You have said that Ghosts Of My Life and your last book, Capitalist Realism, are two sides of the same project, which is: “revealing the inherent negativity of the times in which we live.” Does the new book compliment the last one, or take it as a point of departure and move forward?
Do you miss the future? Mark Fisher interviewed
By Andrew Broaks
crackmagazine.net
In 2002, on the band’s debut single Losing My Edge, LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy sang of “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s”. With that line he playfully skewered the Brooklynite hipsters in “little jackets” whose instinct to look back to pop’s golden past, instead of forward, exemplified a creeping revivalism and dearth of innovation. As electronic music stumbled into the background to become the banal Eurodance backing track for the noughties pop star, or dived underground to simmer (dubstep/grime), rock went retro with the garage-rock/post-punk revival.
And so it continues. Retromania is everywhere, and like the ouroboros choking on its own tail the recent past is continually being regurgitated.
But don’t blame the hipsters.
For author, critic and theorist Mark Fisher, the absence of a culture that can be clearly identified as belonging to the 21st century is best examined in tandem with the major political shifts which began in the 1980s. In his last book, Capitalist Realism, Fisher argued that the limiting horizons set by neoliberal society mean it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and as our consciousness has been limited by this capitalist realism, the possibility of projecting new futures has diminished. In his latest book, Ghosts Of My Life, Fisher argues that cultural time has stalled and we’ve become increasingly incapable of producing the ‘new’, the ‘now’ and postulating the ‘next’. At the end of history, all that’s left is an endless return of dead forms and failed futures, haunting us from a grave we keep digging up.
What follows is a conversation with Mark about music, politics and the progressive possibilities of a blank future.
A lot of Ghosts Of My Life was written at the same time or before Capitalist Realism, so it’s definitely not taking it as a starting point. On the most simple level, there’s barely any music discussed in Capitalist Realism, whereas there’s a lot of music discussed in Ghosts Of My Life. Music is the site where the major symptoms of cultural malaise can be detected I think. Capitalist Realism is about what it’s like to live now, to live with fully naturalised neoliberalism; then Ghosts Of My Life is about the futures that were lost in order for that capitalist realist takeover to happen.
Are you trying to pin down the nostalgic quality of the times?
Yeah, but it’s the formal nostalgia of the current moment rather than the psychological nostalgia per se. Well, it’s both in some sense, but I think more problematic is the nostalgia of form, you know, where things are repeated but in an unacknowledged way, and the increasing naturalisation of pastiche. It’s prescient that in his ’80s texts Frederic Jamieson talked about the increasing prevalence of pastiche, but in those early days of what we then called postmodernism pastiche was still noticeable as a style, the quotation marks were still around things. Whereas now, the quotation marks have disappeared. Appropriation is no longer signalled, it’s just assumed I think. So it’s nostalgic compared to what? Given that there is nothing that marks out 21st century culture as belonging to the 21st century.
You talk about the lack of “future shock” in popular music and discuss the music of Arctic Monkeys; specifically the fact that they are not positioned as a retro group. Could you expand on the concept of “future shock” and the significance of retro?
The thing about retro is very interesting because there have been retro groups for a long time, certainly at least as far back as the early ’70s, but the thing is at least then they were positioned as retro. Whereas something like the Arctic Monkeys, there is no relation to historicity. They’re clearly a retro group, but the category of retro doesn’t make any sense anymore because it’s retro compared to what? And yeah, I think that sense of future shock is what has disappeared, which was in retrospect a very rapid turnover of styles one was accustomed to. I suppose coming to musical consciousness at the end of post-punk, when there was a more or less explicit intolerance towards the recent past, never mind the deep past of cultural time, that was what created my expectations. And when that [post-punk] played out, other areas of music took over, most notably jungle, which when you heard it you thought, “I’ve never heard anything like this.” That’s the simple sense of future shock. Of course, it’s not that things really emerge ex nihilo and you can’t then retrospectively construct the elements that went into this new synthesis. But nevertheless, new syntheses were continually being produced, and I think reliably up until, not quite as punctual as the year 2000, but up until 2003 we could still keep hearing new stuff and keep expecting it. Since then we’ve got increasingly accustomed to the idea that we wont really hear anything new again. That’s what I mean by the underlying, inherent negativity. The negativity is there in our expectations whether we admit to it or not.