From Beatlemania to Dyschronia: Some Thoughts on 'Now and Then'

Screenshot from the official video (dir. Peter Jackson) 

for 'Now and Then', by The Beatles

 

 

I. 

 

As a young child, I was never a Beatles fan: they were my teenaged sister's favourites, but meant nothing to me. To quote Sid Vicious: "I didn't even know the Summer of Love was happening. I was too busy playing with my Action Man." [1]

 

And later, as a young punk, I despised the Beatles: I was happy, like Joe Strummer, to affirm 1977 as a kind of Year Zero in which the Fab Four along with Elvis and the Rolling Stones were deemed irrelevant and the past effectively abolished. 

 

(I was happy also when - according to Malcolm - Glen Matlock was thrown out of the Sex Pistols on the grounds that he was secretly a Beatles fan.) 

 

And, in the years since, I haven't been persuaded to change my view or reconsider my relationship to John, Paul, George, and Ringo. But I have been enchanted (and disturbed) by their new single ...

 

II. 

 

Released a few days ago - and billed as the Beatles' final song - 'Now and Then' [2] appears to bring poignant closure to the story of a band who formed in 1962 and broke up in 1970. 

 

But, as I'll suggest below, it also seems to mark the end of something more than that, which is why such a simple ballad has resonated so profoundly with so many people - including those who, like me, have never been subject to (or infected by) Beatlemania [3].     

 

Originally written and recorded as a demo tape by Lennon in 1977, 'Now and Then' was considered as a Beatles reunion single for their 1995–1996 retrospective project The Beatles Anthology, but this idea was quickly abandoned due to technical issues at the time (namely, Lennon's vocals could not be separated out and cleaned up).

 

However, thanks to AI-backed audio restoration technology, the track has now been reimagined and reworked and the result is pretty astonishing - as is the music video directed by Peter Jackson. So well done to Paul and Ringo and all those who contributed to the project, including the ghosts of John and George [4] and producer Giles Martin [5]. 

 

Fans and critics are almost universally happy with the result, although, paradoxically, the song and video make many people upset at the same time; even some of those who were not born in the 20th-century have been moved to tears. 

Obviously, most people have experienced individual loss and can feel nostalgic for their own past. But it seems to be more than that; people seem to be mourning something collectively, not so much as a generation, but as a people, as a culture.

 

So, how has Beatlemania - which began with hysterical joy  - terminated in mournful melancholia? 

 

 

III. 

 

You don't need to be Mark Fisher to understand what's going on here (although reading Fisher's work is certainly advantageous): we are being invited to join Paul and Ringo (and the ghosts of John and George) in a temporal loop (or time trap) where sounds and images from earlier periods get promiscuously mixed up.

 

The classic Beatles sound, "its elements now serenely liberated from  the pressures of historical becoming" [6], has been recreated via a machine. At first, we are astonished and amused; the montaging of discreet time periods is so perfect that we no longer quite know when or where we are. 

 

But then the sadness and unease creeps in, until, eventually, it all becomes a bit hellish and one realises with despair that such indiscretion ultimately leads to stasis and cultural inertia.

 

The Beatles were once genuinely something New: and they promised us the future. But with this final song the Fab Four imprison us in a perpetual present haunted by the past (and enhanced with AI-backed technology). 

 

What seems like an act of poignant closure, is actually anything but and, ironically, despite its title, this song belongs neither to Now nor Then, but to a timeless (and nihilistic) zone that some term dyschronia. 

 

This is what No Future looks like ...         

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Sid Vicious speaking in an interview with John Ingham, Sounds (Oct 1976). 

[2] The Beatles, 'Now and Then', (Apple Records, 2023). To watch the official music video dir. Peter Jackson, click here. The video features never-before-seen film of the Beatles, including scenes filmed during the 1995 recording sessions for Anthology, home movie footage of Harrison, and new footage of McCartney and Starr performing.

[3] Dismissed by The Clash in their 1979 single 'London Calling' as phoney, Beatlemania is actually a genuine, well-researched and well-documented cultural phenomenon. 

      The term was coined by the British press in 1963 to describe the scenes of hysterical adulation accorded to the group - particularly by adolescent girls - whenever (and wherever) they performed or appeared in public. Commentators rightly compared this to religious fervour with a very obvious sexual component. As an international phenomenon, Beatlemania surpassed in intensity and scope any previous examples of fan worship - even Elvis didn't make the girls scream (and literally wet their knickers) like John, Paul, George and Ringo. The Daily Telegraph published a disapproving article in which the scenes of mass worship were likened to Hitler's Nuremberg Rallies. Questions were asked in Parliament - Beatlemania was becoming a police and public safety issue. Lennon wasn't wrong to claim that the Beatles had become by 1966 more popular than Jesus amongst the young.    

      Eventually, disenchanted by their own fame, the Beatles quit touring and as they mutated from a pop group into a progressive, psychedelic rock band, so their fan base changed and Beatlemania in its most frenzied and delirious form passed as quickly as it had arisen. Now, Beatlemaniacs were looked down upon by the group's more mature, more sophisticated audience interested in serious matters, serious music, and facial hair (man). 

      The last mass display of fan adulation took place at the world premiere of the Beatles' animated film Yellow Submarine (dir. George Dunning) held at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus, on 17 July 1968. There was very little screaming, but traffic was brought to a standstill.

