Haunting the present,
inventing the future
“For the first time in thirty years, the right has lost control of the future. It’s hard
to think of a moment when an ideology was so immediately and so completely
discredited as neoliberalism was in 2008.”
interview by DAN TAYLOR
M
ark Fisher’s 2009 Capitalist Realism
has energised political discussions
in the UK and US following its
publication by innovative imprint Zero
books. Whilst articulating a new conceptual
framework to describe familiar bureaucratic
fox-traps, Fisher has effectively shifted
focus towards the psychological terrains of
capitalist control. His K-Punk blog features a
powerful body of writings on music, politics
and film, whilst representatives of groups like
the University for Strategic Optimism cite
Mark’s ideas in inspiring their creation. His
eagerly-anticipated new work, Ghosts of My
Life, will be published by Zero next year. Here
Mark talks to Nyx about political weak-points,
hauntings of the near future and making holes
in the reality system.
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Can you tell us what are your intentions with this
new work, Ghosts of My Life, and how you’d like
it to be received?
MARK FISHER: Even though I’m known to many
as a writer on music, my first book, Capitalist
Realism¸ includes very few references to music.
Ghosts of my Life will put that right! Unlike
Capitalist Realism, it isn’t a single essay, but a
collection of writings, mostly on music, but also
on film, television and fiction. At the core of
the book are my reflections on ‘hauntology’
– a concept derived from Derrida’s Spectres
of Marx, but which has taken on an (un)life
of its own in the past five years. The word
‘hauntology’ was initially used in a fairly loose
way to refer to a confluence of musics that
had a spectral feel. But it gradually took on
a more rigorous meaning as it became clear
that the ‘hauntological’ provided a way to
understand and analyse the way postmodern
culture was developing in the early 21st
century. The work of the Ghost Box label,
for instance, evokes the popular modernisms
of the postwar social democratic period
(the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, brutalist
architecture, paperbacks). It was quickly clear
that what might at first have seemed like a
merely diverting stroll down memory lane
actually pointed to a crisis of cultural time.
Because the futures promised by that popular
modernism didn’t arrive. In conditions where,
just as Fredric Jameson predicted in his highly
prescient writings on postmodernism, pastiche
and retrospection have become so taken for
granted that we don’t notice them any more,
we’ve lost any sense of the present. My claim
is that hauntology is the closest thing we have
to a zeitgeist; but it is a paradoxical zeitgeist, in
that it articulates a broken sense of time. The
difference between hauntology and most of
the culture that surrounds it is that hauntology
acknowledges this failure of the present,
instead of simply exemplifying it.
In Ghosts of my Life, I bring together most of
my statements on hauntology as a 21st century
cultural phenomenon, but I also look back at
some of the futures that were lost. There’s a
personal dimension to all this, of course – I am
old enough to have my expectations shaped
by a popular modernist culture which has
disintegrated over the course of my lifetime,
and which survives now as traces and echoes.
But it’s crucial to keep alive all the dialectical
ambiguities of being nostalgic for modernism.
The book isn’t about the good old days; it’s
about keeping faith with the spirit of popular
modernism, which entails rejecting any
temptation to return to the past.
Another sense of the ‘ghosts’ in the title is
depression, something that has intermittently
afflicted me throughout my life. Like Capitalist
Realism, Ghosts of my Life is in part an attempt
to think through the relation of this affective
pathology to wider cultural issues.
I suppose many of the book’s themes come
together in the music of Burial. There’s a
particular quality of sadness in Burial’s music
– a 21st century melancholia – that connected
with many people, and Ghosts of my Life is
trying to get to the source of that sadness.
In 2009 you offered a remarkable analysis of
a collective ideology of cynical self-defeat you
called ‘capitalist realism’, something which has
psychologically inhibited the Left from mounting
an effective challenge to neoliberal capitalism.
Would you update this analysis today, given the
increasingly reactionary nature of democratic
politics in light of the worsening economic crisis?
Have psychological techniques of control shifted
since 2009?
MF: Well, 2009 was a cusp moment. The bank
crises had already happened by the time that
the book had come out, which meant that the
moment of neoliberal high pomp was already
over. But it didn’t feel like that, and in some ways
it still doesn’t. Neoliberalism has invaded our
unconscious just as it has infiltrated practically
every institution. It is a whole reality system,
which doesn’t just collapse in one go. But what
we are seeing are massive holes in the fabric,
which are emerging far too quickly for them to
be fixed in anything but a gimcrack way. Before
2008, neoliberals used to say that everything
but capitalism was impossible. Now it’s clear
that capitalism – at least in its neoliberal mode
– is also impossible. It’s an extraordinary time,
truly extraordinary.
