The Rain, It Never Stops
In his new book released this June, The Future is Not Lost: On Music, Technology and the Creation of New Worlds, philosopher and writer Matt Bluemink frames Mark Fisher’s redeployment of hauntology as a pessimistic and melancholic cultural phenomenon:
“Hauntology then, is the cultural result of a world that has reticently accepted the fundamental tenets of capitalist realism; a world in which popular modernism had become a nostalgic trace of times gone by”.1placeholder
Taken in isolation, this sentence is almost a concise and accurate summary of Fisher’s use of hauntology. Playing its most central role in his 2014 book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Fisher borrows hauntology from Jaques Derrida and re-engineers it to refer to a cultural condition where the artefacts of the past, specifically those of the second 20th century, haunt the 21st century.
Fisher’s use of hauntology is really the other side to probably his most famous concept, capitalist realism. Under the conditions of capitalist realism, according to Fisher, it seems as though there is no future beyond the present reality established by neoliberal capitalism other than the very Real horizon of climate apocalypse. And, as Fredric Jameson observed at the outset of the neoliberal counter revolution, when there is no future, culture ceases to innovate and becomes stuck in a cycle of repetitive pastiche. In other words, the present is haunted by the remnants of the immediate past, unable to give up the ghost.
Referring to popular music, which is the widest avenue through which both Bluemink and Fisher identify modernist futurity or its lack, Bluemink frames the logical direction of Fisher’s work as one of despair, depression and hopelessness. That it essentially follows a logic that there is no outside of Capital any longer. Everything has been subsumed and there is no future:
“Fisher essentially sees that contemporary music has been trapped in a cycle of repetition that has allowed the capitalist culture industries to trap listeners in a state of suspended animation; a state through which novel and new ideas are not being created or even expected by the listener. Here, in some respects, Fisher is harking back to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industries and their subsumption of cultural forms into the machine of late capitalism.”2placeholder
Everything that follows in The Future is Not Lost is an attempt to shake off this depression and start thinking hopefully again, partly through the counter concept anti-hauntology. And it must be said that despite the issues outlined below, Bluemink’s book generates many essential avenues of thinking futuristically again. Avenues that I hope to come back to in time.
But for now, my issue with Bluemink’s reading is that it misunderstands the progressive (in a temporal as well as political sense) and modernist element present in Fisher’s specific invocation of hauntology. This also, as I will attempt to show later, risks misunderstanding modernism generally. Part of Bluemink’s critique of Fisher depends not on simply getting past the supposed depression his work invokes, but involves a claim that it would seem cultural imaginaries of the future were never lost in first place. It is these two aspects of Bluemink’s book that I address in this piece, not to pedantically quibble over meaning but to play some part in generating the imaginative capacities of futurity that Bluemink, and Fisher, are and were interested in.
No Particular Place To Go
My reading of Fisher’s hauntology is that it was never about a pessimistic acceptance of the conditions of capitalist realism, but about breaking out of its affective ideological field. Fisher’s hauntology does not, as Bluemink argues, operate according to the logic of depression, but it is an attempt to deal with loss. Specifically, the loss of the various forms of social security made available, directly and indirectly, to a proletariat who were then able to develop strands of popular culture capable of imagining the future. What Bluemink and other anti-hauntologists see as the logic of depression is actually the logic of mourning.
To expand upon this point it is worth considering two other concepts that surround hauntology. These are capitalist realism and retromania.
Capitalist realism is the term Fisher gives for a pathological condition afflicting not just society at large but specifically a left that says there is no possible alternative to capitalism as an organising principle of society.
For Fisher, capitalist realism runs alongside the slow collapse of popular modernist cultures that flourished in the post-war UK welfare state. Popular modernist cultures that could imagine futures beyond the immediate present, ones that were distinct from and challenged the operating assumptions of what was or could be real.
It is crucial to understand that the popular modernism of the post-war UK welfare state was a consequence of the social security afforded to much of if not all of the proletariat. And as that welfare state is attacked from the late 1970s to today, the institutions and social security that allowed for popular modernism to exist slowly disappear. This leaves behind a singular affective register that insists on capitalism as the only possible reality, one that the left melancholically comes to accept.
The past then becomes nothing but a jumble of signs and symbols that once meant something but now mean nothing and can consequently be playfully (re)assembled into atemporal pastiches: postmodernism.