 

[4] John Lennon was murdered in December 1980; George Harrison died of cancer in 2001.   

[5] Readers who are interested in knowing the full-story of how the song came to be can click here to view a 12-minute documentary film, Now and Then - The Last Beatles Song (written and directed by Oliver Murray, 2023) on YouTube.

 

[6] Mark Fisher, 'The Slow Cancellation of the Future', in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2014). 

It's Creepy and It's Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky: Notes on Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (Part 2)

Mark Fisher (1968-2017) author of 

The Weird and the Eerie (2016)

 

 

I. 

Fisher's opening discussion of the eerie is perhaps my favourite section of his book and deserves to be quoted at some length:

"As with the weird, the eerie is worth reckoning with in its own right as a particular kind of aesthetic experience. Although this experience is certainly triggered by particular cultural forms, it does not originate in them. You could say rather that certain tales, certain novels, certain films, evoke the feeling of the eerie, but this sensation is not a literary or filmic invention. As with the weird, we can and often do encounter the sensation of the eerie [...] without the need for specific forms of cultural meditation. For instance, there is no doubt that the sensation of the eerie clings to certain kinds of physical spaces and landscapes." [a] 

 

But the feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird: "The simplest way to get this difference is by thinking about the [...] opposition [...] between presence and absence." [61]

 

The weird is the presence of that which does not belong; "the eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence" [61]. That's a nice definition. It means that the sensation of the eerir occurs "either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something" [61]. 

 

The only way to dispell this sensation is with knowledge; for the eerie concerns the unknown (although that doesn't mean that all mysteries generate the eerie).

 

Finally, Fisher returns to a point made in the introduction to his book. Behind all the manifestations of the eerie lies the question of agency: 

 

 "In the case of the failure of absence, the question concerns the existence of agency as such. [...] In the case of the failure of presence, the question concerns the particular nature of the agent at work." [63]

 

The key point is: "Since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the [often invisible and/or unconscious] forces that govern our lives and the world." [64]

 

 

II. 

 

It makes me happy that Fisher discusses the work of Daphne du Maurier, as I'm a devotee of her work. 

 

(On the other hand, it makes me feel ashamed of my ignorance when he discusses the work of Christopher Priest about whom I know nothing at all.)  

 

'The Birds' (1952) is a tale I wrote about on Torpedo the Ark back in Feb 2019: click here. 

 

Funny enough, I don't remember describing it as eerie - I think I stressed its malevolence, ambiguity, and inhuman brilliance - but that's not to say Fisher isn't right to use this term. Maybe the fact that the birds seem to possess an unnatural degree of agency is eerie.       

 

Fisher also discusses 'Don't Look Now' (1971), another tale I have twice referred to on this blog: click here and here. Whilst on neither occasion did I use the word eerie, again, I understand why Fisher does; because there is definitely something eerie about fate as a form of obscured agency [b].    

 

And as for the unconscious - if it exists - of course it's eerie, full as it is of absences, gaps, and other negativities. 

 

 

III.

 

Mightn't it be that there's a subjective element in what constitutes an eerie landscape? That eeriness, like beauty or any other aesthetic phenomena, is in the eye of the beholder? 

 

Probably. 

 

Though that's not to deny that a landscape - as an object in its own right - will often demand "to be engaged with on its own terms" [76] and if it happens to be "desolate, atmospheric, solitary" [77] well then it's eerie, no matter who happens to perceive it.

 

Insensitivity to the mood of an environment - be it moorland or an inner city wasteland - is a failure of the individual and can be a dangerous failing too. For we underestimate the powerful agency of a terrain at our own peril. 

 

We might, after Lawrence, call this mood-cum-agency the spirit of place and think in terms of "different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity" [c]. This sounds a bit like pseudo-science, but the spirit of place is, insists Lawrence, a great reality, however we choose to describe it.

 

Of course, the spirit of place needn't always be malevolent and openness to it might lead one into an ecstatic encounter with otherness that is "pulsing beyond the confines of the mundane" [81] and is "achingly alluring even as it is disconcertingly alien" [81] [d]. 

 

In other words, sometimes wandering outside the gate brings joy and can help restore a sense of primordial wonder (which is precisely why Nietzsche encourages philosophers to do their thinking in unexplored realms of knowledge).   

 

 

IV.  

 

As someone who has been researching in the field of thanatology for the best part of two decades, a section entitled 'Eerie Thanatos' is bound to attract my interest ...

 

By this term, Fisher refers to "a transpersonal (and transtemporal) death drive, in which the 'psychological' emerges as the product of forces from the outside" [82]. The theme is beautifully explored, says Fisher, in the work of Nigel Kneale, an author best known for writing Quatermass and the Pit [e].

 

For Kneale - as presumably for Fisher (and for me) - "the material world in which we live is more profoundly alien and strange" [83] than most people care to imagine. And rather than "insisting upon the pre-eminence of the human subject who is alleged to be the privileged bearer of reason, Kneale shows that an enquiry into the nature of what the world is like is also inevitably an unraveling of what human beings had taken themselves to be" [83]. 

