Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 3: Hauntology

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. 

 

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 1: Lost Futures

Zero Books (second edition, 2022)

 

 

For some reason, the spectral figure of Mark Fisher continues to haunt my imagination [a]. 

 

And, what's more, his name continues to crop up in conversation. Just the other night, for example, a young woman asked me if I had read his 2014 essay collection Ghosts of My Life and I had to rather shamefully admit I hadn't. 

 

So, at Mariam's insistence that I really should do so - and despite certain reservations [b] - here goes. 

 

But, note at the outset, what follows is not an attempt at a review (still less an overview). 

 

Think of this more as an attempt to occupy the space of thinking that Fisher opens up and to engage with some of the ideas encountered, moving from text-to-text but not stopping where the material is outside my field of knowledge or experience, or simply void of any interest. I won't, for example, be saying much - if anything - about the various genres of dance music, such as Jungle, that seem to so excite Fisher's imagination [c].    

 

Note that all page references to (the second edition) of Fisher's book are given directly in the text.

 

 

I.

 

Many people talk about the cancellation of the future, but I admire Fisher for being the one who (like the Italian Marxist Franco Beradi) emphasises the slowness of this process. 

 

It's something that (gradually but relentlessly) creeps up on us (like old age): one day everything seems fine and there's plenty to look forward to, the next ... Suddenly, all we are left with is the past - or more precisely, our memory of the past and even this dims over time. 

 

Luckily, we have photographs and videos and thanks to YouTube it seems that everything we ever watched or listened to is made available: "In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost." [2]

 

 

II.

 

It's clever how Fisher (retrospectively) reads Sapphire & Steel in relation to the work of Harold Pinter and John Le Carré. But I remember how, at the time - the series ran from 1979 to 1982 - my friend and I would often laugh at it's absurdity and pretension. 

 

Now, however, I'd view this pair of interdimensional operatives whose job it is to repair breaks in time so as to ensure temporal continuity with a good deal of philosophical hostility. For what are they if not defenders of the myth of progress (i.e., linear development) and ideals of smoothness, purity, and temporal good order ...?

 

Personally, I quite like anachronisms and chronological inconsistencies. It's not these things which lead to stasis - on the contrary, things which puncture equilibrium also keep things moving. 

 

Without wishing to completely destabilise the Western concept of time, I'm happy to celebrate its periodic disturbance; to allow for a certain chaos (or openness); for untimely events that produce divergent becomings; for lines of flight which produce wild disruptions.

 

I say this as a reader of Deleuze, but also as a reader of Lawrence who writes in Apocalypse: "Our idea of time as a continuity, as an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly" [d].

 

Hopefully I've not misunderstood what Fisher is arguing, but I get the impression that, like Sapphire and Steel, he wants to straighten everything out and prevent cultural time folding back on itself, so that we might once again be able to make a clear distinction between past and present (and we'll all know what's what and when and where we are).

 

 

III.

 

Fisher likes to use a term borrowed from his pal Simon Reynolds - dyschronia - to describe the "current crisis of cultural temporality" [14] as he experiences it. 

 

And, to be fair, it's a nice term - one that can be added to all those other dys- terms which people seem to like using today (from dyslexia and dysmorphia to dysphoria and dystopia). I even referred to the concept myself in a recent post on the Beatles [click here].        

 

But I can't quite get as worked up about it as Mr Fisher, who at one point cries out: "Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk?" [9] A passionate cri de coeur no doubt, but one that made me almost spit my tea. For this may be a question concerning the time in which we live, but it's hardly a question for the ages. 

 

Although, having said that, perhaps Fisher has a point when he asserts that the fate that has befallen popular music is "in many ways paradigmatic of the fate of [wider] culture under post-Fordist capitalism" [16].

 

 

IV.

Despite appropriating his term hauntology, Fisher claims to find Derrida a "frustrating thinker" [16] and he makes clear his hostility to deconstruction: 

 

"As soon as it was established in certain areas of the academy, deconstruction, the philosophical project which Derrida founded, installed itself as a pious cult of indeterminacy, which [...] made a lawyerly virtue of avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of scepticism, which induced hedging, infirmity of purpose and compulsory doubt in its followers. It elevated particular modes of academic practice - Heidegger's priestly opacity, literary theory's emphasis on the ultimate instability of any interpretation - into quasi-theological imperatives." [16-17]  

 

So what's not to love? 

 

Well, to be fair, I share some of Fisher's frustration when it comes to Derrida and I've never read his work with the same kind of pleasure or excitement as that of his contemporaries, such as Deleuze. 

 

Over the years, however, my appreciation of Derrida and Derridean concepts, such as différance and hauntology, has increased and I think his main point that nothing enjoys a purely positive existence - that presence requires absence; that being rests on non-being - is absolutely crucial. 