Attributed sometimes to Fredric Jameson, the often invoked phrase which summarises the capitalist realist position is that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Indeed, Jameson’s assessment and critique of postmodernism which stretches back to the very beginning of neoliberalism in the anglo-sphere is an essential node for understanding Fisher’s critique of capitalism and its relationship to modernity. For Jameson, postmodernism is a cultural mode that is schizophrenic in a specifically Lacanian sense. In Lacan’s suitably structuralist formulation, schizophrenia is a language disorder, quite literally a disorder of language and therefore fundamentally a temporal phenomenon:
“For Lacan, the experience of temporality, human time, past, present, memory, the persistence of personal identity over months and years—this existential or experiential feeling of time itself—is also an effect of language. It is because language has a past and a future, because the sentence moves in time, that we can have what seems to us a concrete or lived experience of time. But since the schizophrenic does not know language articulation in that way, he or she does not have our experience of temporal continuity either, but is condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence.”3placeholder
And for Jameson, postmodernism is simply the cultural form that is best suited to the logic of late capitalism. When everything is abstracted through the deterritorializing flows of Capital, how can any sense of temporality or symbolic efficiency be retained? Unless, of course, through a reterrorialization of exactly what has been put through the meat grinder. All that is solid doesn’t melt into air, rather all that is solid is melted down and sold back to us as a nostalgic commodity. As Fisher puts it in his 2012 critique of Landian accelerationism:
“The actual near future wasn’t about Capital stripping off its latex mask and revealing the mechanic deaths head beneath it; it was just the opposite: New Sincerity, Apple Computers advertised by kitschy-cutesy pop”4placeholder
It appears to follow then that hauntology is just another example of or just another word for postmodernism. Bluemink even makes reference to Alex Williams’ essay that says exactly that.5placeholder As a cultural mode it is haunted by the signs of the past. It is Nietzsche’s Last Man roaming endlessly around the museum of the dead, fingering the artefacts of a finished history. For modernists, and Fisher was undoubtedly a committed modernist, it is surely the enemy, the thing to struggle against. But this risks misunderstanding both Fisher and modernism itself. To understand why we need to move to the second concept I want to raise, retromania.
Retromania, a term coined by Simon Reynolds but one that influenced Fisher’s thinking about culture and capitalism in the early 21st century, describes a situation where contemporary culture has become obsessed with the repetition and commemoration of the immediate past.
One of the most striking and easy to explain examples of retromania can be found in Fisher’s famous analysis of the Arctic Monkeys, although Reynolds includes many in his book on the term too.6placeholder For Fisher, the Arctic Monkeys call forth an earlier period, in this instance UK post-punk, and re-stage it in an act of direct repetition. New technology has been used in its production and distribution, of course. But, and this is the crucial point, it appears as though it actually is a product of the earlier period that it seeks to repeat. The only difference it has to what it tries to replicate is its method of distribution. To paraphrase Reynolds’, it is 20th century culture distributed through 21st century technologies.
Retromania could therefore be fairly described as a pessimistic, melancholic and schizophrenic phenomenon. Pessimistic in the sense that it, as Bluemink says of hauntology, accepts the fundamental tenets of capitalist realism; that there is no alternative to capitalism. Schizophrenic in the way that it fails to belong to any coherent, continuous stream of temporality. And melancholic in a specifically psychoanalytic way, which means we must be careful not to equate melancholia with mourning. Going back to Freud and his essay on the distinction between the two terms is useful here.
For Freud, mourning and melancholia are both responses to the loss of an object of libidinal investment. Both begin from the same place, in our case the loss of any sense of futurity beyond capitalist social relations or apocalypse. But where mourning is an active process that operates consciously and eventually ends, melancholia is a reactive process that remains submerged in the unconscious mind, capturing the subject in the stasis of neurotic repetition. The mourner eventually gets over their loss and is then free to make new libidinal investments. The melancholic remains unable to make new libidinal investments, trapped in a spiral of repetitive self-loathing.7placeholder
It is my contention that Fisher’s hauntology should not be categorised as a pessimistic, melancholic or schizophrenic cultural pathology in the same way retromania should. It would be better to understand it specifically as a form of cultural mourning during a period of capitalist realism. It is therefore all about moving on from a period in which the future has been lost, rather than accepting it as the realistic and terminal state of affairs. New libidinal investments are possible through mourning, eventually. Indeed, the negotiation between haunting, melancholia and mourning is raised explicitly by Fisher in Ghosts of My Life.
