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

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT

GHOSTS OF MY LIFE

After the brilliance of Capitalist Realism, Ghosts Of My Life confirms Mark Fishers 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 analyst 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 Sheepshagger

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 Fishers work are its lucidity, reflecting the urgency of his commitment to communicating ideas; his high expectations of popular arts 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

Praise for Capitalist Realism

Lets not beat around the bush: Fishers compulsively readable book is simply the best diagnosis of our predicament that we have! Through examples from daily life and popular culture, but without sacrificing theoretical stringency, he provides a ruthless portrait of our ideological misery. Although the book is written from a radically Left perspective, Fisher offers no easy solutions. Capitalist Realism is a sobering call for patient theoretical and political work. It enables us to breathe freely in our sticky atmosphere.

Slavoj iek

What happened to our future? Mark Fisher is a master cultural diagnostician, and in Capitalist Realism he surveys the symptoms of our current cultural malaise. We live in a world in which we have been told, again and again, that There Is No Alternative. The harsh demands of the just-in-time marketplace have drained us of all hope and all belief. Living in an endless Eternal Now, we no longer seem able to imagine a future that might be different from the present. This book offers a brilliant analysis of the pervasive cynicism in which we seem to be mired, and even holds out the prospect of an antidote.

Steven Shaviro

Finally, an analysis of contemporary capitalism that combines rigorous cultural analysis with unflinching political critique. Illustrating the deleterious effects of business ontology on education and market Stalinism in public life, Fisher lays bare the new cultural logic of capital. A provocative and necessary read, especially for anyone wanting to talk seriously about the politics of education today.

Sarah Amsler

First published by Zero Books, 2014

Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,

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For distributor details and how to order please visit the Ordering section on our website.

Text copyright: Mark Fisher 2013

ISBN: 978 1 78099 226 6

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Mark Fisher as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design: Stuart Davies

Cover photograph by Chris Heppell

Illustrations by Laura Oldfield Ford

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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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.

Many of the ideas in Ghosts Of My Life were first auditioned on my blog, k-punk. Im grateful to the k-punk readers who responded to the ideas there and helped them to propagate. Im 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 manuscript. Thanks, therefore, to Tariq Goddard 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 illustrate the text, Chris Heppell for the cover photograph, and Rob White for his customarily insightful and incisive comments.

Lately Ive been feeling like Guy Pearce in
Memento
-Drake

Theres 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 caf. 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 its forever. She and her companion then disappear, leaving spectral outlines, then nothingness. Sapphire and Steel panic. They rifle through the few objects in the caf, 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 caf, it seems, is some kind of capsule floating in deep space.

Watching this extraordinary final sequence now, the juxtaposition of the caf with the cosmos is likely to put in mind some combination of Edward Hopper and Ren 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 re-watching. In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost.