It’s...eight years without Mark Fisher
London after the rave
I’m sure you know the feeling: not quite yearning, or melancholy, or nostalgia, but an unsated desire for something else. You want to keep up with a friend from a past life, you get an image of them reading in a cozy cafe on Instagram. You want warm and welcoming music when you host a date, you get the “Chillout Essentials” playlist on Spotify. You want a mass cultural event that both fulfills and subverts our expectations for what entertainment can be the 21st century, and you get Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul.
The culture is saturated but unsatisfying. Something feels out of reach, always one swipe away.
This feeling, according to the blogger and theorist Mark Fisher, was endemic to a culture that had ceased to believe in the possibility of the new. Yesterday marked eight years to the day since we lost Fisher to suicide, so in tribute we might ask ourselves the same question he poses. Can we imagine anything new anymore?
Every January since Covid, I find myself returning to Mark’s writing. (The informal style of k-punk, his blog, recommends the familiarity and (un)authority of first names.) Usually it’s Capitalist Realism. This year it’s Ghosts Of My Life, a collection of essays and interviews from 2005 to 2013, another eight year span at the end of history that happens to map rather neatly onto my own adolescence.
I think of Fisher as the punk stepson of the New Left, too class-conscious for the academic Marxists and too pop-conscious for the street ones. He believed in the revolutionary potential of youth culture, from the swing of rockabilly to the trap beats of Jungle music, a good forty years of teenage rebellion that now looks positively docile compared to the perturbations before and since.
That faith in the kids, I suppose, is his Marcuse showing. Back in October I laid out a tool to help keep radical strategy at the cutting edge of the possible. I called it the “fantasy/strategy heuristic,” and now, having made my way through much of Eros and Civilization, I see Marcuse’s unconscious influence there.
The latent desire for revolution has to live somewhere, and Marcuse offered the work of art as one such vehicle. The problem? The forty years of pop music’s ascendence coincided with the left’s long retreat from class politics into the counterculture. In this way, Fisher’s writing is something like punk rock: keeping the dream alive, if not in the streets, then in the culture.
Which is to say: let’s not be all doe-eyed about the revolutionary potential of art. But we can still be curious about Fisher’s critique of cultural stagnation. Drop Loveless (1991, 34 years ago) into 1957 (34 years before 1991) and it will knock off some bobby socks. The residents of 1991 raised on Eurobeat, however, would find BRAT (for instance) oddly quaint.
The basic thrust of Ghosts Of My Life is that the culture is haunted by what might have been. After the vertiginous array of scenes, subcultures, and sounds produced by post-war prosperity and pseudo-social democracy, the era of what Fisher calls “popular modernism,” culture came to a standstill right as I turned 13 (lucky me). Punk was dead, suburban white boys were sagging their pants, the scene was over.
He calls what’s left “London after the rave.” In the post-dawn, pre-comedown threshold between euphoria and dreaming, the ghosts appear. We can see them as we sleepwalk home, nothing but a glimmer, those shimmering spectral somethings: other ways of being. (Is that what we’re reaching for?) Their soundtrack is what Fisher and other blog critics called hauntology, the pseudo-genre of vinyl gasps collaged among found melodies: other eras’ sounds trying to be heard.
And maybe they would be, if not for the past already ringing in our ears. Fisher trains his crosshairs at critical darlings of the mid-aughts like Adele and Arctic Monkeys, musicians retreading old sonic territory.1 What fellow traveler in English pop criticism Simon Reynolds dubs “retromania,” suggesting a Beatles-like faddishness, Fisher calls the slow cancellation of the future. The condition is chronic.2
Ghosts of my Life strikes me as an important text to return to, two full decades after Mark’s Jan 9 2005 musings on Joy Division’s afterlives for a youth culture that was already sick of itself, so that we may take stock of its thesis. Has the culture rebounded from the Bush-era doldrums of the Naughties? What is the art that sounds like now? And does it offer any alternative to the frictionless, never-ending present?
Consider the conditions that Fisher holds responsible for the future’s perennial postponement. Drawing on Frederic Jameson and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, he offers a theory of consumption and theory of production to explain the predicament. The latter is straightforward: we’ve sacrificed art at the alter of profit. There used to be such a thing as a welfare state (and “higher education maintenance grants” in the UK, whatever those are!) that nurtured the ambitions of young artists as they mingled, dicked about, and generally sublimated their libidinal instincts into records, films, photography, and each other.3
As landlords and labels sucked more and more surplus value from this youthful commonwealth — what is culture but commonwealth? — the starving artist was starved out of the centers of cultural production. “If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism,” he writes, “it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages.” If hustle culture begets great art, it might be in the lives of scammers and folk heroes who turn the profit vacuum back onto itself.