Bluemink indicates this himself when he refers to these passages of Ghosts of My Life:
“One way of thinking about hauntology is that its lost futures do not force such false choices [the choice between the internet and social security]; instead, what haunts is the spectre of a world in which all the marvels of communicative technology could be combined with a sense of solidarity much stronger than anything social democracy could muster.”8placeholder
And:
“What is being longed for in hauntology is not a particular period, but the resumption of the processes of democratisation and pluralism […]. What should haunt us is not the no longer of actually existing social democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialised. These spectres – the spectres of lost futures – reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world’.”9placeholder
From my vantage point, and my exploration into this debate is ongoing, the notion of anti-hauntology is immanent to hauntology as Fisher conceptualises it. Someone like Burial, the example par excellence of hauntology, should not be understood as melancholic or pessimistic, but instead as a cultural figure of mourning. The lost love-object (in this case the popular modernist future of UK electronic music and its associated circuits of intersectional, proletarian and cosmopolitan conviviality) is not put through a process of neurotic repetition, the symptom of the pathology of capitalist postmodernity. Instead, it begins a time of mourning that will open up the possibility for new libidinal investments, new futures. The implications for Fisher’s hauntology is not that the ghosts will remain swirling around a dead-end cultural zone but that they will be conjured for the specific political and cultural ends of continuing the lost futures they represent. In essence, hauntology is precisely one of the antidotes to the depressive cultural logic imposed by retromania.
When My Chance Came To Be King
What I think Bluemink’s invocation of the term anti-hauntology does though is challenge us to move beyond any belief that the conjuring of the ghosts of lost futures is the only strategy for thinking through and beyond contemporary capitalism.
If hauntology can be used for progressive ends, that does not mean it is the only vehicle for advancing cultural and political time. And this is I think the book’s most crucial value, it opens space for thinking about what those futures look like after the mourning has ended and without falling into the false promises of total machinic integration offered by unqualified accelerationism or the nostalgia of folk-politics, both of which are, of course, impossible fantasies. In this sense it is not dismissing the trajectory of Fisher’s thought, but going through and extending it.
But is it not also the case that Bluemink’s anti-hauntology risks being, much like Landian accelerationism for all its supposed nihilism, too optimistic about the situation we find ourselves in today?
The cultural artefacts that Bluemink invokes as anti-hauntological, SOPHIE being the most prominent example, are modernist and certainly do influence or are themselves features of popular music cultures, and this invocation carries with it important challenges to Fisher’s potential short-sightedness with regards to developments along the coast of the popular and avant-garde during the period he was writing. However, there remains a burning Marxist question about the material conditions for the production of modernisms by an active, assertive and organised proletariat.
To answer this question, we need to be clear about what I believe Fisher was doing when he conjured the ghost of the popular modernist culture of the second half of the 20th century in the UK specifically.
For Fisher, popular modernism was never simply about modernism(s) influencing or being incorporated into popular culture(s). Modernism has always had a two-way relationship to popular culture. I remember during a formative module on American Modernism at University my lecturer making the point that modernism revolves around both the low and high terrains of culture. Modernist aesthetics can be found in a painting housed in an exclusive art gallery and an advert for a cheap and popular commodity. In a sense, and this is perhaps a limitation on the choice of wording for the term popular modernism, modernism has always been popular. It is also worth noting here that this is where Fisher makes his biggest divergence from any comparison with Adorno. Or perhaps it is better to say that where Adorno recognises an irreparable rift between the high and low in the first half of the 20th century, Fisher recognises and celebrates the ways in which that rift closes in its second half through the claiming of modernism, and modernity, by the proletariat.
Where the first half of the 20th century denotes a period where self-conscious modernist cultural production was the exclusive preserve of the bourgeoisie, the second half, as a consequence of interdependent and intersecting cultural and political victories won by the proletariat denotes the grabbing of the baton by the proletariat. And proletariat here does not refer exclusively to the image of the ‘working man’, but, as Jodi Dean highlights in The Communist Horizon, the 99% of us who do not fall into the category of bourgeoisie.10placeholder
Modernism, just as it reaches a dead end in the hands of the bourgeoisie, finds new life in the hands of the proletariat who re-work and extend its commitment to novelty in ways that the old guard could never have managed.11placeholder For one example, see the way in which Sam Selvon establishes the stakes of Caribbean modernism in the opening sentence of his 1965 novel The Lonely Londoners by bringing together a reference to the highest of modernist classics ‘The Waste Land’ with the creolised English of the narrative voice:
“One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if not London at all but some other strange place on another planet’”12placeholder
Notice not only the intertextual reference to “high” modernism via ’The Waste Land’ and the ever-present modernist technique of defamiliarization, but the way in which both are invoked to speak to the then-present condition of modernity from the viewpoint of its current subject. The bourgeois Mrs Dalloway and J. Alfred Prufrock are replaced with proletarian, Windrush migrant Moses Aloetta. Through re-combinatory reference to its past, modernism is pushed forward into a new phase of development. Modernism goes from being the singular modernism of Woolf, Eliot, Joyce and Pound to the pluralistic modernisms of the global proletariat. Almost all of the major cultural reference points for Fisher are part of this modernist continuum. From post-punk pop to the weird narratives of classic Doctor Who, modernism is democratised down and through the circuitry of cultural production.
