Ghosts of My Life Quotes

“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 thirty years has been a time of massive, 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 shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen 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 anymore.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Depressive ontology is dangerously seductive because, as the zombie twin of a certain philosophical wisdom, it is half true. As the depressive withdraws from the vacant confections of the lifeworld, he unwittingly finds himself in concordance with the human condition so painstakingly diagrammed by a philosopher like Spinoza: he sees himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junky hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions. The depressive cannot even lay claim to the comforts that a paranoiac can enjoy, since he cannot believe that the strings are being pulled by any one. No flow, no connectivity in the depressive’s nervous system.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life – or inner death – overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty. For the depressive, the habits of the former lifeworld now seem to be, precisely, a mode of playacting, a series of pantomime gestures (‘a circus complete with all fools’), which they are both no longer capable of performing and which they no longer wish to perform – there’s no point, everything is a sham.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there's no work to do. If neoliberalism's magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fanaticism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Everything comes back as an advertising campaign. It isn’t just that the alternatives are written over, or out, it is that they return as their own simulacra”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Baudrillard observes somewhere that computers don’t really remember because they lack the ability to forget”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“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.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The disarticulation of class from race, gender and sexuality has in fact been central to the success of the neoliberal project”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t want really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road. If you ‘can’t replace the fear or the thrill of the chase’, why stir yourself to pursue yet another empty kill? Why carry on with the charade?”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Capital can never openly admit that it is a system based on inhuman rapacity; the Terminator can never remove its human mask.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Confronted with capital’s intense semiotic pollution, its encrustation of the urban environment with idiotic sigils and imbecilic slogans no-one – neither the people who wrote them nor those at whom they are aimed – believes, you often wonder: what if all the effort that went into this flashy trash were devoted to a public good?”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“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 crushing 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 café.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Как организмы с определенной продолжительностью жизни, — пишет Джеймисон —

"мы плохо приспособлены как биологические индивиды к наблюдению за фундаментальными историческими процессами — нашему взору доступны только обрывки событий, и мы спешим перевести их в привычные, слишком человеческие единицы измерения: успех или поражение. Но ни стоическая мудрость, ни напоминание о долгосрочной перспективе на самом деле не решат данную особую разновидность экзистенциальной и эпистемологической дилеммы, сравнимой с дилеммой из научной фантастики, когда существа, населяющие космос, не обладают необходимыми органами, чтобы воспринять и познать его. Быть может, лишь признав столь принципиальную несоизмеримость между человеческим существованием и динамикой коллективной истории и производства, мы сможем породить новые политические взгляды, новые способы политического восприятия и политического терпения; и новые методы расшифровки эпохи и различения внутри неё неуловимой дрожи непостижимого будущего".

Посреди реквиема по неолиберальной Англии в "Робинзоне в руинах" рассыпаны некоторые намёки на эту самую неуловимую дрожь и непостижимое будущее.”
― Марк Фишер, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Identification with the alien meant the possibility of an escape from identity, into other subjectivities, other worlds.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Why is it always raining here? Or is that just the sound of the television, tuned to a dead channel?”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“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”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life – or inner death – overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Здесь больше нет времени.
«Сапфир и Сталь»
Финальная сцена британского телесериала «Сапфир и Сталь» снята будто нарочно, чтобы тревожить умы подростков того времени. Два главных героя в исполнении Джоанны Ламли и Дэвида Маккаллума оказываются в типичном придорожном кафе 1940‐х годов. По радио играет легкий джаз в духе оркестра Гленна Миллера. За соседним столиком сидит еще одна пара: мужчина и женщина, одетые по моде 1940‐х. Женщина встает и произносит: «Это ловушка. Это место — нигде, и это навсегда». После этого они со спутником исчезают, оставляя в воздухе лишь свои очертания, а вскоре пропадают и те. Сапфир [1] и Сталь паникуют. Они ищут в кафе хоть что-нибудь, что поможет им выбраться, — но не находят. Отдернув занавески, они видят за окном только звезды в черной пустоте. Похоже, что кафе — это своего рода капсула, плавающая в глубоком космосе.
Сегодня эта удивительная сцена, в которой совмещены кафе и космос, заставит представить что-то вроде сочетания Эдварда Хоппера и Рене Магритта.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Как заметил Джон Сэвидж в книге "England's Dreaming", Лондон во времена панков всё ещё был разбомбленным городом с множеством котлованов, убежищ, свободных пространств, которые можно было бы временно занять или даже превратить в сквот. Когда эти пространства закрыли и огородили, практически вся энергия города стала направлена на выплату ипотеки или уплату аренды. Не осталось времени экспериментировать, двигаться куда-то, заранее не зная, где окажешься. Цели и задачи необходимо обозначать заранее. "Свободное время" стало сродни реабилитации. Ты тянешься к тому, что успокаивает, что помогает максимально зарядиться перед рабочим днём: к старым, знакомым мелодиям (или чему-то, на них похожему). Лондон превратился в город измождённых роботов, подключённых к своим айподам.