But it’s Fisher’s theory of consumption that I want to wrestle with: in his telling, neoliberalism (a word which appears shockingly little in Mark’s writings, a secondary qualifier to “post-Fordist”) has denuded us of desire. The future won’t come because we don’t want it bad enough. We’re more-or-less content to snack on the little treats of pop hooks and Taylor Swift. These “comforts that don’t console,” as Reynolds puts it in the book’s afterward, do the work of the ruling class for them.
What’s great about Fisher is that this retreat into the familiar isn’t a moral failing of a decadent culture from which we must RETVRN, so much as a perfectly sound response to the cacophony of modern life. “The intensity and precariousness of late capitalist work culture,” he writes, “leaves people in a state where they are simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated. The combination of precarious work and digital communications leads to a besieging of attention.” In this war for attention, “‘free time’ becomes convalescence.”
This was written more than a decade ago, before streaming hollowed out Hollywood, before crypto turned memes into speculative assets, before Chat-GPT started hitting on tech reporters. Fisher did not predict the future, but he called it as it was happening, and the rest of us are just now catching up. Case in point: Chris Hayes’ essay from early January on resisting the attention economy and Liz Pelly’s cover story for this month’s edition of Harper’s on Spotify systematically screwing musicians, two pieces that are preludes to books I’m very much looking forward to.
Like so much confectionary chemistry that keeps us hooked on processed foods, neoliberalism hijacks our erotic energy, exchanging desire for dopamine hits. The result is a sort of neo-libidoism. (Another joy of reading Fisher is the silly terms he tries on for size. Hauntology is a “puncept,” Joy Division are “neuromantics,” art pop becomes “Barthes pop.”) These confections don’t satisfy our desires but inflame them, only for us to realize that the means of truly sating our appetites have vanished. Less sex, more porn; less drinking, more narcotics; less family, more work; less sociability, more social media; less community, more communications; fewer phone calls, more phones.
Back to that feeling of longing for something different, something more, something….real? That’s the “specter of Mark” (Reynolds’ pun). That’s the feeling that was kept, well, not alive, given the ghost metaphor, but present in the mid-00s by the artists that Fisher champions, Burial and The Caretaker foremost among them. When I listen to them, amid the digitized cracks of vinyl and gauzy, looped vocals, I do feel something different, maybe Fisher’s lost futures coming in and out of focus. Who sounds like that today? It’s not The Dare.4
What makes the idea of lost futures so compelling — and the caretakers who summon these ghosts from their burials so vital — is that we desperately need alternative ways of being. We need to keep the ghosts present so that they may remind us that things were not always like this. Fisher himself plays this hauntological role with his moribund techno-optimism, a reminder that “the net” (a wonderful anachronism he deploys) used to be the vehicle of so much utopian energy. I’m currently listening to Evgeny Morozov’s podcast about Project Cybersyn in Chile before the CIA-backed coup, and it’s revelatory to hear socialists talk of cybernetic management as a tool of liberation, rather than yet another weapon of capitalist surveillance. Dreams die but their ghosts live on.
We need new ways of being because the current ones are clearly failing. The simulacra of Instagram Stories is not adequate to connecting with a friend, “Rap Caviar” is not the pipeline to discovery of exciting music, Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul is not the mass event we deserve. Sizing up other modes is one reason I’m writing this blog: to mediate my world through words. I’m reading Fisher because I’m likewise looking to inhabit his subjectivity, a world which he gives generously. I need to keep Wikipedia open on my phone beside me when I read him in order to keep up with the endemic Englishness of his references (Sapphire and Steel? Robinson in Ruins? Rufige Kru? David Peace?). These particulars flesh out a time and a place that’s gone now, like Fisher himself, but somehow still with us in the eternal present. The ghosts of Fisher’s life are mine, too.
Burn After Reading
On Jonathan Haidt’s Substack After Babel about digital anxiety and information overload, Gen Z writer Freya India names a similar feeling to the one I’m writing about. She calls it anemoia, the longing for a time one has never known. For her, it’s the 90s, when boredom was filled with, well, boredom, not screen time. For me, it’s London after the rave, when that something else comes into view.
Look my first love was the superior Franz Ferdinand so I don’t mind Fisher knocking the Monkeys down a peg or two. But let’s not forget how bleak Top 40 was in this era — I remember those high school dances. Funnily enough, this was “party hauntology” for Fisher. The Black Eyed Peas gotta feelin’ and it’s called melancholia.
This frisson was captured in my lifetime in Meet Me in the Bathroom, the film based on Lizzy Goodman’s account of the indie rockers who captured the sound of post-9/11 New York.
Poptimism’s total cultural victory — which I’m on the record opposing back in 2014 in college music column — is surely a story here. And while it’s a minor miracle that an album like Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, a dark horse Album of the Year in 2024 at Pitchfork, exists at all, its sounds are basically hauntological. Amazing record.