Having read Deleuze as a student, this gothic flatline of inquiry remains present with all of Mark Fisher's writings, albeit regularly updated and made more accessible through his books, blog posts and other writings on the pop-cultural landscape for the present. From his PhD thesis to his final completed book, The Weird and the Eerie, Fisher inhabited the role of cultural diagnostician with ease, exploring the hidden pathologies still waiting to be excavated from our collective psyches, contained embryonically in our works of weird literature, Hollywood film or haunted music. Nowhere was this clearer than on the very first page of his best-selling book Capitalist Realism in which Fisher considers the film Children of Men not just as a work of speculative fiction but as a symptom of our contemporary cultural malaise.
For example, describing a scene in the film where the protagonist Theo visits his brother's Bond villain-esque compound in the Battersea power station the entrance to which is, in fact, despite the magic of cinema, ironically and recognisably situated in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Fisher writes, Cultural treasures, Michelangelo's David, Picasso's Guernica, Pink Floyd's inflatable pig, are preserved in a building that is itself a refurbished heritage artefact. This is our only glimpse into the lives of the elite. Hold up against the effects of a catastrophe which has caused mass sterility. No children have been born for a generation. Theo asks the question how all of this can matter if there will be no one to see it.
The alibi can no longer be future generations since there will be none. The response is nihilistic hedonism. I try not to think about it. It is no coincidence that the cultural objects Fisher points to in children and men are as impotent as the wider world in which they exist. Believing that criticism is a mode of production in its own right, Fisher had no interest in pinning down cultural works, like butterflies to a board, to be analysed and dissected. However, he did not see the same commitment to cultural production echoed in the world around him. Cultural studies, even music and arts journalism more broadly, had an unfortunate tendency to treat cultural artefacts like the capitalist elite, perhaps not consciously, but certainly as a result of their pervasive influence. In this sense, Children of Men becomes a hyperbolic rendering of the present,
And so Fisher puts it back to work on us, presenting capitalist realism, the belief that the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism, immediately as a symptomatology of the late capitalist condition, excavated from its own cultural offerings. symptomatology is always a question of art wrote de Luz. In Fisher's writings this could not have been more literal. His symptomatologies were cultural objects in their own right extending the habits of the 20th century's modernists into a new century that had otherwise become hostile to their once influential demands. As Frederick Jameson another of Fisher's major influences once wrote modernism's penchant for real abstraction an act of distancing from psychology from our own symptoms in a way that allows us to walk around them and to contemplate them as so
many objects. This is to say that it is precisely by diagnosing the present that the new is created. However, in the 21st century, such an approach is practised less often. It is even Fisher believed less possible. Contemplating this absence as a symptom in itself, he longed for a revived conception of a popular modernism. As Phoebe Braithwaite described popular modernism for Tribune magazine in 2019. This was Fisher's phrase for a kind of culture, most often found in music, which straddled the experimental and the mainstream. While popular, it required work to be fully understood, doing away with past forms, following a modernist make-it-new imperative. Fisher's frustration with this lack of the new led to the development of the cultural critique of
hauntology. However, whilst much has been made of Marx's writings on hauntology, in practice his theories have often been rendered hauntographically by others. For clarity, we can understand the difference between hauntology and hauntography as being similar to the difference between biology and biography. The latter orders and describes the events of a life after the fact. The former 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. To dismiss his hauntological writings as the cultural mourning of an out-and-touch writer from Generation X, as is common amongst new readers today, is to ignore the innate hope his writings contained,
and the riling declaration that the new can only emerge from a vigilance regarding one's own cultural position in relation to the recent past. To offer a less unwieldy cultural example of this tension from within Fisher's own interests, we can emphasise that he hated the Arctic monkeys, and their ordering and describing of late 20th century cultural signifiers, album after album. However, at the same time, he loved the modernist tendencies erupting through his pervasive malaise, audible in the metaphysical crackle he heard on albums by Burial and The Caretaker, two musicians that Fisher's writings are now synonymous with. However, his loves and hates should not be equated with one another. One's diagnosis and one's a symptom, Fisher argued in an interview with Crack magazine. Whereas Arctic Monkeys airbrush cultural time out and appeal to its endless return and timelessness of rock,
