Main articles: Hauntology and Hauntology (music) Mark Fisher lecturing on the topic "The Slow Cancellation of the Future" in 2014 A sketch from the The Return of the 70s section of the book. Illustration: Stuart/Laura Oldfield Ford Arcand, Rob (14 December 2018). "The Marxist Pop-Culture Theorist Who Influenced a Generation". The Nation . Retrieved 22 January 2021. Seaton, Lola (20 January 2021). "The ghosts of Mark Fisher". New Statesman . Retrieved 22 January 2021.

His tastes were sometimes questionable – he went from championing bloodlessly cerebral music that fulfilled theoretical prejudices in lieu of offering any visceral thrill to eulogising scoldy sloganeers Sleaford Mods – and there are those to whom the dated concept of hauntology is a mere expression of middle-aged lassitude. But none of that should put the curious off this amphetamine rush of a book. When Fisher got going about his passions – Burial, the Caretaker, jungle, David Peace – there was no one like him. If you missed it first time round, or even if you didn’t, this book will light up your brain like few others. Ironically, it’s hopeful too: a UK that can produce the likes of Fisher is not beaten yet. Fisher wrote prolifically – most famously on his blog, k-punk, which he launched in 2003 partly in an attempt to lift himself out of an acute period of depression, from which he had suffered since he was a teenager. K-punk accrued a devoted following, becoming a hub of various music and philosophy blog networks. Yet his literary energies were chiefly expended on the short-form: he only published three books in his lifetime. Two of these – Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie (2016) – remix material that originally appeared on k-punk. A huge, though not exhaustive, anthology of Fisher’s blog writings and other occasional essays – K-Punk (2018) – appeared posthumously. He was at work on a fourth book, “Acid Communism”, when he died; an unfinished introduction appears in the anthology. Postcapitalist Desire is perhaps most fruitfully read as an accompaniment to this. The song was discussed at lengths in - and its lyric provides the title for - theorist Mark Fisher's 2014 critical work Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. At the time of his death, Fisher was said to be planning a new book titled Acid Communism, [2] excerpts of which were published as part of a Mark Fisher anthology, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), by Repeater Books in November 2018. [38] [39] Acid Communism would have attempted to reclaim elements of the 1960s counterculture and psychedelia in the interest of imagining new political possibilities for the Left. [2] On Vanishing Land [ edit ] What did they [Joy Division] see there? Only what all depressives, all mystics, always see: the obscene undead twitching of the Will as it seeks to maintain the illusion that this object, the one it is fixated upon NOW, this one, will satisfy it...the kind of nostalgia that is now so pervasive may best be characterised not as a longing for the past so much as an inability to make new memories. Fredric Jameson described one of the impasses of postmodern culture as the inability 'to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. My Granny grew up in Gola , outside Scotstown, a brave, kind , funny and intelligent lady, who was herself the daughter of a brave, kind and intelligent lady who had , with Granny as a baby in her arms , single handedly faced down a masked mob who had come to burn them out of the family home. That’s a story for another day…or a novel. Reynolds, Simon (19 January 2017). "Mark Fisher's K-punk blogs were required reading for a generation". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 January 2021.

As a philosophical concept, capitalist realism is influenced by the Althusserian conception of ideology, as well as the work of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. [25] The concept of capitalist realism also likely stems from the concept of Cultural hegemony proposed by Italian theorist, Antonio Gramsci; which can generally be described as the notion that the "status quo" is all there is, and that anything else violates common sense itself. Capitalists maintain their power not through violence or force, but by creating a pervasive sense that the Capitalist system is all there is. They maintain this view by dominating most social and cultural institutions. Fisher proposes that within a capitalist framework there is no space to conceive of alternative forms of social structures, adding that younger generations are not even concerned with recognizing alternatives. [26] He proposes that the 2008 financial crisis compounded this position; rather than catalyzing a desire to seek alternatives for the existing model, the response to the crisis reinforced the notion that modifications must be made within the existing system. Fisher argues that capitalist realism has propagated a 'business ontology' which concludes that everything should be run as a business including education and healthcare. [27]

