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

by Mark Fisher

The kind of figure capable of exhibiting and expressing a yearning for the past belongs, actually, to a paradigmatically modernist moment – think, for instance, of Proust’s and Joyce’s ingenious exercises in recovering lost time.

Could it be that neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and security brought about a compensatory hungering for the well-established and the familiar?

desperately short of time, energy and attention, we demand quick fixes.

Despite all its rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new.

It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities.

To the rhythm of a cadenced march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism! (Specters of Marx, p64)

not only has the future not arrived, it no longer seems possible. Yet at the same time, the music constitutes a refusal to give up on the desire for the future. This refusal gives the melancholia a political dimension, because it amounts to a failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism.

a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward looking and punishing.’ (Wendy

What is being longed for in hauntology is not a particular period, but the resumption of the processes of democratisation and pluralism for which Gilroy calls.

Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves.

Is ‘Ghosts’ the moment when art pop confronts this fear – that class will out, that one’s background can never be transcended, that the rude spectres of Lewisham will return no matter how far East you travel?

the more you’ve disguised your background, the more it will hurt when it is exposed.)

This was a music designed to reassure anxious white males at a moment when all of the certainties they had previously counted on – in work, sexual relations, ethnic identity – were coming under pressure.

It has become increasingly clear that 1979-80, the years with which the group will always be identified, was a threshold moment – the time when a whole world (social democratic, Fordist, industrial) became obsolete, and the contours of a new world (neoliberal, consumerist, informatic) began to show themselves.

‘To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.’

But the true Schopenhauerian moments are those in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart’s desire – and feel cheated, empty, no, more – or is it less? – than empty, voided.

and beneath the framing ontological question (is this real or not?), there was a question about desire and politics: do we want this to be real?

Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile’s victims quiet. Who’s going to believe your word against the word of a television entertainer, someone who has raised millions for charity? But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable – this can’t possibly be happening. What has happened can be pieced together only in retrospect. The powerful trade on the idea that abuse and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and cover–up can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the past. That was then, things are different now…

‘We all dream about it,’ he says. ‘I wish something was there. But even if you fight to see it, you never see anything. You don’t have a choice. You’d be on the way to a job, but you’re longing to go down this other street, right there, and you walk past it. No force on Earth could make you go down there, because you’ve got to traipse to wherever. Even if you escape for a second, people are on your case, you can’t go down old Thames side and throw your mobile in.’

Isn’t, in fact, theoretically pure anterograde amnesia the postmodern condition par excellence? The present – broken, desolated is constantly erasing itself, leaving few traces. Things catch your attention for a while but you do not remember them for very long. But the old memories persist, intact…Constantly commemorated … I love 1923…

Do we really have more substance than the ghosts we endlessly applaud?

The past cannot be forgotten, the present canno...

The past keeps coming back because the present cannot be remembered.

It is not surprising that anxieties about memory should continually surface in late capitalism, where, as Jameson and others have argued, perpetual economic instability and the rapid turnover of ephemeral images leads to a breakdown in any coherent sense of temporality.