the likes of Burial and the Caretaker instead highlight the broken time of the 21st century. Since Fisher first made this argument, the separation between these two modes of cultural production has only gotten more extreme. The Arctic Monkeys have reached the terminal beach of their predictable trajectory, entombing themselves in a teddy boy cultural purgatory of their own making. quite literally on their last album, 2018's Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino. This titular hotel is to the Arctic Monkeys as the Overlook Hotel was to Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Meanwhile, Beryl and the Caretaker, the lucid observers, look upon these trapped souls and see that their hallucinations and temporal distortions are the ailments of unwell men. This analogy is already a part of the Caretaker's particular body of work,
with the project taking its name from Jack Torrance's role at the Overlook Hotel. Just as Jack is transformed horrifically and unwittingly by his environment in The Shining so too is The Dementia Patient the focus of Leland Kirby's final string of albums under the caretaker moniker transformed by the unfolding experience of mental degradation. The horror of dementia comes from its reduction of a person to a shell of their former self but there are other more positive associations to be made here too. Music, as we know, has a transformative effect upon the mind of the dementia patient wrestling them from their clinical condition and reactivating their critical faculties Similarly, Ivan Seal's three associative and improvised paintings which adorn Kirby's album covers further emphasise the dormant positivity of an otherwise melancholic project
depicting the other side of memory loss through which half-remembered ornaments and bric-a-brac take on newly psychedelic forms like flower arrangements from a new and alien world The intention here is certainly not to reimagine dementia as a positive disease. It is not an attempt to affirm dementia, but rather productively negate its ontological hold on us. As such, understood more as a comment on a collective cultural dementia, the sentiment offers us hope for the future. In this sense, Kirby's works are less documents of an individual failing mind, and more like psychedelic soundscapes, onto which restricted desires re-emerge to hallucinate new ways of living. With this in mind, for a project that could seemingly continue for eternity, it is telling and heartening that Kirby has let it die. What new project might now emerge from the ashes?
Hauntological music, like The Caretaker's, is, in this sense, a kind of critique as Ballardian invention. Just as J.G. Ballard's novels are strewn with prescient cultural observations, he also sketched bold new visions of what the human subject might look like if left too long in the pressure cooker of his concerns. Similarly, hauntology proper should be seen less as a mere description of the repetitive semiology of capitalist modernity, and more as a study of postmodern capitalism's effects on us as cultural producers and consumers. From this perspective, the Arctic Monkeys emerges precisely the subject that hauntology hopes to critique. Repetition incarnate, hubris unbound. The music of Burial and the Caretaker, on the other hand, interrogates the impact of this very tendency on the contemporary human subject
and produces new sonic worlds in the process. In a 2012 article for Film Quarterly, Fisher summarised this process as a confrontation with the cultural impasse, the failure of the future. Today we might understand this cultural impasse as the inertia whiplash of the West post-millennium, a whiplash embodied today by the political discontent of so-called millennials. This is the irony of the apparent dwindling of hauntology's relevance for a new generation of bright young things. Whilst Fisher is seen as out of touch by many new readers, the central critique of hauntology has, in fact, become more mainstream, politically at least, than he could have ever imagined. Greta Thunberg, for example, has captured the attention of the world with her declarations that the future is being stolen from her generation.
The same can also still be said of our relationships to our cultural artefacts, but this was stolen from us long ago, with considerably less protesting. Nevertheless, it is a sentiment that goes back some decades, as boards of Canada most famously declared with the title of their 1998 Haunted Logical Masterpiece, music has the right to children. Music also has a right to the future. The background on which this right to the future is being fought today is the impact of streaming monopolies and their suffocation of alternatives. We return here once again to our analysis of cultural rentism and its ideological constriction of the possibilities of technological progression. As we have previously discussed, so many things are available online today, but they also take a lot more effort and financial heft to access than they once did.