On The Go

House and Techno for instance took a long time to mature in Chicago and Detroit, now there is no time, once an idea is out of the rabbit’s hat it’s copied ad infinitum until the energy is gone' A few years passed , we got friendly again, I was again welcome in their house and banished any thoughts of times past, comforting myself that it had been a misguided , but healthy, sense of injustice on my part. She not only stayed alive, she turned her hard beginnings around, became self sufficient, successful and someone with respect for herself. She didn't let the naysayers and judgers stop her. She's the one sitting in the drivers seat at the end. Worthwhile reading mainly for its musical, filmic, literary references and some thought-provoking observations about our contemporary cultural landscape (it has been published in 2013)

in 1982). Japan also performed the song live on The Old Grey Whistle Test on 4 March 1982. [9] The band line-up included Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Rhodes and this new version of Ghosts, allegedly arranged by Sakamoto, remains unique to this performance. [10] Don't be fooled, this is just a reprint. The ghosts of Mark Fisher's life are actually blogs, mostly from his old k-punk journal, which you can read for free online. Or print out at the library. The only thing to recommend Blogs of My Life as a physical book, besides the nice teal cover, is the introduction, written specifically for this volume. To be fair it's a very good introduction. In fact, I think it contained more insight and just plain good writing than the rest of the essays combined, although they were mostly about music I've never listened to, films I've never seen, novels I've never read. The pop culture from Mark Fisher's youth, he assures me, is much better than anything I grew up with. He may have a point. Fisher, Mark; Gilbert, Jeremy (Winter 2013). "Capitalist Realism and Neoliberal Hegemony: A Dialogue". New Formations (80–81): 89–101 (at p. 90). doi: 10.3898/neWF.80/81.05.2013. S2CID 142588084. Unfortunately a lot less insightful than expected. This basically being a barely-cohesive collection of k-punk/magazine articles doesn't help: Fisher's opening essay (also by far the most interesting of the lot) does its best to tie everything together, but the fact remains that the book both repeats itself multiple essays in a row and yet doesn't really go into a satisfying level of depth.

Accelerationism: How a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in". TheGuardian.com. 11 May 2017. The CCRU left a lasting mark on Fisher’s idiom and theoretical canon. Although the unit’s accelerationist politics were far from socialist, its futurism also inflected Fisher’s political thought, perhaps most discernibly in the central question posed by his final lecture series: “Is it possible to retain some of the libidinal, technological infrastructure of capital and move beyond capital?” Versions of this question are found throughout his writings. Ghosts of My Life (2014), Fisher’s second book, is a collection of cultural criticism named after a 1981 song by David Sylvian’s Japan and revolving around the concept of “hauntology”. Fisher deployed the concept, borrowed from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993) , to capture the ways the present is haunted not exactly by the past itself – social democracy and the “cultural ecology” it fostered – but by the loss of the futures it presaged.

Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, 30 May 2014. ISBN 978-1-78099-226-6

The questions with which Fisher began his last lectures – about what we are capable of wanting and envisioning – are questions of consciousness. Their roots can be traced to the concept for which Fisher is most famous: “capitalist realism”, the title of his first, bestselling pamphlet, published in 2009. The original definition – “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” – is not, Fisher would later say, “quite accurate”. Capitalist realism is less a conviction than “a set of behaviours and affects that arise from [it]”. It entails a “deep embedding in a world – or set of worlds – in which capitalism is massively naturalised”. “The best way to think about capitalist realism,” Fisher told an audience in 2016, “is as a form of what I’d call consciousness-deflation.” The thematic continuity in these essays is not really hauntology though, which is always sort of vague. Maybe necessarily so, Fisher refers to it somewhere or another as the cultural materialization of lost memory. I find it more useful to think of it as the ontologization of historical materialism, since that's kind of what Derrida's doing in Specters of Marx and it's kind of what Fisher's doing here. The 'slow cancellation of the future', neoliberalism's desiccating foreclosures of possibility is not elaborated in full political dimension, but registered as a very personal sense of tragedy. The lost futures we choreographed in futility instead play out in our depression & despondency, or across avant garde art, in both Derrida and Fisher's estimations--rather than in global poverty, endless warfare or ecological catastrophe. These are the ghosts that spook Derrida and Fisher's books, which are narrower in scope, but haunted by the large-scale conflicts that they only allude to. It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.” Whether you agree with such counter-opinions, it's likely your enjoyment of this book will rest on similar matters of taste - i.e. whether you're as interested in or enraptured by the various musicians or film-makers that Fisher is. Yet when it comes time for the vicious take-downs of 'corporate hip hop' and the ubiquity of 'autotune music', most will probably be inclined to agree. The suggestion that Will.i.am's I Got A Feeling is the rather bleak, unconvincing self-help affirmation of a depressive attempting to goad himself into some form of social engagement - if only a swift half at Wetherspoons - is spot on. As is the more politically-minded analysis of Guetta's 'Play Hard' which is unremittingly savaged as “the perfect anthem for an era in which the boundaries between word and non-work are eroded”.