Part 1 (1/2)
Ghosts of My Life.
Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures.
Mark Fisher.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT.
GHOSTS OF MY LIFE.
After the brilliance of Capitalist Realism, Ghosts Of My Life confirms Mark Fisher's role as our greatest and most trusted navigator of these times out of joint, through all their frissons and ruptures, among all their apparitions and spectres, past, present and future.
David Peace, author of the Red Riding Quartet and Red or Dead.
Mark Fisher reads the contemporary world like no other a.n.a.lyst of its miseries and madness and mores. He is driven by anger but, miraculously, he never forgets to celebrate, when that reaction is apposite. I find his work exhilarating, fascinating, deeply engaging and, not least, utterly vital; this world we have made for ourselves would be a lesser place without it.
Niall Griffiths, author of Sheeps.h.a.gger.
Ghosts Of My Life confirms that Mark Fisher is our most penetrating explorer of the connections between pop culture, politics, and personal life under the affective regime of digital capitalism. The most admirable qualities of Fisher's work are its lucidity, reflecting the urgency of his commitment to communicating ideas; his high expectations of popular art's power to challenge, enlighten, and heal; and his adamant refusal to settle for less.
Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania and Rip It Up and Start Again.
A must read for modernists, and for anyone who misses the future. This is the first book to really make sense of the fog of ideas that have been tagged as ”hauntology”. Ghosts Of My Life is enjoyable, progressive and exciting.
Bob Stanley, author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop and member of Saint Etienne.
For my wife, Ze and my son, George.
Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zer0, 2009). His writing has appeared in many publications, including Sight & Sound, The Wire, The Guardian, Film Quarterly and frieze. He is Programme Leader of the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a lecturer at the University of East London. He lives in Suffolk.
Acknowledgements.
Many of the ideas in Ghosts Of My Life were first auditioned on my blog, k-punk. I'm grateful to the k-punk readers who responded to the ideas there and helped them to propagate. I'm also grateful to the publishers who kindly allowed me to reprint material in Ghosts, in particular Rob Winter at Sight & Sound and Tony Herrington at The Wire. Some of the pieces that originally appeared elsewhere have been altered for inclusion here. Needless to say, all responsibility for the edits in Ghosts lies with me.
If I were to list everyone who inspired or supported the writing of Ghosts Of My Life, the book would never get started, so I will concentrate only on those who worked closely on the ma.n.u.script. Thanks, therefore, to Tariq G.o.ddard for his patience, Liam Sprod and Alex Niven for their attentive copy-editing and proofreading, Laura Oldfield Ford for allowing me to use her drawings to ill.u.s.trate the text, Chris Heppell for the cover photograph, and Rob White for his customarily insightful and incisive comments.
Lately I've been feeling like Guy Pearce in Memento.
-Drake.
00: LOST FUTURES.
'The Slow Cancellation of the Future'
'There's no time here, not any more'
The final image of the British television series Sapphire and Steel seemed designed to haunt the adolescent mind. The two lead characters, played by Joanna Lumley and David McCallum, find themselves in what seems to be a 1940s roadside cafe. The radio is playing a simulation of Glenn Miller-style smooth Big Band jazz. Another couple, a man and a woman dressed in 1940s clothes, are sitting at an adjacent table. The woman rises, saying: 'This is the trap. This is nowhere, and it's forever.' She and her companion then disappear, leaving spectral outlines, then nothingness. Sapphire and Steel panic. They rifle through the few objects in the cafe, looking for something they can use to escape. There is nothing, and when they pull back the curtains, there is only a black starry void beyond the window. The cafe, it seems, is some kind of capsule floating in deep s.p.a.ce.
Watching this extraordinary final sequence now, the juxtaposition of the cafe with the cosmos is likely to put in mind some combination of Edward Hopper and Rene Magritte. Neither of those references were available to me at the time; in fact, when I later encountered Hopper and Magritte, I no doubt thought of Sapphire and Steel. It was August 1982 and I had just turned 15 years old. It would be more than 20 years later before I would see these images again. By then, thanks to VHS, DVD and YouTube, it seemed that practically everything was available for rewatching. In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost.