The other media we consume, MP3s and physical records, DVDs and books, are often made to feel like legacy media by the new streaming monopolies of platform capitalism. The likes of Spotify and Netflix want us to feel like newness is at our fingertips at all times. But the reality is that what is on offer on these platforms is infrequently original and more limited than what was previously available on the high street or in the darkened corners of peer-to-peer torrent sites, which have since died a death or otherwise been clamped down upon by capitalist institutions over the last few decades. This accessibility and diversity was supposedly reduced in order to save the music industry from piracy, but streaming monopolies remain controversial for failing to sustain the culture and production they directly rely on. None of this is intended
to form an argument against the fact that new music is still produced that responds to this present confluence of concerns. Nevertheless, plenty of music remains lost or restricted, captured and made impotent by capitalism's latest infrastructural innovations. This is particularly true of music that is more explicitly critical of the environment in which it is produced. Simon Reynolds' more recent neologism, Conceptronica, has controversially reaffirmed these tensions as a time when many would rather believe we had made it through the worst of it. In the now famous article for Pitchfork, Reynolds interviews Lee Gamble, for instance, amongst many others. Gamble's early records in particular were hauntological to a T, in style as well as intent. He notes, however, that his style of composition has shifted in
more recent years, in direct response to the political changes of their time. He is currently making a kind of music that works like capitalism works, slick, shape-shifting, seducing you with beautiful objects. This change in style also demonstrates the reasons why the vigilance fish are called for is more necessary than ever. The temporal anomalies of jungle, slithering through the underground with the veritable snake style, now find themselves reborn through Gamble's new music capital Ouroboros, devouring its own tale. This Ouroboros is as economic as it is stylistic. As Reynolds tentatively explains, even though experimental music is more explicitly critical than it was ten years ago, this criticality is nonetheless becoming increasingly captured by what Fisher calls the bureaucratic anti-production of academic expectations and art
world funding requirements. Such a situation must not discourage us, diagnosing the problem as myriad artists continue to do is half the battle. Through the works of Burial, the caretaker Lee Gamble, and countless others it must be said, less readily associated and familiar with the writings of Mark Fisher, we see imaginative desires for the new rupturing the most destructive of capitalist pathologies. We can also see Fisher's popular modernism re-emerging here too. Take this quote for example from a K-Punk post on The Jam, which is just as applicable to this brief reappraisal of experimental music and Fisher's own work besides. He writes, we can apprehend yet another paradox here. What makes this music culture so positive was its capacity to express negativity, a negativity that was thereby deprivatised as well as denaturalised. Here Fisher is describing a
paradox that does not contain within capitalism itself, but within cultural production under capitalism. With all the musicians above, we see a similar process at play. With the caretaker, dementia itself is deprivatised and denaturalised the experience as a result becomes impersonal it becomes all of ours it is no longer enclosed within the mind of the subject but is instead opened up to the rest of us psychedelically so that it might be transformed through a clinical and critical applazal For Fisher, this kernel was not a pit of out-of-touch despair. It was a machine of desire, ready to spit out the new. It will only remain as such if we continue to force it to do so. Following the excitement of the Ghostbox label's output in 2005,
and with the self-titled debut by South London producer Burial the following year adding more fuel to the fire, Hauntology dominated the blogosphere for much of 2006 and 2007. Enacting the critical and necessarily para-academic look under the bonnet of an institutionalised cultural studies that Fisher had hoped it would, unfortunately this did not last. Despite the intentions of those who initially put the term to work, hauntology's eventual ubiquity as a hip new buzzword to be deployed by the music press eventually led to an all-too-predictable backlash. Hauntology in this sense was absorbed all too quickly by the market dynamics it hoped to critique. This souring of the term was most clear a few years later. Take, for example, Rory Gibb's 2011 interview with Miles Whittaker of the group Demdike Stare for The Quietus.