 

To quote from Fisher at length once more if I may:

 

"At the heart of Kneale's work is the question of agency and intent. According to some philosophers, it is the capacity for intentionality which definitively separates human beings from the natural world. Intentionality includes intent as we ordinarily understand it, but really refers to the capacity to feel a cerain way about things. Rivers may possess agency - they affect changes - but the do not care about what they do; they do not have any sort of attitude towards the world. Kneale's most famous creation, the scientist Bernard Quatermass, could be said to belong to a trajectory of Radical Enlightenment thinking which is troubled  by this distinction. Radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Spinoza, Darwin, and Freud continually pose the question: to what extent can the concept of intentionality be applied to human beings, never mind to the natural world? The question is posed in part because of the thoroughgoing naturalisation that Radical Enlightenment thought had insisted upon: if human beings fully belong to the so-called natural world, then on what grounds can a special case be made for them? The conclusions that Radical Enlightenment thinking draws are the exact opposite of the claims for which so-called new materialists such as Jane Bennett [f] have argued. New materialists such as Bennett accept that the distinction between human beings and the natural world is no longer tenable, but they construe this to mean that many of the features previously ascribed only to human beings are actually distributed throughout nature. Radical Enlightenment goes in the opposite direction, by questioning whether there is any such thing as intentionality at all; and if there is, could human beings be said to possess it?" [83-84] 

 

That's the direction I head in too: a direction that leads to the Nietzschean conclusion that life is only a very rare and unusual way of being dead. A conclusion which Freud, following Nietzsche, also (reluctantly) arrived at in his work on Thanatos and the death drive:

 

"By striking contrast with the new materialist idea of 'vibrant matter', which suggests that all matter is to some extent alive, the conjecture implied Freud's positioning of Thanatos is that nothing is alive: life is a region of death. [...] What is called organic life is actually a kind of folding of the inorganic." [84]

 

But ...

 

"But the inorganic is not the passive, inert counterpart to an allegedly self-propelling life; on the contrary, it possesses its own agency. There is a death drive, which in its most radical formulation is not a drive towards death, but a drive of death." [84-85] 

 

Thus ...

 

"The inorganic is the impersonal pilot of everything, including that which seems to be personal and organic. Seen from the perspective of Thanatos, we ourselves become an exemplary case of the eerie: there is an agency at work in us (the unconscious, the death drive), but it is not where or what we expected it to be." [85] 

 

This argument - which I believe to be correct - is surely the most important in Fisher's book. I'm less convinced, however, by his (somewhat hopeful) suggestion that science - as an equally impersonal process - offers us a way beyond. To paraphrase Quatermass himself: Maybe death is as good as it gets. Perhaps it's a cosmic law.  

 

 

V.

 

Fisher provides an excellent reading of Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing (1972) as a book which, in some respects, "belongs to the same moment as such texts as Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus" [101]. 

 

That is to say, works which "attempt to rise to the challenge of treating discontent, abjection and psychopathology as traces of an as yet unimaginable outside rather than as symptoms of maladjustment" [101]. 

 

Having said that, Fisher thinks that the novel's unnamed narrator at the point of schiophrenic break-rapture is actually more in tune with Ben Woodard's dark vitalism [g], which is an interesting idea, but not one I wish to discuss here, as frankly, I can't quite see how the latter relates to the eerie. This might be shortsightedness, or a sign of my own intellectual limitations; or it could be that Fisher is now hallucinating visions of the eerie and seeing it in places where it really doesn't exist. 

 

So far, I've enjoyed and been impressed by the manner in which Fisher has taken a rather hackneyed idea - the eerie - and given it an original twist as well as a strong degree of conceptual rigour. But I think he should have wrapped things up with the notion of eerie thanatos, having already offered us his central insight; i.e., that the eerie is ultimately the trace of an inhuman (and inorganic) drive. 

For the first time, after a hundred odd pages, I'm starting to get just a wee bit bored and to feel that Fisher is now simply namechecking a few more of his favourite things à la Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965) and flexing his muscles like an intellectual version of Tony Holland [h].

 

Having said that, I don't like to abandon a book before the end once I've begun to read it. And so, let's continue, fast-forwarding past Jonathan Glazer's 2013 film Under the Skin [i] and arriving at the final couple of chapters, 'Alien Traces' and ''The Eeriness Remains' ...

VI.

 

Any consideration of outer space, says Fisher in the first of these chapters, "quickly engenders a sense of the eerie" [110]: is there anybody (anything) out there? Again, I suppose that's true - so obviously true, in fact, that it could have fallen from the mouth of Sybil Fawlty [j].  

 

Fisher also claims that Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a "major contribution to the cinema of the eerie" [112]. 

 

But it's also one of the most boring films I have ever had to sit through and I'm not sure I'd agree with this judgement; I mean, I can see that of Kubrick's The Shining (1980) - and enjoyed Fisher's analysis of the latter - but 2001 ... I'm unconvinced.  

 

Let's just say that when it comes to eeriness, ghostly twins always trump aliens ... and if anyone thinks I'm going to discuss the "possibility of an eerie love" [121], well, they've got another think coming; I'm afraid that I do find this suggestion sentimental "as well as emotionally and conceptually excessive" [121]. 

 

VII.

 

I mentioned in section III of this post how the eerie needn't always be malevolent and openness to it might lead one into an ecstatic encounter with otherness; that wandering outside the gate may even bring joy and help restore a sense of primordial wonder.

