The Weaver Reads reviewed Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher
Goodreads Review of Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
4 stars
It's hard to review this book, and I think it's because I don't share enough of Fisher's cultural references points to evaluate how convinced I am by his analyses.
The introductory chapters on hauntology and lost futures are excellent. They are Mark Fisher engaging with theory and culture in a really thoughtful way, and his conceptualization of hauntology as artifacts (whether lost from the past or still to come from the future) that bear on the present is a powerful one. Ultimately, hauntological artifacts are those that force us to mourn paths that could have been taken but--for some reason or another--we failed to do so. Ostensibly, this could be personal, but Fisher here is largely talking about Western (and mostly Anglophone) societies that took the neoliberal path.
For Fisher, the moment of loss took place in the late 1970s. The shift from 1979 to 1980 was the "moment of …
It's hard to review this book, and I think it's because I don't share enough of Fisher's cultural references points to evaluate how convinced I am by his analyses.
The introductory chapters on hauntology and lost futures are excellent. They are Mark Fisher engaging with theory and culture in a really thoughtful way, and his conceptualization of hauntology as artifacts (whether lost from the past or still to come from the future) that bear on the present is a powerful one. Ultimately, hauntological artifacts are those that force us to mourn paths that could have been taken but--for some reason or another--we failed to do so. Ostensibly, this could be personal, but Fisher here is largely talking about Western (and mostly Anglophone) societies that took the neoliberal path.
For Fisher, the moment of loss took place in the late 1970s. The shift from 1979 to 1980 was the "moment of truth" so to speak: Margaret Thatcher became the British Prime Minister and Ian Curtis of Joy Division hanged himself. The first section of the book deals with the ghosts of the 1970s and the way they haunt the present.
The second section of the book is largely, although not entirely, about music. The death of community after the end of rave, musicians who reflect on the past of what London (above all) could have been, the explosion of upbeat electronic music that we used to distract ourselves from the 2008 financial crisis, and a really incredible chapter on The Shining.
Finally, part three is about "the stain of place." There are some great writings in here, but it struck me as being the less coherent of the sections. Christopher Nolan's Inception and what it tells us about dreams and neoliberalism is here; there's an outstanding analysis Robinson in Ruins, the last of a documentary trilogy about the transformation of the UK in the wake of neoliberalism; and so on.
Most texts here had been written by Fisher before and published in outside sources, so they may be familiar to those who read him before this was published. Moreover, I think one of my challenges with this text is that Fisher draws upon a very different set of cultural references than I am familiar with. This is certainly a British book before any other, and his specific choices of cultural criticism feel generationally-defined. Even so, he does a great job unifying his cultural interests around hauntology and less futures, and the whole text is undergirded by a melancholic atmosphere.