Whittaker takes umbrage at the group's apparent pigeonholing by the blogosphere, and so, when Gibb points out that there's a big connection to horror movies and the occult in both the music and the aesthetic you present as Demdike Stare, that comes in part from the fact that there's something quite arcane or mystical about unearthing all these old records, these old sounds, these ghosts of people trapped in recording form, and reworking them into something new, giving them a new lease of life. Whittaker's response is tellingly forthright. Of course, he says, as long as you don't mention ontology. That's a misnomer right there. And yet, considering all that we have discussed so far, this hardly seems like a misnomer. In fact, it seems quite appropriate. Instead, Whittaker's denouncement is more of a sign of just how impotent the term has become. Reaffirmed into an aesthetic genre in its own right,
rather than an attempt to give form to certain musicians' attempt at a positive negation of their own stuckness. This music industry backlash was precipitated by a backlash in the blogosphere itself in 2008, with Alex Williams on his blog Splintering Bone Ashes taking aim at Hauntology's gradual calcification from an ology into an oggraphy. Williams at first seemed sympathetic to the topic and his contributors. He writes,
to properly think the new as such, and makes of this condition something positive. However, he continues, despite this intention, and beyond merely foregrounding the processes of recording, and thereby demonstrating the nature of our time, hauntological musical works are frequently acts of reverent mourning for some better time, for some golden age forever foreclosed to us. This is to say that in many respects, the blogosphere's theorising of hauntology is little more than the post-modern affirmation of an Adornian pessimism. This is certainly hard to deny. Ghostbox and many writers within the blogosphere were quite open about the fact that they missed the popular surrealism of Britain in the 1970s, and yet William's point seems to be that no matter how much these musicians and writers may strain against the short leash of negation, they always
rebound backward into capitalism's mechanical jaws, so that its incessant chewing of the cultural could at the end of history can continue once again. Still some artists nonetheless managed to retain the term xenogothic edge by emphasising that hauntology is not merely an act of mourning for a non-reclaimed past as Williams put it but rather a way of redeeming time, of reaching across possible universes towards parallel utopias thereby showing us the possible rather than just the dead-end intractability of our present socio-cultural situation. In this sense the way in which hauntology places the material component of its otherwise sonic spectrality centre stage is the obvious logical move. But perhaps a hauntological position is only obvious and logical from within the very bounds of culture's capture by capitalism. From such an enclosed perspective,
this interrogation of a logic of haunting inevitably becomes, for Williams, a cowardly move, lusting after utopias that never were, or which were now unreachable. Whereas Fisher had argued that hauntology, in all its wistfulness, constituted the direct inverse of postmodernism's replacement of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness, with a cocksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Williams nonetheless found the hauntologists to be hyper-self-aware of their own melancholy, and this did not negate that melancholy as such. In fact, the hauntologists' affirmation of the half-forgotten, the poorly remembered and the confabulated, has started to take on the air of a sickly pension of self-pity. As we knowingly find ourselves approaching the horizon of new experiences, we flail about in our own nostalgia. At its most pathological, this position is akin to
a cultural dementia. The caretaker's psychedelia is affirming, but for Williams, there's just little to actually rectify the diagnosis. As such, a hauntologist's critique of the postmodern is always already guilty of ceding too much ground to what it attempts to oppose. Williams proposes two alternatives to this hauntological position. Either we take hauntology's xenogothic tendency further, by pushing for a more nihilistic aesthetic which seeks not merely to foreground the processes of post-modern audio necromancy, but rather to accelerate the system to its ultimate demise, to speed up the rate of fashion flux to a point of irredeemable collapse. Or we take a more nuanced approach, considering Bidoux's analysis of the emergence of the mu, which would entail a more strategic examination of precisely where the pop musical evental
sites and historical situations exist within our current time. When we speak of Badeuian events, we should be clear that what we are speaking to, in a more general sense, are instances of contingency that can herald the new only if we respond to them correctly. For Deleuze, when faced with this cultural crossroad to the end of history, we have to resist the temptation to choose another path well travelled. Instead, we have to off-road it. This is, of course, easier said than done. Figuring out what this correct response looks like is part of the gamble, but we can at least allow for it more readily by keeping something of an open mind. That is, avoiding the preoccupations of capitalist realism. Alternatives are not always discovered. Sometimes you need to leave the door open for them. As far as the music industry at large is concerned, Williams' nods to this Boudouian approach can be rephrased as a strategy
that looks to follow certain lines of flight, uncovered by the new music of the day, and seeing where they lead rather than attempting to immediately canonise these new sounds to convenient trajectories of historical development, or, worse still, commodified genres. This is a process that takes real strategic vigilance, because whilst hauntology may have started its life as the former, it inevitably becomes the latter, that is, para-academic fodder for what were then the latest trend-chasing press releases. and understanding why is just as important to the musical trends of today as it is to understanding those of the recent past. There may be no better or worse example of this than the more recent buzz phrase deconstructed club music which is arguably a close relative ontology not least in its nod to Deridian deconstruction.