Capitalist realism has not disappeared, but it
has changed form, from the ebullient bullying of
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“It is a whole reality system, which
doesn’t just collapse in one go. But what
we are seeing are massive holes in the
fabric, which are emerging far too quickly
for them to be fixed in anything but a
gimcrack way.”
pre-2008 – you better get on board with this
because nothing else will work – to something
more desperate: we all have to make this work,
because the alternative is total catastrophe.
Parliamentary politics is still caught in the pre2008 moment, trying to shore up or reform a
system that has already collapsed. But part of
the reason that parliamentary politics became
so decadent in the first place was that, with
the decline of working class solidarity, the only
significant forces acting upon it from outside
were those representing big business. What
we’ve seen over the last 18 months is an
enormous resurgence of extra-parliamentary
forces – in everything from the Arab Spring
to the student militancy and the riots here. In
the UK, that hasn’t coalesced into an agent or
a series of agents that can exert any kind of
sustained pressure on the ruling class, but it’s
early days yet.
Since the abuse of law following the August 2011
riots, meaning that many young people are now
receiving long prison sentences for relatively minor
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crimes, the left seems to have fallen into despair
again - unable to connect with urban workingclass movements, whilst its own protest and
marches campaigns have similarly stagnated.
How might an opposition in this country mount
an effective resistance and overthrow of what you
call Cameron and co’s ‘Bullingdon Club Swindle’?
What weak points and opportunities can you
identify?
MF: The weak points are everywhere – what’s
missing is an agent that could take advantage
of the massive disarray that the ruling class is
currently in. For the first time in thirty years,
the right has lost control of the future. It’s hard
to think of a moment when an ideology was
so immediately and so completely discredited
as neoliberalism was in 2008. This year in the
UK, we’ve seen the hacking scandal, which
implicates the whole British ruling class in
a network of shady complicities, the riots,
appalling growth figures, rising unemployment
.... All that Cameron has to offer is his public
school insouciance and plutocratic confidence;
he and Osborne clearly have no serious policies,
“All that Cameron has to offer is his public school insouciance and plutocratic
confidence; he and Osborne clearly have no serious policies, only vacuous calls for us
to keep smiling and do something. I don’t think this persuades very many people”.
only vacuous calls for us to keep smiling and
do something. I don’t think this persuades very
many people; all the signs are that discontent
and disaffection are spreading. What keeps it
all going is not any kind of positive belief, but
principally two things. The first is the idea that
there really is no alternative, that this might be
grim, but there isn’t any other way, we have to
grin and bear it ... The other is the sense that,
even if we aren’t at all persuaded by the Great
Bullingdon Club Swindle rhetoric, there’s
nothing we can do to stop it from happening.
We need a multiplicity of strategies to deal
with this. Now more than ever it’s a mistake to
retreat from the so-called ‘mainstream’. But that
doesn’t mean we have to confine ourselves
to the narrow parameters of already existing
mainstream culture – the point is that things
are now unstable and we simply don’t know
what’s possible. What’s happening is a collapse
of what, until 2008, was seen as the centre
ground. The terrain is now wide open. I think
that Alain Badiou is right and that our current
situation is now akin to the very beginnings of
the labour movement – we need the same spirit
of invention that led to the formation of trade
unions and workers’ political parties in the first
place. Part of the spell that postmodernism
still casts over us is the sense that history is
behind us, that we can’t invent institutions or
organisations in the same way that people
could in the past. But, if the conditions which
allowed the workers’ movement to thrive have
now declined, that doesn’t mean that solidarity
is no longer possible; it just means it’s no longer
possible in the old way. The crucial question is
how to co-ordinate the disaffection which is
certainly there, and we are in a moment when
technology allows unprecedented levels of coordination. But we have to ruthlessly eliminate
any nostalgia for the forms of organisation made
possible under Fordism. Those conditions
won’t return. Instead of organising around the
Fordist worker, we need to organise around
the precarious worker. Practically everyone
is precarious to some degree; imagine how
powerful a solidarity which could bring
precarious workers together could be.
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