 

Well, Fisher clearly agrees with this and that is why he closes his study with a discussion of Joan Lindsay's brilliant novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967):   

 

"Not only because Picnic at Hanging Rock is practically a textbook example of an eerie novel - it includes disappearances, amnesia, a geological anomaly, an intensely atmspheric terrain - but also because Lindsay's rendition of the eerie has a positivity, a languorous and delirious allure, that is absent or suppressed in so many other eerie texts." [122]

 

Whereas the outside is usually seen as dangerous and deadly, Picnic at Hanging Rock invokes an outside which involves "a passage beyond the petty repressions and mean confines of common experience into a heightened atmosphere of oneiric lucidity" [122]. 

 

Fisher concludes: "The novel seems to justify the idea that a sense of the eerie is created and sustained simply by withholding information." [126][k]  

 

I could elucidate, but the above note seems to encourage one to recognise that sometimes it's best to say no more ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, (Repeater Books, 2016), p. 61. Future page references to this work will be given in the main text.   

[b] Etymologically speaking, it's weird - rather than eerie - that suggests fate; the Old English term wyrd meant having the power to shape the latter and thus control one's destiny. Readers will probably recall that the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, often known as the Weird Sisters, have this ability.     

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Spirit of Place', Studies in Classic America Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambride University Press, 2003), p. 17.  

 

[d] Edward Hunter and Simon Solomon seem to understand this in their short film Room (2010) set on the North Yorkshire Moors. Unfortunately, I can provide no further details of this work or give any links at this time.   

 

[e] Quatermass and the Pit is an influential British science-fiction serial transmitted live by BBC Television in December 1958 and January 1959. A Hammer Films adaptation was released with the same title in 1967, directed by Roy Ward Baker and scripted by Kneale.

      Fisher also discusses the fantasy novel Red Shift (Collins, 1973) by Alan Garner in his chapter on eerie thanatos in relation to the question of human free will, but this is another book and author about which and about whom I again know nothing and so prefer to pass over in silence here (with no disrespect to Garner).       

 

[f] I discussed Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter (Duke University Press, 2010) in a post published on 10 April 2015, in which I express my dislike of her material vitalism: click here. 

 

[g] See Woodard's Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life (Zero Boks, 2012). 

 

[h] Tony Holland is a British bodybuilder known for his musical muscle man act. He achieved national fame in the UK after appearing on Opportunity Knocks in 1964 - which, unbelievably, he won six times. 

      Click here to watch him perform (joined by Kenny Lynch) to what became his cha-cha theme tune; 'Wheels', originally recorded (and released as a single which reached number 8 in the UK charts) by the String-A-Longs in 1960. As a very young child, I always found it weirdly disturbing when Holland came on TV and hearing this tune today still makes my skin crawl.     

 

[i] I intend to (i) watch this film and (ii) write a future post on it - and that's why I don't discuss it here. 

      I don't know why I haven't already seen this film; I'm beginning to think I sometimes have blackouts like Rip Van Winkle and when I wake up the world has moved on and certain cultural productions have simply passed me by. The fact that I have been denied an opportunity of seeing Scarlett Johnasson on screen playing an alien young woman stalking human males really irritates.

 

[j] I'm referring here to a famous exchange between Basil and Sybil in the final episode of Fawlty Towers [S2/E6] entitled 'Basil the Rat' (dir. Bob Spiers, written by John Cleese and Connie Booth, 1979): click here. 

 

[k] As Fisher reminds us: 

      "In the case of Picnic at Hanging Rock, this literally happened: the form in which the novel was published was the result of an act of excision. In her original manuscript, Lindsay provided a solution of sorts to the enigma [at the heart of the novel], in a concluding chapter that her publishers [wisely] encouraged her to remove [...] This 'Chapter Eighteen' was published separately, as The Secret of Hanging Rock [1987]." [126] 

 

 

To read the first part of this post - on Fisher's notion of the weird - click here.  

 

  

It's Creepy and It's Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky: Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie (Part 1)

Front cover image from Mark Fisher's 

The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016)

 

 

I. 

 

Let me confess from the outset that one of the main problems I have with Mark Fisher's work is that I'm unfamiliar with many of the books, films, and records that he chooses as points of reference, so often feel unable to comment. Thus, I intend sticking here to his more general remarks on the weird and the eerie, about which I feel better able to discuss.

 

According to Mark Fisher, the weird and the eerie are closely related (but distinct) modes of strangeness, each with their own properties. The former draws our attention to that which does not belong and instills a sense of wrongness; the latter troubles the notion of agency (human and non-human) and makes us question existence and non-existence. 

 

Neither terrifies or deeply distresses, so much as make us feel vaguely apprehensive or uneasy.    

 

And neither has much to do with with Freud's concept of the unheimlich and should not be equated to the latter. The attempt to do so, says Fisher, is "symptomatic of a secular retreat from the outside" [a]; i.e., returning to the safety of a long familiar (if hugely influential) idea that ultimately serves to domesticate and contain the outside "in terms of a modernist family drama" [10]. 

 

 

II.