The pa.s.sage of 30 years has only made the series appear even stranger than it did at the time. This was science fiction with none of the traditional trappings of the genre, no s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps, no ray guns, no anthropomorphic foes: only the unraveling fabric of the corridor of time, along which malevolent ent.i.ties would crawl, exploiting and expanding gaps and fissures in temporal continuity. All we knew about Sapphire and Steel was that they were 'detectives' of a peculiar kind, probably not human, sent from a mysterious 'agency' to repair these breaks in time. 'The basis of Sapphire and Steel,' the series's creator P. J. Hammond explained, 'came from my desire to write a detective story, into which I wanted to incorporate Time. I've always been interested in Time, particularly the ideas of J. B. Priestley and H. G. Wells, but I wanted to take a different approach to the subject. So instead of having them go backwards and forwards in Time, it was about Time breaking in, and having set the precedent I realised the potential that it offered with two people whose job it was to stop the breakins.' (Steve O'Brien, 'The Story Behind Sapphire & Steel', The Fan Can, /fancandy/features/tvfeatures/steel.html) Hammond had previously worked as a writer on police dramas such as The Gentle Touch and Hunter's Walk and on children's fantasy shows like Ace of Wands and Dramarama. With Sapphire and Steel, he attained a kind of auteurs.h.i.+p that he would never manage to repeat. The conditions for this kind of visionary public broadcasting would disappear during the 1980s, as the British media became taken over by what another television auteur, Dennis Potter, would call the 'occupying powers' of neoliberalism. The result of that occupation is that it is now hard to believe that such a programme could ever have been transmitted on prime-time television, still less on what was then Britain's sole commercial network, ITV. There were only three television channels in Britain then: BBC1, BBC2 and ITV; Channel 4 would make its first broadcast only a few months later.
By comparison with the expectations created by Star Wars, Sapphire and Steel came off as very cheap and cheerful. Even in 1982, the chroma-key special effects looked unconvincing. The fact that the stage sets were minimal, and the cast small (most of the 'a.s.signments' only featured Lumley and McCallum and a couple of others), gave the impression of a theatre production. Yet there was none of the homeliness of kitchen sink naturalism; Sapphire and Steel had more in common with the enigmatic oppressiveness of Harold Pinter, whose plays were frequently broadcast on BBC television during the 1970s.
A number of things about the series are particularly striking from the perspective of the 21st century. The first is its absolute refusal to 'meet the audience halfway' in the way that we've come to expect. This is partly a conceptual matter: Sapphire and Steel was cryptic, its stories and its world never fully disclosed, still less explained. The series was much closer to something like the BBC's adaptation of John Le Carre's Smiley novels Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had been broadcast in 1979; its sequel Smiley's People would begin transmission a month after Sapphire and Steel ended than it was to Star Wars. It was also a question of emotional tenor: the series and its two lead characters are lacking in the warmth and wisecracking humour that is now so much a taken-for-granted feature of entertainment media. McCallum's Steel had a technician's indifference towards the lives in which he became reluctantly enmeshed; although he never loses his sense of duty, he is testy and impatient, frequently exasperated by the way humans 'clutter their lives'. If Lumley's Sapphire appeared more sympathetic, there was always the suspicion that her apparent affection towards humans was something like an owner's benign fascination for her pets. The emotional austerity that had characterised the series from the start a.s.sumes a more explicitly pessimistic quality in this final a.s.signment. The Le Carre parallels are reinforced by the strong suspicion that, just as in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the lead characters have been betrayed by their own side.
Then there was Cyril Ornadel's incidental music. As Nick Edwards explained in a 2009 blog post, this was '[a]rranged for a small ensemble of musicians (predominantly woodwind) with liberal use of electronic treatments (ring modulation, echo/delay) to intensify the drama and suggestion of horror, Ornadel's cues are far more powerfully chilling and evocative than anything you're likely hear in the mainstream media today.' ('Sapphire and Steel', gutterbreakz.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/sapphire-steel.html) One aim of Sapphire and Steel was to transpose ghost stories out of the Victorian context and into contemporary places, the still inhabited or the recently abandoned. In the final a.s.signment, Sapphire and Steel arrive at a small service station. Corporate logos Access, 7 Up, Castrol GTX, LV are pasted on the windows and the walls of the garage and the adjoining cafe. This 'halfway place' is a prototype version of what the anthropologist Marc Auge will call in a 1995 book of the same t.i.tle, 'non-places' the generic zones of transit (retail parks, airports) which will come to increasingly dominate the s.p.a.ces of late capitalism. In truth, the modest service station in Sapphire and Steel is quaintly idiosyncratic compared to the cloned generic monoliths which will proliferate besides motorways over the coming 30 years.