Selvon is certainly haunted by ‘The Waste Land’, and if we are going there, it also must be said that ‘The Waste Land’ is itself a deeply haunted text. But this haunting, at least in Selvon’s case, is mobilised towards the formation of the new. A newness that speaks to a temporal link between the two texts and thus marks both a history and a future. It propels itself across time and space progressively. Indeed, where Eliot, the bourgeois modernist, sees a kind of cultural atemporality in modernism, one that made someone like Lukács so critical of it, in the hands of Selvon it becomes, much as it did for Fisher himself, imbued with a potent revolutionary potential.
Crucially, this grabbing of the baton does not happen in the cultural field alone and is not a consequence of individual creative acts by artists endowed with divine inspiration, the mechanisms of capitalist deterritorialization, or the benevolence of the old modernist guard, or at least not these things alone. It is not enough to raise selected examples of where modernism can be found today, something which it must be said Fisher was doing all the time. Rather it is a consequence of the changing material conditions during post-war social democracy in the UK (and elsewhere) at the time when capitalism was forced to meet the demands of an increasingly confident and active proletariat.13placeholder As well as a highlighting of the examples where contemporary modernisms reveal themselves, the litmus test for modernism should always depend upon the material conditions of its production.
The reason that social democracy should be abandoned by the left as a viable political project is because it will no longer work. To the extent that it did it only provided a degree of social protection to some, usually in return of a lifetime trapped in the Spectacle, all the while reinforcing capitalism’s grip on reality. But there were gaps and impasses in this settlement that proved generative for modernist cultures such as those found in popular music, public broadcasting and public architecture. Gaps and impasses that are significantly smaller today. Just try being a writer or artist without the luck of a rich family! It’s all very well if they get to practice modernism, but what about us?
But Fisher’s hauntology is not about a return to social democracy, nor is it about the depressive/nihilistic acceptance of capitalism and its cultural logic. It is about remembering and mourning the loss of a ‘virtual trajectory’ (not an ‘object’) that was cut short.14placeholder A pluralistic strand of cultural production that spoke to a world beyond bourgeois confinement in capitalist social relations.
We might wish to conjure up all the hope we can about how the future has already arrived. But it won’t be a reality unless the material conditions of the 99% change through our sustained and organised struggle. Let us be confident instead of hopeful about the future that is ours to make. Used the right way, the ghosts that haunt us may offer us ways through.
Works Cited
Matt Bluemink, The Future is Not Lost: On Music, Technology & The Creation of New Worlds, Becoming Press, 2026.
Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon, Verso, 2018.
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Zero Books, 2014.
Mark Fisher, ‘Terminator vs Avatar’ in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic Media, 2014.
Nancy Fraser, ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’ in New Left Review, 2016, https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii100/articles/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips, Penguin Classics, 2006.
Fredric Jameson. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, 1982, https://archive.org/details/jameson-friedric-postmodernism-and-consumer-society/mode/2up
Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, Faber and Faber, 2011.
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, Penguin Books, 2006.
Bluemink, The Future is Not Lost, 40.
Bluemink, The Future is Not Lost, 23.
Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, 5. (https://archive.org/details/jameson-friedric-postmodernism-and-consumer-society/mode/2up)
Fisher, ‘Terminator vs Avatar’, 344.
Bluemink, The Future is Not Lost, 41.
See Reynolds, Retromania.
See Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’.
Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 26.
Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 27.
See Dean, The Communist Horizon.
If Jane Austen is, and I do not think she gets nearly enough credit for this, the inventor of the modern novel and through it the most astute articulator of bourgeois subjectivity as it consolidates itself, then Virginia Woolf’s high modernist experimental novel marks both their terminal points.
Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, p. 1.
For a compelling insight into the way capitalism adjusts itself according to the specific set of contradictions it faces at a given point in history, see Fraser, ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’.
Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 22.