 

And I'm pretty certain that Fisher - indebted as he is to Derrida - would be more generous to him were it not for the fact that the latter's not quite lycanthropic enough for those influenced by Nick Land [e]. 

Anyway, Fisher asks the question that many readers have probably asked themselves: "Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is just a figure of speech?" [18]

 

He answers by saying: 

 

"The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing." [18]

 

That's a nice (easily understood) definition and I agree with Fisher that many of the great thinkers of modernity - not least of all Marx and Freud - "discovered different modes of this spectral causality" [19]. 

 

As did Nietzsche, of course, when he spoke of posthumous individuals ...

 

The key thing is that we can distinguish in hauntology between the no longer and the not yet:

 

"The first refers to that which is (in actuality) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic 'compulsion to repeat', a fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)." [19]

 

 

V.

 

Nodding to both Freud and Derrida, Fisher also provides an excellent definition of (and distinction between) mourning and melancholia:

 

"In Freud's terms, both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawl of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared. For mourning to properly begin, Derrida says in Spectres of Marx, the dead must be conjured away [...]" [22]

 

I think that's true: which is why the dead must bury the dead and the living must live; remembering their loved ones, but also letting them go. The dead can't rest in peace if we won't allow them to do so: and haunting, then, "can be construed as a failed mourning" [22] - a refusal to give up the ghost (and thus the ghost's refusal to be quiet). 

 

For Fisher, what's at stake in 21st-century hauntology is not the loss of a loved one or the disappearance of a particular object, but the vanishing of a certain trajectory that he names popular modernism and which produced such things as public service broadcasting, Penguin paperbacks, and postpunk ... 

 

In a passage that makes clear the aim of his book, Fisher writes:

 

"In popular modernism, the elitist project of modernism was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist. Particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the preset moment was taken up and renewed. Which is to say that [...] the culture which shaped most of my early expectations was essentially popular modernist, and the writing that has been collected in Ghosts of My Life is about coming to terms with the disappearance of the conditions which allowed it to exist." [22-23]  

 

Perhaps, in a sense, that's also one of the aims of Torpedo the Ark. 

 

Ultimately, it comes down to a refusal to give up; "a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call 'reality' - even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time ..." [24]

 

Of course, as Fisher recognises, this raises the question of nostalgia once more: "is hauntology, as many of its critics have maintained, simply a [new] name for nostalgia?" [25]

 

Clearly, Fisher doesn't think so and I agree with him that "comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not automatically nostalgic in any culpable way" [25]. The fact is, the 1970s was a more creative decade - and people were happier - than today; this isn't falsely overestimating (or falsely remembering) the past and readers who weren't alive to experience the '70s will just have to take my word for it [f].  

 

The popular modern culture that was unfolding back then "was by no means a completed project" [26] and it was, admittedly, a time of "casual racism, sexism and homophobia" [26] - not to mention football hooliganism, strikes, blackouts, and flared jeans. But, nevertheless, the decade was, in many respects, "better than neoliberalism wants us to remember it" [25]. 

 

What is being longed for in Fisher's work (and perhaps also in mine) is not the return to a certain period, but the resumption of an abandoned project (which he calls popular modernism) and the summoning of a lost spirit, although Fisher and I obviously disagree as to the political guise of this spirit - I'm not an acid communist.  

Still, acid communist or not, I can agree with Fisher that the key thing is ultimately about dismantling identities which are for the most part poor fictions: "Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves." [28]

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written recently about Mark Fisher and his work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark; see here and here, for example. 

 

[b] I am always a little wary of writers like Fisher who, via unrestrained enthusiasm for certain ideas (often brilliantly expressed) attract a cult following amongst readers who, like Fox Mulder, so want to believe in the existence of truth lying out there (beneath the falsifications of capitalist realism).    

 

[c] This isn't to say that Fisher's analysis of, for example, Rufige Kru's Ghosts of My Life EP (1993) isn't excellent, it's just that I know more (and care more) about the actress Goldie Hawn than I do about Goldie the music producer and DJ. 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 97. 

      Lawrence continues: "The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge."  

[e] I'm referring here to Nick Land's essay 'Spirit and Teeth', in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Sprit, ed. David Woods, (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.

     The essay can also be found in Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, (Urbanomic, 2011), pp. 175-201.

 

[f] Readers don't have to take my word for how shit things are in the 21st-century in comparison to the 1970s. Consider this statement from Fisher: "It's clear to me now that the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised - not in the far distant future, but very soon - as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s." [Ghosts, 29] 

      Arguably, things have only got worse - much worse - in the ten years since this was written. 

 

 

Part 2 of this post - The Return of the 70s - can be read by clicking here.

 

Part 3 of this post - on hauntology - can be read by clicking here.