In fact we might say that deconstructed club music is a core permutation of ontology detached from its counter-cultural beginning. It is a phrase that has been co-opted as a marketing gimmick absolutely. This article on its trendiness by corporate behemoth Red Bull speaks for itself. Thankfully, we have nonetheless seen repeated examples of a fidelity to music's more nihilistic tendencies. In the last ten years, there has arguably been no music genre more innovative, more ready to further mutilate its own aesthetic tropes, than metal and its fractal proliferation of sub-genres. However, it is difficult, even unadvisable, to pinpoint certain artists or albums that have led to these fractures and divergences within the heavy metal continuum. The genre proliferates at such speed that most music journalists can barely keep up.
However, this should not be read as an attempt to disregard the dynamics of pop music. An acknowledgement of metal strength should not give way to a pretentious sense of tribal superiority. In fact, for a time, the label PC Music similarly promised a new way of understanding the accelerative movements of pop culture in this way. But in precisely being reified into an innovation by critics, its cultural impact waned more quickly than it should have done. Less subculturally, hip-hop, as a broad and global phenomenon, continues to adapt thanks to a very healthy stream of midnight marauders, through whom the single has retained an evental power in the age of streaming. Whereas Fisher decried the UK's indie rock retroism most specifically, to consider hip-hop's presence on the single's sales charts reveals sounds that are almost unrecognisable as hip-hop and R&B,
compared to the sounds that dominated the charts under other genre names 10 or 20 years ago. Of course, both PC music and hip-hop more generally have come in for criticism, given how uncritically they often replicate and exacerbate the concerns of market capitalism, fetishising certain commodities in their lyrics, or even breaking out into lucrative marketing strategies of their own. And yet there is similarly a case to be made that these genres have epitomised this accelerative approach far more effectively. Nihilism need not look like metal's doom and gloom. It can just as readily take on the form of late capitalism's neon plasticity. What is clear is that hauntology has passed its best, and surely this is a demise to be celebrated. Not because hauntology was a poor framing of that particular moment, but because encouraging us to move past itself was surely one of hauntology's own aims,
if it is to remain true to itself. As Fisher later argued, protesting the readiness with which Williams conflates hauntology and postmodernism, it is precisely hauntology's aim to establish postmodernism not as an endless now, but a quantifiable site from which to propel outwards from. Postmodernism is, of course, the dead end from which hauntology starts, he writes, but one of its roles is to denaturalise when postmodernism is taken for granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the sense of a sickness. In this sense, Hauntology's innate nihilism manifests in its desire for its own death as a valuable critique. As some have argued was the case with Marx's analysis of capitalism, if the critique is too all-encompassing, we may never escape it. Nevertheless, these noble intentions were not enough to forestall the flood of interest from record companies
for an aesthetic exciting the underground. And it was precisely this negative feedback loop that Williams saw on the horizon, and which he hoped to counter. Hauntology saw itself as a positive feedback loop, but if this were the case then it had been overcome. And so, in 2008, with Hauntology's impotent future already self-evident, it was clear that something new, some new vector for travel, was already needed. A few months after William's declaration that Hauntology must give up the ghost, this cultural crisis of negation would collide with those other crises similarly affecting contemporary politics and philosophy, and it was Williams again who first tied them all together. In a post entitled Xenoeconomics and Capital Unbound, Williams takes his two proposed approaches
to hauntology and applies them not only to the music industry, but to capitalism more generally. It was this argument that would finally birth the acceleration in his blogosphere. Now with explicit reference to the financial crisis stabilising economies around the world, Williams writes, maintaining of a stable form. The optimism of the will, though, suggests that there might be the