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Fisher begins his study of the weird by turning to H. P. Lovecraft - a writer whom Graham Harman predicts will one day displace Hölderlin as the philosopher's favourite [b] and someone who intuitively grasped that nothing is weirder than reality (i.e., the natural-material cosmos).

 

As Fisher rightly says, when you really stop to think about it, a black hole is weirder than a vampire or werewolf. 

 

Lovecraft is the daddy of weird fiction; the man who long before George Michael encouraged characters and readers alike to venture outside - even if doing so "often ends in breakdown and psychosis" [16] for the former and fascination "mixed with a certain trepidation" [17] for the latter.

 

There is nothing surprising or suspensful or even truly terrible in Lovecraft's weird tales. And yet they compel our attention, even as they repel us at the same time with their inhuman quality; i.e., their insistence that "human concerns, perspectives and concepts have only a local reference" [18].    

Fisher is spot-on to insist that Lovecraft is neither a horror writer nor a fantasy author; that his weird realism is something very different from either of these genres and that his tales "depend for their power on the difference between the terrestrial-empirical and the outside" [20][c] and on their sheer originality.

 

 

III.

 

Like Lovecraft, H. G. Wells also understood something of the weird, even if his work is, in many respects, very different from the former's. 

 

One thing both writers shared is a concern with thresholds and the fatal possibility of "contact between incommensurable worlds" [28], an idea best illustrated in an episode of Seinfeld when George's independence (and sanity) are threatened by the transcendental shock of worlds colliding [d].   

 

It's probably always best (if not always possible) to keep worlds apart, although the weird, as a phenomenon, is that which unfolds in the space between them. 

 

 

IV.  

 

Moving on, Fisher introduces a notion of the grotesque, which, like the weird, "evokes something which is out of place" [32] - although unlike the latter it often evokes laughter (the only humour in Lovecraft, says Fisher, is accidental).

 

And the "confluence of the weird and the grotesque is no better exemplified than in the work of the post-punk group The Fall" [33], particularly in the period 1980-82. 

Unfortunately, my knowledge of Mark E. Smith's combo is limited. In fact, I can only name one of their songs; the 1980 single 'How I Wrote Elastic Man' (and that's only because I often heard it on John Peel, not because I went out and bought it). 

 

So I'll just have to take Fisher's word for it when he insists The Fall "are remarkabe for the way in which they draw out a cultural politics of the weird and the grotesque" [33] and produced "what could be called a popular modernist weird [...] with all the difficulties and compulsions of post-punk sound" [33] [e].

 

In the same period Fisher was getting worked up over The Fall, I was listening to Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow and had more interest in post-punk piracy than the weird and grotesque; indeed, I seem to remember finding groups like The Fall too depressing (perhaps even too Northern) for my tastes; even their laughter issues "from a psychotic outside" [35] and that didn't sound very funny to me at the time.           

 

However, if what Fisher says is true, I would probably find The Fall more amusing now (although I suspect I would still find them a band more interesting to read about, than fun to listen to).   

 

 

V.

 

Is there not an intrinsically weird dimension to the time travel story? 

Mark Fisher thinks so:

 

"By its very nature, the time travel story [...] combines entities and objects that do not belong together. Here the threshold between worlds is the apparatus that allows travel between different time periods [...] and the weird effect typically manifests as a sense of achronism." [40]

 

Again, that's one of those true-but-kind-of-obvious statements that Fisher seems to specialise in. Here's another: time-paradoxes also trigger a feeling weirdness. Indeed - who would argue with that?  

 

 

VI.

 

"There is another type of weird effect that is generated by strange loops [...] not just tangles in cause and effect [...] but confusions of ontological level." [45]

 

These confusions particularly play out at the level of simulacra and simulation, putting the nature of being and reality into question - just ask Thomas (Neo) Anderson. Or Baudrillard. Is there anything weirder than living in a world one knows to be a cleverly constructed simulation but which still feels real?      

 

 

VII.

 

If it wasn't in the least surprising that Fisher should open his study of the weird with Lovecraft, it's equally unsurprising that he should close it with the director of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, David Lynch.

 

For in many ways Fisher seems weirdly trapped in the 1980s and '90s; a man still gripped by the same philosophical ideas (and postmodern obsessions) that shaped his thinking when writing his Ph.D. on cybernetic fiction-theory [f]. Indeed, Fisher readily admits that his fascination with the weird and eerie goes back as far as he can remember. 

     

Now, whilst some might suggest he move on and find new interests, I rather admire the manner in which he has stayed true to the authors, singers, and filmmakers, he loves best. But David Lynch isn't a particular favourite of mine, I'm afraid; there are certainly films by the other two Davids - Fisher and Cronenberg - I like more than Mulholland Drive (2001), though they're perhaps not as weird in the sense that Fisher uses the term.   

 

As for Inland Empire (2006), not only have I not seen it, I've not even heard of it - how weird is that?

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, (Repeater Books, 2016), p. 10. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

 

[b] See Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Zero Books, 2012).

 

[c] Just to be clear: "The outside is not 'empirically' exterior; it is transcendentally exterior; i.e. it is not just a matter of something being distant in space and time, but of something which is beyond our ordinary experience and conception of space and time itself." - Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 22. 