The problem that Sapphire and Steel have come to solve is, as ever, to do with time. At the service station, there is temporal bleed-through from earlier periods: images and figures from 1925 and 1948 keep appearing, so that, as Sapphire and Steel's colleague Silver puts it 'time just got mixed, jumbled up, together, making no sort of sense'. Anachronism, the slippage of discrete time periods into one another, was throughout the series the major symptom of time breaking down. In one of the earlier a.s.signments, Steel complains that these temporal anomalies are triggered by human beings' predilection for the mixing of artefacts from different eras. In this final a.s.signment, the anachronism has led to stasis: time has stopped. The service station is in 'a pocket, a vacuum'. There's 'still traffic, but it's not going anywhere': the sound of cars is locked into a looped drone. Silver says, 'there is no time here, not any more'. It's as if the whole scenario is a literalisation of the lines in Pinter's No Man's Land: 'No man's land, which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, which remains forever icy and silent.' Hammond said that he had not necessarily intended the series to end there. He had thought that it would be rested, to return at some point in the future. There would be no return at least, not on network television. In 2004, Sapphire and Steel would come back for a series of audio adventures; though Hammond, McCallum and Lumley were not involved, and by then the audience was not the television-viewing public, but the kind of special interest niche easily catered for in digital culture. Eternally suspended, never to be freed, their plight and indeed their provenance never to be fully explained, Sapphire and Steel's internment in this cafe from nowhere is prophetic for a general condition: in which life continues, but time has somehow stopped.
The slow cancellation of the future It is the contention of this book that 21st-century culture is marked by the same anachronism and inertia which afflicted Sapphire and Steel in their final adventure. But this stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of 'newness', of perpetual movement. The 'jumbling up of time', the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so prevalent that is no longer even noticed.
In his book After The Future, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi refers to the 'the slow cancellation of the future [that] got underway in the 1970s and 1980s.' 'But when I say ”future”', he elaborates, I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegel-Marxist mythology of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encom-pa.s.sing power of scientific knowledge; and so on.
My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it, and look at reality without this kind of temporal lens. I'll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. (After The Future, AK Books, 2011, pp18-19) Bifo is a generation older than me, but he and I are on the same side of a temporal split here. I, too, will never be able to adjust to the paradoxes of this new situation. The immediate temptation here is to fit what I'm saying into a wearily familiar narrative: it is a matter of the old failing to come to terms with the new, saying it was better in their day. Yet it is just this picture with its a.s.sumption that the young are automatically at the leading edge of cultural change that is now out of date.
Rather than the old recoiling from the 'new' in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in popular music culture. It was through the mutations of popular music that many of those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the pa.s.sage of cultural time. But faced with 21st-century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared. This is quickly established by performing a simple thought experiment. Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It's hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be. While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crus.h.i.+ng sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn't feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn't feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century, just as Sapphire and Steel were incarcerated in their roadside cafe.
The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges' Funhouse or Sly Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of 'nostalgia'. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those 30 years have been a time of ma.s.sive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher's neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The s.h.i.+ft into so-called Post-Fordism with globalisation, ubiquitous computerisation and the casualisation of labour resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last 10 to 15 years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there's an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate any more.
Consider the fate of the concept of 'futuristic' music. The 'futuristic' in music has long since ceased to refer to any future that we expect to be different; it has become an established style, much like a particular typographical font. Invited to think of the futuristic, we will still come up with something like the music of Kraftwerk, even though this is now as antique as Glenn Miller's big band jazz was when the German group began experimenting with synthesizers in the early 1970s.
Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk? If Kraftwerk's music came out of a casual intolerance of the already-established, then the present moment is marked by its extraordinary accommodation towards the past. More than that, the very distinction between past and present is breaking down. In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.
Two examples will suffice to introduce this peculiar temporality. When I first saw the video for the Arctic Monkeys' 2005 single 'I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor', I genuinely believed that it was some lost artifact from circa 1980. Everything in the video the lighting, the haircuts, the clothes had been a.s.sembled to give the impression that this was a performance on BBC2's 'serious rock show' The Old Grey Whistle Test. Furthermore, there was no discordance between the look and the sound. At least to a casual listen, this could quite easily have been a postpunk group from the early 1980s. Certainly, if one performs a version of the thought experiment I described above, it's easy to imagine 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor' being broadcast on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1980, and producing no sense of disorientation in the audience. Like me, they might have imagined that the references to '1984' in the lyrics referred to the future.