiar with a ghostly wail and the creaking sounds of a haunted house, for example. And it's amusing to realise that, as Fisher says, sometimes it's a question of hearing what's not there; "the voice no longer the guarantor of presence" [120].
Derrida's neologism thus "uncovers the space between Being and Nothingness" [120]; that spooky realm where objects that go bump in the night are real but not actual and Schrödinger's cat silently meows.
Real ghosts - and ghosts of the Real: there's no need for a notion of the supernatural, which is what one of Fisher's favourite books and films [b] - The Shining - makes clear. Horror is already present within the world, within the everyday, within the family: home is where the haunt is ...
And this word, haunt, is, says Fisher, one of the closest we have in English to the German term unheimlich. For just as the latter can switch from that which allows for the familiar (or homely) to the unfamiliar (unhomely) in the blink of an eye, so the former "signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it" [125].
II.
When I was younger, I used to love Angela Carter and read nearly all of her books, be they novels, short stories, or works of non-fiction. One book I particulary loved was American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Vintage, 1994), which consists of nine tales, the first four of which are based on American folklore.
I don't know if Fisher ever read or ever refers to Angela Carter in his work, but when I came across the following paragraph in Ghosts of My Life it reminded me of the above book by her:
"America, with its anxious hankerings after an 'innocence' it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World ... but here they are ..." [128]
III.
As a child of the 1970s, I grew up watching a lot (and I really mean a lot) of television.
So when Fisher writes of "uncanny spectres entering the domestic environment through the cathode ray tube" [133] [c] - particularly in the children's programming of this decade - it was obviously going to pique my interest.
And I have to admit, I love the idea of a TV set as a ghost box; that's certainly preferable to the idea of it being a device designed for the amusement of idiots - a boob tube as our American cousins used to call it.
I still watch a lot of television - and a lot of it is still British television from the 1970s. It's not just that it reminds me of my childhood, but that it has "a certain grain [...] that got smoothed away by 80s style culture gloss" [135] [d].
I like the voices and the faces (and the clothes) of the people in the 1970s. They may all be dead now - may just be ghosts in a machine - but they're my kind of people and make me feel at home. Nostalgia doubtless plays a part in this, but it's more than that - Fisher would say it's a longing for what he terms popular modernism and not so much a lost past as the promise of a lost future.
Speaking of promises ...
IV.
I hate the promise of digital music: which, as Fisher says, is the promise of an "escape from materiality" [144] and the eradication of crackle - i.e., the sound of dust, dirt, and damage; the sound of static build-up; the sound of joy.
The loss of crackle spells the death of pop.
No wonder then that many artists still release tracks on vinyl and invoke the sound of the past and a "whole disappeared regime of [tactile] materiality [...] lost to us in an era where the sources of sound have retreated from sensory apprehension" [144].
I don't care about keeping music live - but I do want to keep it analogue. For in an enchanted sound-world, crackle should not be excluded and the pleasure of placing a needle into the outermost groove should not be denied.
V.
Is this true:
"What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental [...]" [155]
I mean, it might be true - but I don't think it is. And where's the evidence for this claim, which, like so many of Fisher's other claims, is made without any real attempt to back it up.
I do tend to agree, however, that encounters with angels might prove to be "as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons" [155] [e], though I'm not sure that's because nothing could be "more shattering [...] and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy" [155].
Actually, such angelic tranquility - an experience of what Rudolf Otto terms the numinous - might actually be very welcome in the world right now, even if it is "associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness" [157].
For contrary to the idea that we should feel good about ourselves and always be positive, "the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace" [157]. As Fisher goes on to note: "There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us" - i.e., our own egos.
As D. H. Lawrence would say, grace is the sinking of one's soul into the magnificent dark blue gloom, the glory of darkness; a willingness to be erased and made nothing; to be dipped into oblivion in order that we might be renewed [f].
Notes
[a] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2022), p. 120. Future page references to this work will be given in the text.
Of course, as Fisher later notes, hauntology doesn't just have a sonic dimension, there is also an important visual dimension; "the eerie calmness and stillness of photography" [152], for example, which is so good at capturing lost moments and presenting absences. Photography - the art of painting with light - also allows one a glimpse of a world that is radiant and not weighed down with darkness (although this is arguably a Gnostic quality rather than hauntological).
[b] The Shining is a 1977 horror novel by American author Stephen King. It was adapted into a 1980 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson as the writer Jack Torance. King hated the movie because of its deviations from his book (and the fact that Kubrick had rejected his screenplay, preferring to co-write his own with novelist Diane Johnson).
In his piece on The Shining (adapted from a k-punk post dated 23 Jan 2006), Fisher chooses to side-step "the wearisome struggle between King fans and Kubrickians" and treats the novel and the film "as a labyrinth-rhizome, a set of interlocking correspondences and differences". See Ghosts of My Life, p. 120.
I don't dislike the film, but can't say it's one of my favourites. And as I've never read the novel, I don't intend to say very much here about Fisher's interpretation of The Shining.
[c] One obviously thinks of the famous scene in Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982) when five-year-old Carol Anne (played by Heather O'Rourke) presses her hands to a TV screen displaying post-broadcast static and declares: "They're here" (referring to the spirits of the dead).
[d] As Fisher writes elsewhere when analysing why it is programmes made today fail to capture this '70s grain:
"There must be some technical reason - maybe its the film stock they use - that accounts for why British TV is no longer capable of rendering any sense of a lived-in world. No matter what is filmed, everything always looks as if it has been thickly, slickly painted in gloss, like it's all a corporate video." - Ghosts in My Life, p. 76.
[e] Fisher is making this claim on the basis of work by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his 1917 text (translated into English as) The Idea of the Holy.
[f] See the poems 'The State of Grace', 'Glory of Darkness', and 'Phoenix', in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 591 and 641.
To read part one of this post on Lost Futures, click here.
To read part two of this post on the Return of the 70s, click here.
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