'The simple life's no longer there'
I read Matt Colquhoun’s book on Mark Fisher with interest and trepidation. Like a lot of those who read K-Punk at formative or transformative moments, I still deal with Mark’s work and example in almost everything I write, with more irksome labour than I’d like - none of us wants to be one of Adorno’s self-important “wrestlers with difficulties”. I’ve written elsewhere about my ambivalence about aspects of Mark’s work and much of what’s kept me intermittently writing about it is a loving irritability with its least useful aspects, which happen to be the ones that rose emoji stereotypes love the most. (I’ll reiterate a now-forgotten tweet and say that the “anti-SJW left”, which takes the ‘Vampire Castle’ essay as its ur-text, is a joke sect but one that needs to be wiped from history.) That tetchy “fealty to the Event”, which I’ve accepted but want to leave behind, knowing that Mark and I are ultimately such different writers, is Egress’s real subject. It’s a bold, perverse and quixotic book, one that in its winding lack of organisation leaves everything out on the floor. I don’t have much patience with the places it takes Mark’s work, which could charitably be called idiosyncratic. I’ve got much more to say about it, elsewhere, but for now I just want to make some notes in the margins of a few passages from Colquhoun about the concept Mark became known for, “hauntology”. (Having rewatched The Sopranos recently, I find myself giving the word the intonation with which middle-aged suburban mobsters speak of “this thing of ours”.)
In an essay for The Quietus that draws on passages of Egress, Colquhoun returns to hauntology’s first formulations and contextualises them in the later complex of “capitalist realism”, as a form of cultural “symptomatology”. The image of Battersea Power Station as a storehouse of cultural treasures and elite bolthole from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) that famously opens Capitalist Realism becomes an illustration of the endgame of culture under late capitalism: “how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?” Cultural objects are torn from the diachronic process of historical change that produced them, and exist in an atemporal assemblage, all distinctions of time ironed out into a flat present. What Jameson called the “nostalgia mode” makes new pop culture into simply the repetition of this past whose differences are reduced to the alternation of “period styles”. Thus, the example of Arctic Monkeys, who take the guitar formulae of post-punk and combine them with the revived vocal whine and orthodox rock rhythm section of Britpop or The Strokes, themselves revivals, all expressed in the seamless hi-fi of contemporary digital recording techniques. The expectation that anything might emerge that would throw light on this material as excrescences of the past disappears: the press ate up, as Mark observed with distemper, the reheated Curb Your Enthusiasm embarrassment of Extras or a dull, matey Dr Who reboot as delectable product and met complaints about its unoriginality with “it’s not perfect, but what do you expect. The BBC has to cater to public taste now.”
Hauntology, then, emerges as a symptom of this impasse: the sign of a psychic sickness of cultural time, like the dejected affect and compulsive repetition that Freud saw as the contours of melancholia, the failure to internalise the fact of death. It’s the depressive cultural equivalent to “the privatisation of stress” as an etiology of clinical anxiety. In Burial, The Caretaker or Ghost Box, he discerned - in writings that exemplify criticism as an act at once of aesthetic seimography and careful construction of the object - a disturbed longing for moments of the cultural past in which that forgotten difference exploded, the “baroque sunbursts” to which he compared rave culture in a late essay. For Mark, with the periodisation that guided his writing like a lodestone, those moments were the ruins of “popular modernism”, a term that, in his late writing, he reconfigures again as an aesthetic of lost possibilities. Popular modernism is far less a tradition of realised innovations in art than a series of glimpses, lived through the historical experience of mass culture, that politics refuses to make real: one in which “consumer desire and class consciousness could not only be reconciled, but would actually require one another… a world in which the old dandy-flaneur ambition for life to become a work of art would be democratised, where the mass produced and the bespoke would combine in unexpected ways, where no detail was too small to be attended to, and fashion would be as significant as fine art”, a socialism of unimpeded leisure and an everyday life equal to the shocks of modernist art.
The irritated familiarity with which this argument tends to be received now (“yeah yeah, we get it dad”) by “younger readers” - or for that matter Gen X media barflies eager to appear in the know - is an indicator of Mark’s very success. Enough people accepted its premises to start quibbling with the details. (As Jenny Turner noted in her surprisingly basic, dull and obtuse review of the Repeater anthology last year, the canon of “popular modernism” happened to be that of Mark’s youth.) The first Burial essay was published in April 2006; by the publication of Capitalist Realism in late 2009, hauntology as a productive concept was dead, because everyone was now a hauntologist. The longing for “lost futures” was easy enough to incorporate into a British culture industry already primed for revivals of various modernist styles. Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns (2010) was the paradigm of such a move, claiming to disinter a ‘forgotten’ modernism that just so happened, as Joe Kennedy notes, to supposedly thumb its nose at the “Corbusian plate-glass” aesthetics of modernity esteemed by mandarin leftists. (Harris’s counterparts in electronic music are too many to name.) With barely a tremor, the future was now just another element in the present’s reproduction of the past as commodity. “Popular modernism” becomes Instagram modernism. Encomia to Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem could happily sit in the Guardian alongside dismissals of Mark’s own theories. Hence, I suspect, why he tried in the grand and unsatisfactory architecture of ‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’ to reassert hauntology’s relationship with a putatively materialist history of the period since 1979, the collapse of the public sphere and the welfare state that sustained it. As I suggested at the time, such a reduction actually blunted the power of hauntology’s original formulations, turning the unheimlich into just another effect of a 70s childhood and a collectively authored, spectral concept into a monolith. It made hauntology more legible as a political intervention - made clearer how it mattered in the 2010s - at the same time that it sapped its effectivity.
