Paul Watson’s posts tagged “Mark Fisher”

There is something decidedly hauntological about all of this. The way in which a phantasmal and retrospective political and cultural movement has choked the life out of the pro-European futures articulated in the political and musical ground zero of post-punk (Empires and Dance, Europe After the Rain, Europa and the Pirate Twins); an insistence that the only way forward is a ghoulish simulacrum of Britain’s finest hour. It’s hard not to see echoes of Fisher’s assertion in Capitalist Realism that the only way forwards is backwards.

It’s possible that we as individuals read too much into what we like, that we invest too much of our identity into corporate properties or even art by individuals, and that part of the harm we feel on discovery of harm is associative: that by enjoying something made by someone who did bad things, some of that badness must rub off on us.

I have lived my whole life within this ideological wasteland. It is a landscape where perpetual economic crisis and political scandal reign supreme, where public funding is forever swallowed up by the religious fervour of free-market philosophy, and environmental catastrophe and technological existentialism loom ever closer. Here, even culture exists in a time out of joint, ever repeating the hits of the 20th century as the markets demand. Yet, if you look towards the horizon, you will not find the slightest pretence that things will ever truly change.

In both Derrida’s and Fisher’s conceptions of hauntology, the crucial element is that of time. For Derrida, the return and repetition of the past in the present is manifested through the figure of the revenant, that which returns each time as if it were the first, unchanging and insistent, demanding a reckoning for a message that went unheard or was ignored. For Fisher, as we shall see, there are two opposing temporal currents intrinsic to hauntology: the no longer and the not yet. The former haunts the present from the past, an event, idea or entity whose moment is past but which continues to make its presence felt. The latter haunts the present from the future, through the unfulfilled promise of that which never came to pass but which may yet do so. In both instances, their impact is felt now, in the present, either through repetition or anticipation.

In this spirit, Acid Communism was meant to strengthen the political imagination. A recently published anthology of Fisher’s writings includes a draft for the introduction, which reads something like a manifesto. Fisher had taken a cue from his friend Jeremy Gilbert, a scholar who had long maintained that the sixties might serve as a blueprint for contemporary leftist revolution.

The time for sending messages in bottles has passed. As seas toxify and rise over the shorelines, who will be left to read them? Nonetheless, we have to communicate. So we communicate. To anyone who will listen. Through the haze of wine, cannabis, SSRIs, exhaustion, overwork, climate depression, and an overwhelming anxiety at the rise of new fascisms, we communicate. Because we must. Because, for the time being at least, we are human.

England is a country in which every last space where conviviality might flourish has been colonised by a commercial imperative …. supermarket check-out operatives replaced by crap robots… unexpected item in bagging area… every surface plastered with corporate graffiti and haranguing hashtags … no trick missed to screw every last penny out of people… exorbitant parking charges in NHS hospitals (exact amount only, no change given), all the profits going to private providers …

Acid communism? Psychedelic Corbynism? Freak left? Call it what you will – but re-infuse endeavours with a spirit of radical collectivism and unselfing to revivify co-opted countercultures for a world that would be free.

An analysis of Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's audio-essay 'On Vanishing Land' (2013), taking up the notion of the "eerie" in it and contrasting it to melancholy. Originally delivered at 'Five Centuries of Melancholia' conference, University of Queensland Art Museum, 4 September 2014.