 

[d] Seinfeld, 'The Pool Guy' [S7/E8], dir. Andy Ackerman, written by David Mandel (1995). Click here to observe the devastating effect it has upon George's mental health when he experiences the colliding of worlds: George is getting upset! Nevertheless, it's interesting to note that this tale unfolds within a weirdly comic universe, rather than a weirdly tragic or melancholic one.

 

[e] Perhaps the only author who writes with such intense conviction about the pop music they love is poet and playwright Síomón Solomon; see his 2020 text Hölderlin's Poltergeists in which he celebrates that other critically-acclaimed post-punk band from Manchester, Joy Division.     

 

[f] Fisher's Ph.D. thesis was entitled: Flatline constructs: Gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. It was completed in the Philosophy Dept. at the University of Warwick and submitted in July 1999. A PDF of this work is available via the University of Warwick publications service website: click here. The first line opens with the words "Isn't it strange [...]". 

      Fisher was a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective inspired by the work of Nick Land and Sadie Plant known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Although I was also in the Philosophy Dept. at Warwick at this time and initially had Land as my Graduate Progress Committee member overseeing my own doctoral research project, I never crossed paths with Fisher, which, looking back, I now rather regret.  

 

 

Part two of this post - on the eerie - can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

On the Case of Russell Brand and Mark Fisher

Messrs. Fisher & Brand

 

 

I. 

 

One of the more unexpected consequences of the media storm surrounding the allegations of rape, sexual assault, and emotional abuse levelled at the comic revolutionary-cum-spiritual wellness guru Russell Brand is that it has reignited an online controversy surrounding a ten-year-old essay by political philosopher-cum-cultural commentator Mark Fisher, in which he openly expresses his admiration for the former ...  

 

Published in 2013, 'Exiting the Vampire Castle' [1] is probably my favourite piece by Fisher, despite the fact - or, if I'm being honest, it's probably due to the fact - that at the time it pissed a lot of people off.

 

Here, I'd like to revisit the essay, particularly those sections that refer to Brand - whose case increasingly fascinates me - and then discuss a retrospective defence of Fisher and his text, written by one of his closest allies, Matt Colquhoun, in response to the present hoo-ha.

 

 

II.

 

Fisher himself concedes that his essay was born out of depression and exhaustion. But that doesn't, of course, lessen its brilliance or weaken its arguments. Tired, fed-up, and bored is often a great combination when it comes to producing work that has a vitriolic edge; happy souls don't always create the best art or have the most interesting ideas. 

 

The trick is to weaponise and affirm negative thoughts and feelings and not wallow in them or allow them to coalesce into bad conscience and ressentiment; i.e., one must learn to hate with a certain gaiety, like Nietzsche, who is very much present in 'Exiting the Vampire Castle'.          

 

Like Fisher, I don't care so much about what an individual has said or done - no matter how objectionable - I worry more about the manner in which they are "personally vilified and hounded" afterwards. It's this that leaves behind the stench of witch-hunting moralism. 

 

This wasn't said by Fisher at the time with Russell Brand in mind, but I repeat it here and now thinking very much of the latter.

 

I'm sure that Brand's behaviour in the past was appalling at times; though whether it was also criminal is another matter. But the behaviour of his critics - many of whom were former friends and colleagues - as they rush to disassociate themselves from him is just as shocking and just as vile.

 

Fisher crossed paths with Brand at a so-called People's Assembly, held in Ipswich. Recalling the encounter, he confesses that he'd "long been an admirer of Brand - one of the few big-name comedians on the current scene to come from a working class background."

 

Then, in an astonishing series of paragraphs, Fisher couples a passionate endoresement of Brand to an excoriating critique of those po-faced puritans on the left of the political spectrum who sneer and wag fingers at him. For Fisher, Brand is not only cool, sexy, and intelligent, but queer "in the way that popular culture used to be". 

 

If, as those on the moralising left claim, Brand is prone to making inappropriate and offensive remarks, thereby breaching "the bland conventions of mainstream media 'debate'", Fisher is prepared to cut him some slack - and I respect him for that. 

 

Yes, Brand should apologise for some of his behaviour and sexist language; but any such apology should be accepted, says Fisher, in a spirit of comradeship and solidarity. And above all Brand should be admired for daring to bring up the taboo topic of class - one that so embarrasses many on the left with their public school backgrounds and ultra-posh accents [2].            

 

Admired too, for standing up to smug and condescending TV interviewers, like Jeremy Paxman, who seem to think celebrities shouldn't express political views and that "working class people should remain in poverty, obscurity and impotence lest they lose their 'authenticity'" [3]. 

 

Fisher writes:

 

"For some of us, Brand's forensic take-down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn't remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class 'superior' using intelligence and reason. This wasn't Johnny Rotten swearing at Bill Grundy - an act of antagonism which confirmed rather than challenged class stereotypes. Brand had outwitted Paxman - and the use of humour was what separated Brand from the dourness of so much 'leftism'."

Brand, concludes Fisher, is an inspirational figure. That is to say, one who "makes people feel good about themselves; whereas the moralising left specialises in making people feed bad, and is not happy until their heads are bent in guilt and self-loathing" [4].  

 

III.

What then, you might ask, is wrong with anything said here by Fisher in 2013?

 

The answer - as far as I can see - is nothing. The claim that this essay caused lasting damage to his reputation is exaggerated and overlooks the fact that there are some readers, like me, who think highly of Fisher mostly on the basis of this text. Nevertheless, Fisher's essay caused a big fuss then and it's causing a big fuss once again.