basis for the opprobrium that finance capital is now attracting. Low-level intensity, but extremely broad in terms of numbers, for some kind of new proletarian leftist movement. The issue, however, is that whilst this crisis in-slash-of capitalism had led to a nascent revitalisation of the popular left, a movement that was undoubtedly incoate, it would still take several years to coalesce into the Occupy movement, this growing momentum lacked a clearly defined direction in which to go. An odd sort of impotence that Williams provocatively terms a conservative radicalism. The best the left could hope for in adapting to this state of affairs was the sort of active melancholy epitomised by hauntology. As Williams writes, in the bending of all history against the impassable perimeter of the postmodern terminus, even radical leftism is fundamentally a mere
shuffling of the pre-existing deck of possibilities, hopeless, haunted and echo, homeless, nostalgic. The choice that the left faced in that moment, as far as Williams was concerned, was the same choice he had put forward in his two-pronged move beyond ontology. However, as Benjamin Noyes added on his own blog, this choice was not new in the realm of political philosophy. Indeed, it was this very current, within late 20th century thought, that Noyes announced he was writing about in his then-unpublished book The Persistence of the Negative. Considering William's two options between nihilistic intensification and the pursuit of a Bidouian Mew, Noyes sides with the latter, but he also understands the aesthetic attraction of the former. Much of the shock of Detroit techno in its initial phase, he suggests, was its choice to embody the robots of the production lines of
Ford, and this was acutely contrary to the humanism of Motown. Politically speaking, however, this path was a dead end. Quoting himself, Noyes suggests that Williams was adding to an already well-established exotic variant of la politique du peer. If capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution, then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself, the worse the better. He adds that we can call this tendency accelerationism. Noyes' use of the phrase politique du peer, a politics of the worst or worst case politics, is telling. It suggests a view of accelerationism that, in its very first instance, shares an affinity with the contemporary far-right variant. Many of these accelerationists support the
establishment of a kakocracy, for instance, a political system in which the people are ruled by the very worst amongst them. This was certainly an argument made by those on both the left and the right that contributed to some degree to the election of Donald Trump, as if electing the worst candidate for the US presidency imaginable would require a wholesale re-evaluation of our democratic capitalism. Of course this did not happen. Capitalism simply adapted as it always does. It was precisely this capacity for adaptation that Williams was most concerned with in his post. In fact he goes some way to describe the implications of a politics of real abstraction that Noyes himself had previously called for. This process of abstraction with its innately gothic aesthetics amounts to a material manipulation of the capitalist crisis, a manipulation of what
it provides, of what it takes as a given. This is to say that the turn towards that which capitalism itself has declared a worst-case scenario is only nihilistic by capitalism's own understanding of what is reasonable. Ergo, a decisive move towards communism would be capitalistically nihilistic. To differentiate between what capitalism wants and humanity wants is no easy feat. We have already explored at length how manipulatively entwined these two forms of desire are, but those are precisely the stakes of an accelerationist discourse. So, if we cannot separate the human from capitalism, can we at least separate capital from a blinked humanism? This was William's argument, following the Promethean philosophy of Ray Brazier. If the left was to learn anything from its cultural sojourn into the hauntological, before this strange critique was shuffled out of
the deck of possibilities, it had to emphasise the inhumanism of cultural production. It had to emphasise the fact that the impasse of the end of history can only be properly surmounted by a final nihilistic overcoming of humanism. This is not a politique de pierre that cheerleads human extinction, but rather affirms modernity's tendency towards Kantian abstraction in order to think the in itself of capitalism, outside of every correlation to the human.