В "Savage Messiah" город предстаёт как простор для блужданий и мечтаний, как лабиринт переулков и зон, противостоящих процессу джентрификации и "развития", кульминация которого будет приурочена к жалкому гиперзрелищу 2012 года.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Keiller finds extinction looming everywhere – species dying off at a far faster rate than scientists had thought possible only a few years ago. The emphasis on extinction means that the concerns of Robinson in Ruins rhyme with the preoccupations that have emerged in speculative realist philosophy, which has focused on the spaces prior to, beyond and after human life. In some respects, the work of philosophers such as Ray Brassier and Tim Morton re-stages the old confrontation between human finitude and the sublime which was the former subject of a certain kind of landscape art. But where the older sublime concentrated on local natural phenomenon such as the ocean or volcanic eruptions which could overwhelm and destroy the individual organism or whole cities, speculative realism contemplates the extinction, not only of the human world, but of life and indeed matter itself. The prospect of ecological catastrophe means that disjunction between the lived time of human experience and longer durations is now not just a question of metaphysical contemplation, but a matter of urgent political concern, as one of Robinson’s touchstones, Fredric Jameson, noted. ‘[A]s organisms of a particular life span,’ Jameson writes in his essay ‘Actually Existing Marxism’,

we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the alltoo-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political attitudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future.

Amongst its requiem for neoliberal England, Robinson in Ruins gives us some intimations of those imperceptible tremors and inconceivable futures.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“. Keiller finds extinction looming everywhere – species dying off at a far faster rate than scientists had thought possible only a few years ago. The emphasis on extinction means that the concerns of Robinson in Ruins rhyme with the preoccupations that have emerged in speculative realist philosophy, which has focused on the spaces prior to, beyond and after human life. In some respects, the work of philosophers such as Ray Brassier and Tim Morton re-stages the old confrontation between human finitude and the sublime which was the former subject of a certain kind of landscape art. But where the older sublime concentrated on local natural phenomenon such as the ocean or volcanic eruptions which could overwhelm and destroy the individual organism or whole cities, speculative realism contemplates the extinction, not only of the human world, but of life and indeed matter itself. The prospect of ecological catastrophe means that disjunction between the lived time of human experience and longer durations is now not just a question of metaphysical contemplation, but a matter of urgent political concern, as one of Robinson’s touchstones, Fredric Jameson, noted. ‘[A]s organisms of a particular life span,’ Jameson writes in his essay ‘Actually Existing Marxism’,
we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the alltoo-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political attitudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future. (Valences of the Dialectic, Verso, 2010, pp369-70)
Amongst its requiem for neoliberal England, Robinson in Ruins gives us some intimations of those imperceptible tremors and inconceivable futures.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Дж. Ф.: Подобные вещи меня очень интересуют – всегда интересовали. Через такие вот странные моменты мы ловим проблески чего-то, выходящего за пределы наших привычных представлений о мире; проблески восприятия, альтернативного нашему; по-моему, это очень ценная возможность, и за неё стоит держаться. Осознание того, что, возможно, в нашем восприятии есть пробелы, которые мы пока ещё не способны заполнить.”
― Марк Фишер, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Marconi had conceived of telegraphy as a spectral science. He ‘became convinced that sounds once generated never die, they simply become fainter and fainter until we no longer perceive them. Marconi’s hope was to develop sufficiently sensitive equipment, extraordinarily powerful and selective filters I suppose, to pick up and hear these past sounds. Ultimately, he hoped to be able hear Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Jameson equates the postmodern ‘waning of historicity’ with the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, but he says little about why the two are synonymous. Why did the arrival of neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism lead to a culture of retrospection and pastiche? Perhaps we can venture a couple of provisional conjectures here. The first concerns consumption. Could it be that neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and security brought about a compensatory hungering for the well-established and the familiar.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Но 2013-й может быть и нулевым годом: противоположностью 1979-го, временем, когда все обманутые надежды осуществятся, а упущенные возможности будут наконец реализованы. "Savage Messiah" призывает нас увидеть контуры другого мира сквозь трещины и разрывы оккупированного Лондона:
Возможно, именно здесь пространство можно высвободить и таким образом выковать коллективное сопротивление этой неолиберальной экспансии, бесконечному распространению банальности и обезличивающему эффекту глобализации. Здесь, в конченных торговых галереях, в заколоченных досками зданиях, в потерянных цитаделях консюмеризма, может крыться истина; здесь можно обнаружить новые территории и прошибить эту коллективную амнезию.”
― Марк Фишер, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Вообще, Жак Деррида, автор термина, часто раздражал меня как мыслитель.”
― Марк Фишер, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures