Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

Product Information

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Acid Communism, [2] excerpts of which were published as part of a Mark Fisher anthology, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), by Repeater Books in November 2018.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 ] I hope you find this freeing, but most people aren’t thinking about you. Like, at all. So if you’re thinking that someone’s mad/sad/snooty/absent because of you…they’re probably not. They 100% have their own things happening.” This is essentially Fisher’s thing: the vestige of a future lost in half-remembered fragments from half a life ago The song was played in episode six in the BBC series of Ashes to Ashes, a spin-off of Life on Mars, and, since April 2008, it has been used in the trailers for another BBC series, Waking the Dead. The song is also featured in the 2008 Norwegian film The Man Who Loved Yngve, and was played extensively in the series 2 premier of the ITV series McDonald & Dodds. The unique pleasure in reading Fisher is that, whereas other first-rate critics – think Geoff Dyer or Brian Dillon – will generally apply a refined critical-intellectual apparatus to commensurately rarefied subjects, Fisher’s fanatical loyalty is to pop culture in its instinctively avant-garde strains. A piece on the prematurely canonised German author WG Sebald criticises him for writing “as if many of the developments in 20th-century experimental fiction and popular culture had never happened”. Fisher will easefully cite Deleuze or Lacan or draw comparisons with De Chirico or Antonioni, but typically in service of analysing films such as Terminator or Children of Menor the work of some post-dubstep breakbeat sorcerer.

Fisher’s attention to aspects of daily life that might seem too boring or personal to be worthy of collective interest was, I think, propelled by an intuition that part of what sustains our acquiescence to the status quo is our inattention to it. Capitalist realism “naturalises” capitalism by desensitising us to it – requiring and encouraging So reading Fisher’s essay on Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, with its references to liminal spaces, was highly intriguing to me. And while the essay “Nomadalgia: The Junior Boys’ So This is Goodbye” took fully 2/3rds of the essay to get started, the last 1/3, about the nostalgia felt specifically by frequent travelers, was relatable. Capitalist realism as I understand it ... is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.The ruins of the house are still there, people sometimes visit on a dare .I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts, but, even now writing this I can see my Granny’s heartfelt fear and passion in telling that story, I would not set foot in that house for all of the tea in China.

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. 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. The oddest thing was, well odd for an Irish wake, when I arrived at the house, there was no one there except family. Normally at any wake you are queuing with your friends and neighbours for at least 30 minutes before you even get into the house. Izaakson, Jen. (12 August 2017) ‘Kill All Normies’ skewers online identity politics Feminist Current. Retrieved 23 November 2018.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. Sleevenotes for the Caretaker's Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia" was exactly the sort of essay I was hoping for from this volume. It helps that I own two Caretaker albums. This playful essay declares in perfect terms the displacement, both in location and time, encountered when one listens to the album. This is a key hauntological essay that, along with the interview with The Caretaker, which follows, strikes at the heart of the matter: Brown's left melancholic is a depressive who believes he is realistic; someone who no longer has any expectation that his desire for radical transformation could be achieved, but who doesn't recognise that he has given up. In her discussion of Brown's essay in 'The Communist Horizon', Jodi Dean refers to Lacan's formula: 'the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one's desire' and the shift that Brown describes - from a left that confidently assumed the future belonged to it, to a left that makes a virtue of its own incapacity to act - seems to exemplify the transition from desire (which in Lacanian terms is the desire to desire) to drive (an enjoyment through failure). The kind of melancholia I'm talking about, by contrast, consists not in giving up on desire but in refusing to yield. It consists, that is to say, in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call 'reality' - even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time” 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' Political writing that aims to produce an affective response in readers is often described as ­“polemic”, but another way of thinking about Fisher’s writing is as “consciousness-raising”. This, Fisher explains in a 2015 k-punk post, is a process of “people sharing their feelings, especially their feelings of misery and desperation, and together attributing the sources of these feelings to impersonal structures”.