Given that fate, how and why would you return to hauntology? Especially in a moment when all the policy questions that the “end of history” rendered unthinkable - around the fate of public health and services, work and survival, housing and rentierism, the plausibility of a pure service economy that delivers permanently stagnant real wages - are inescapable? Colquhoun answers partly by reformulating hauntology’s temporality: hauntology has been rewritten as “hauntography”, their difference “being similar to the difference between biology and biography — one orders and describes the events of a life after the fact; the other is a study of life as it is lived, and all the mechanisms and relations that make it possible. In these terms, Fisher saw himself as less a writer of obituaries and more as a necromancer for not just lost futures but the futures we are continually losing.” In this reading hauntology is a continual dowsing, detection, for the emergence in the present of a past strikingly unlike the renditions of the past that constitute the retromaniac present. From this perspective, like primitive accumulation, the destruction of the future is an always ongoing process. But Colquhoun doesn’t point to new forms of hauntology here, his central examples - Burial and The Caretaker - being drawn from the mid-00s. In Egress itself, he “move[s] swiftly past this most famous phase of Mark’s thought” to better situate it “in the movement of its thinking and its relation to futures new as well as lost”, turning to his later body of writing on accelerationism and post-capitalist desire as a reaction to the frozen present hauntology diagnosed. Instead the failure of the future is “embodied today by the political discontent of so-called Millennials”, and the sequel to Everywhere at the end of time is Greta Thunberg’s “declarations that the future is being stolen from her generation”. It’s an understandable move: if everything is hauntological then the real haunts will be out there, exposed in the light for everyone to see. But it feels, bathetically, like hauntography in reverse, the making over of emergent trends into the kind of empirical canon that hauntology became.
Part of the problem, I want to suggest finally, is due to unresolved questions about “the future” and its place in the temporal involutions of hauntology. In the theory of cultural change implicit in '“popular modernism” and explicitly stated in Simon Reynolds’ Retromania, the New arrives as something completely original and unexpected, untainted by any trace of the past. The thing known as “modernism” is an accelerating production of such future shocks which, after 1979, tail off, in Reynolds’ simile, like a rocket losing speed. Culture’s energy depletion, the dwindling of futurity, can be sensed in changes over periods of time: 20 years separate The Wailers’ Burnin’ and Rufige Kru’s “Ghosts of my Life”, but any record from 2015 “beamed back in time to, say, 1995” would shock the audience by “the very recognisability of the sounds”. An unarguable claim. And yet this almost quantitative measure of futurity - music has progressed by this much in this amount of time - isn’t really congruent with the qualitative measure - the glimpses of another world - contained in “popular modernism”. The “lost futures” of popular modernism aren’t really futures at all, in the sense of times ahead of the present, to which it will lead or could have lead. After all, as Kodwo Eshun noted (quoting Mark’s own “SF Capital”), capital is perfectly able to produce futures in that sense: the planning of such times to come is one of its most important sectors, conjuring them into being through the kinds of techno-fixes that have “been decalibrated from cultural form”. In this sense, the “futures” of popular modernism wouldn’t simply be intensifications of existing tendencies within the capital, but the dialectical production of the antithesis of its continual capture of our lives, which would be - amongst other things - what Mark identified in ‘Terminator vs Avatar’ as the movement of “destratification” in capital’s history.
In this sense, hauntology’s critical method can’t be the new cliché of “excavating the past to find our futures”. Freud’s uncanny isn’t simply the recognition of the domestic (“heimlich”) past from which you had become detached or alienated. It is rather a sensation in which the present becomes unmoored from linear temporal succession, revealing it to be dependent on and belonging to something utterly alien and unincorporable. The thrilling vocal shivers from Japan’s “Ghosts” that turn up in “Ghosts of my Life”, that Mark writes of in the essay of the same name, aren’t simply flashes of the popular modernist future that found its final burnup in jungle, but a realisation of the mourning and fear of class society always already there in the past’s vanished fabric, now revealed to be the texture of the present (“just when I think I’m winning/when I’ve broken every door…”). But the fatalistic narrative movement so often present in stories of the uncanny - Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ ending with Nathanael going over the rail to his death - are the dialectical double to the disintegration of the present’s false unity, the temporal correlate of the discovery, to which Colquhoun returns repeatedly, that “there is no inside except as a folding of the outside”. In these breaks or ruptures are what flashes of utopia can be discovered in the midst of capitalist realism. The situation we find ourselves in now is one in which we can’t imagine the future coming down the pipe of pandemic conditions but we know, like the new iPhone upgrade, it will arrive on time. We can certainly picture the likely scenarios capital is no doubt calibrating into being - mass death, starvation and unemployment among those below the executive level, increased political support for authoritarian measures, defunding public services already cut to the bone - but we don’t recognise them as a future, precisely because they would be an intensified continuation of the present most of us have lived through since 2010. A future worth the name - one not just of planetary survival but the flourishing of human species-being - might have some such relation to the horrors and uncomfortable intensities that shimmer out through the dark of the last 40 years of neoliberalism.