 

And this is due to the controversy surrounding the (undeniably charismatic if slightly unhinged) figure of Russell Brand, who, let us remind ourselves is innocent under the law, having not been found guilty of - or even charged with - any crime of a sexual nature and who completely refutes the accusations made against him in the media by several women relating to the period between 2006 and 2013, when he was at the height of his fame.

 

Despite this, Fisher is once again being painted by some not only as an early (and aggressive) opponent of woke politics and cancel culture, but as an anti-feminist who, in celebrating Brand back in 2013, wilfully turned a blind eye to the latter's already apparent sexism, misogyny, and abuse of power. 

Matt Colquhoun - a writer and photographer known for their work on Fisher's writings and their relationship with the latter [5] - is having none of this, however, and says that such a grotesque caricature makes Fisher "wholly unrecognisable to those who knew him or who are more familiar with his work" [6]. 

 

Colquhoun goes on to argue that post-Vampire Castle and following his death in 2017, Fisher has "too often been reduced to a pawn in an online discourse that obscures the ways in which he moved on from this polemic to build a far more positive project ..." [7]  

 

Fisher's celebration of Brand was, writes Colquhoun, due to his life-long fascination with "people who, at one time or another [...] bridged the gap between the mainstream and the underground" [8] and believed in the revolutionary potential of a (chaotic and often comic) popular modernism, that someone such as Brand seems to personify.  

 

So far, so good: Colquhoun hasn't said anything that I find problematic, although, if I'm being completely honest, the claim that Fisher moved on in order to construct a far more positive project is one that makes me slightly concerned. 

 

But the following paragraph from Colquhoun really rankles, however: 

 

"Then and now, the inclusion of Brand in Fisher's argument stains it overall. The allegations now facing Brand, who was already mistrusted by many for his sexual politics [...] are all the more damning and serious. For some, they also vindicate the ire first directed at Fisher over a decade ago. But whereas Brand is accused of very real crimes, Fisher was only guilty of an intellectual misstep - one that he would spend the next few years trying to remedy." [9]

 

That, I think, is an outrageous statement and I'm almost certain that Fisher would not approve of the language of moral pollution; as if the very mention of Brand's name is tainting. 

 

And what, pray, would Fisher think of the claim that unproven allegations are damning? Or the idea of vindication - a term also drawn from a moral vocabulary? Or that he was guilty of an intellectual misstep - as if a philosopher should always walk carefully along a well-beaten and carefully sign-posted path.

 

I don't doubt that Colquhoun's motives in writing their piece for the New Statesman were well-intentioned and honourable. But I really don't think Fisher needs to have anyone apologise on his behalf, or attempt to justify his work. 

 

And to be reminded once more of the claim made by some of Fisher's online supporters that his "defiant support of Brand, against advice to the contrary, was a product of mental ill-health" [10], is, I think, shameful.    

 

If he has a grave, then I fear that poor Mark Fisher will be turning in it ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Mark Fisher, 'Exiting the Vampire Castle', Open Democracy (24 Nov 2013): click here. 

 

[2] Writing about the fragile and fleeting nature of class consciousness, Fisher says:

      "The petit bourgeoisie which dominates the academy and the culture industry has all kinds of subtle deflections and pre-emptions which prevent the topic even coming up, and then, if it does come up, they make one think it is a terrible impertinence, a breach of etiquette, to raise it."

 

[3] Jeremy Paxman did his best to make Russell Brand look a fool on BBC's Newsnight on 23 October 2013, but, arguably, it was the latter who exposed the former for what he was. The full interview can be watched by clicking here. 

[4] The latter, says Fisher, are driven by "a priest's desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant's desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster's desire to be one of the in-crowd" and they inhabit the Vampires' Castle - an institution which "feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities" of the young and lives by "converting the suffering of particular groups - the more 'marginal' the better - into academic capital". This is a hugely important idea and one which I hope to return to and discuss in a future post.

 

[5] Matt Colquhoun is the author of Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher (Repeater Books, 2020). Colquhoun also edited Fisher's Postcapitalist Desire lectures (Repeater Books, 2021). They blog at xenogothic.com: click here.

 

[6-10] Matt Colquhoun, 'Mark Fisher was not Russell Brand', in the New Statesman, (18 Sept 2023): click here. 

      Readers who are not subscribers to this publication and don't wish to register in order to be able to access three free articles a month online, will sadly come up against a paywall. I'm grateful to Colquhoun for kindly emailing me a copy of their text, so that I could read it at my convenience.     

Notes on Hauntology and Ghost Modernism

Artcodex: Venn Diagram (2013) [1] 

artcodex.org

 

 

It was Derrida who coined the neologism hauntology in a 1993 lecture on Marx, to refer to the manner in which old ideas, hopes, memories, and dead authors come back to haunt us like ghosts; opening up an uncanny space for thought in which socio-cultural elements from the past, present, and future collapse into an atemporal zone [2].   

 

The term has since been invoked by thinkers in many different fields; not just philosophy, but also the visual arts, music, anthropology, politics, and literary criticism [3]. Indeed, I recall that when I was researching a paper on spectrophilia some years back, I also spoke of hauntology in relation to another Derridean term - différance (i.e., the difference and deferral of meaning, origin, and presence) [4].

 

Arguably, however, it was the English cultural commentator Mark Fisher [5] who popularised Derrida's term and, in the process, made it very much part of his own critical vocabulary. 

 

For Fisher, the key idea is one of lost futures and he argues that postmodernism and neoliberalism between them cancelled the revolutionary promise of modernism and Marxism; gradually (but systematically) depriving artists, activists, and theorists of the resources necessary to produce the New. 

 

In other words, Fisher bemoaned cultural and political stagnation; the endless repetition and recycling of old ideas that were given, at best, a novel form of repackaging. In contrast to the nostalgia and retro-aesthetics of postmodern culture, Fisher promoted hauntology as a means of overcoming the impasse of the perpetual present and he refused to abandon the desire for a better future (or to remain forever pining for a future that failed to arrive). 

 

Discussing the political relevance of the concept, Fisher wrote:

 

"At a time of political reaction and restoration, when cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards [...] one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond postmodernity's terminal time. When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past." [6]

 

To be honest, I have certain reservations about this ... 

 

And when I see members of Artcodex drawing Ven diagram wall installations in order to manifest collective hopes and fears and organise their thoughts to do with modernism, postmodernism, and what they playfully term ghost modernism, it intensifies these reservations. For I simply don't share their longing to revisit the grand narratives of modernity and see how ideals of utopia and universality might be made relevant to the 21st-century [7].         

 

For me, incredulity remains the key and postmodern irony the melody ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This wall installation with three intersecting circles representing Modernism, Postmodernism, and Ghost Modernism was developed by the art collective Artcodex whilst in residency at Transparent Studio (Brooklyn, NY) in Feb-Mar 2013. 

      Painted directly on the wall with blackboard paint, people were invited to use the chalk and erasers made available to list the things they associated with modernity, postmodernity, and ghost modernity, whilst rubbing out any earlier entries with which they disagreed. Then, in April of that year, they created a larger version of the Venn diagram for exhibition, alongside other works exploring the theme of ghost modernism (see note 7 below). 

 

[2] See Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Routledge 1994). 

      The work was first presented as a series of lectures during a conference on the future of Marxism held at the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. Despite being an important concept in the book, the word hauntology appears only three times. For Derrida, the words hauntology and ontology are homophonous when spoken in French. If the latter is the philosophical study of being, then, in Derrida's mind, hauntology is a state of non-being that forever shadows ontology. I mentioned Derrida's text in a post published on Torpedo the Ark earlier this month in response to a 6/20 paper by John Holroyd: click here.

 

[3] As might be imagined, there is little agreement about what the concept of hauntology means exactly and different writers, working in different fields, have used it in different ways. Here, I will argue that it was the English cultural theorist Mark Fisher who popularised Derrida's term and made it very much part of his own critical vocabulary.   

 

[4] A Treadwell's paper entitled 'Spectrophilia' and due for presentation on 7 October 2014 was, unfortunately, cancelled at the last moment. Although I was more interested in notions of the queer gothic, perverse materialism, and the role played by ghosts in fictional works such as Wuthering Heights, I touched on hauntology as a philosophical concept and discussed Freud's notion of the uncanny. Some of my introductory remarks to this paper were recently published on TTA: click here.

 

[5] Mark Fisher - also known under his blogging alias k-punk - was an interesting figure; a writer, critic, theorist, etc., who cared passionately about politics, music and popular culture. Arguably we had this and quite a few other things in common; for example, we both belonged to that haunted generation born in the 1960s and both studied for a Ph.D in modern European philosophy at Warwick in the 1990s. 

      However, for one reason or another, he and I never crossed paths, nor even exchanged a single email. Someone did once jokingly suggest I was a poor man's Mark Fisher, but, even if that were true, the fact remains, dear reader, that he's dead and I'm alive (although, considering our topic in this post, such a distinction is meaningless and Fisher might now be said to haunt TTA).

 

[6] Mark Fisher, 'The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology', in Dancecult, Vol. 5, No. 2, (2013), p. 53. Click here to read as a pdf online. Readers who are interested might like to also see Fisher's article 'What Is Hauntology?' in Film Quarterly Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 16-24 (click here to read on JSTOR) and his book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Zero Books, 2014). 

 

[7] I'm referring here to Artcodex; the name used by Vandana Jain and Mike Estabrook for their work produced in collaboration with many other artists. Via a number of different projects, the aim is to create spontaneous communities that are able to explore issues within contemporary culture. Click here to visit the Artcodex website. 

      As for ghost modernism, Artcodex claim this started off as simply a pun or funny term of phrase "that came in the middle of the night" and which was then adopted for the title of a 2013 exhibition at the Quartair Gallery in The Hague (NL): click here. 

      However, as we have seen, the concept of hauntology has been around since 1993 and Mark Fisher was already using the term ghost modernism in a blog post published in July 2008: click here. Indeed, Fisher readily admits that Marshall Berman anticipates the idea in his classic 1982 work All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. I'm sure members of Artcodex are aware of this, but, as far as I can see no acknowledgment of such a genealogy is given on their website and that seems something of an oversight to me; credit where credit is due, and all that ...