Mark Fisher

Retracing the steps of London's history through the lenses and medium of its body of waters -  this paper investigate the roles of waterways, canals and docklands as essential aspects of the making for the city we know now. Through artist intervention examples, fictional narrative, discourses around political philosophy and capitalism, the paper aim to give a better understanding of how the current system influences our life in the city and our attitude towards it. While getting closer to the present, it also questions the role of citizenship and the urge in activating public spaces connected to the element of water. Almost a manifesto, the paper contain a suggestion for a performative civil disobedience that can create the space to imagine an alternative to the seemingly inescapable passivity of the 'flaneur'.

Hauntology is a trend in music, and more broadly in culture, defined by Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and Adam Harper. It is linked with who are artists interested in exploring memory and its close connections with the transmission of media (hence its frequent references to radio and television). This paper is an attempt to summarize the phenomenon in the form of an alphabetic breakdown, taking into account both the main inspirations behind the movement and profiles of the artists in it.

This essay proposes a cybernetic conception of the human body and uses the System Theory to offer a perspective of the body as a sympoietic system. A sympoietic system develops itself through interactions with other systems. The body is constantly in relation with objects, technological devices, machines, institutions, etc., that expand or reduce its capacity of action. This essay thinks the problem of freedom in the context where life is each day further connected in networks.

https://non-milleplateaux.de/a-cybernetic-conception-of-intelligence/

An inner link has always connected the artistic avant-garde with acts of insurgency carried out by socially disenfranchised populations insofar as both embrace the possibility of an emancipated future that is radically at odds with the present (picture Gustave Courbet
helping to topple the Vendome Column in
1871), except something about such historical repetition and reenactment at this time  –a moment best described as an uncanny present: a present unfamiliar in its very presentness (Rebecca Bryant)– cries out for something like verification. The essay (published in ASAP Journal 3.2 2018) asks is such a thing as proof of authenticity even possible?

Arthouse Tacheles, Kyoto School and Chaos Theory ...

Presented at the conference Indeterminate Futures / The Future of Indeterminacy, University of Dundee (UK), 13 – 15 November 2020; published 2 November 2021: https://queenmobs.com/2021/11/how-long-is-now/

The future is no longer seen as open. But before aligning ourselves to the mantra of the “slow cancellation of the future” (Mark Fisher) we should firstly have a closer look at the present, now: for if we can show that the present is indeterminate, it will be a simple task to show that the future is indeterminate as well.

The now is both a particular now – our contemporary present – and each now throughout history: the present now is thus unique. Unlike the future and the past, the now may not be reduced to statistics, probability or algorithms: according to a Sufi’s saying it is the sword that cuts time into two. To counter the “slow cancellation of the future” we thus must become aware that the doctrine of determinism merely holds for the past. Our political and artistic practice may be wholly unpredictable if we literally engage with autopoiesis, dynamic systems and feedback loops right at the edge of chaos, thus transferring an originally scientific concept to politics and arts. If understood precisely, the now is able to disrupt the pattern of determinacy through the unpredictable event of chaos. If the present now is open, the future is open too.

Drawing on critic Mark Fisher’s typology of the weird and the eerie (particularly his focus on the eerie as the sensation of nothing where there should be something), as well as Nancy Fraser and Rahael Jaeggi’s critiques of capitalism as an institutionalised social order, this paper uses Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel The Virgin Suicide to take up the significance of place and placelessness in contemporary American culture and literature. Set in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe in the early 1970s, The Virgin Suicides simultaneously disguises and reveals its sense of place, a curious and unstable tension that in turn calls readers’ attention to an entire set of unstable binaries inherent to capitalism as a social order – the separation of economic production from social reproduction, economy from polity, the natural from the human, and exploitation from expropriation. In its eerie interruptions and evocations of suburban decay, The Virgin Suicides offers a way to think about the destabilising effect of attempts to separate production from social reproduction, exploitation from expropriation, and human society from non-human nature, a toolkit that might then be used to think about (for instance) the Flint Water Crisis or the contradictions of an international border-crossing like the Ambassador Bridge.

This is an interview I conducted with the late Mark Fisher, as occasion of the translation and publication of his book, "Capitalism Realism. Is There an Alternative?" into Spanish by Caja Negra Editora. The interview was done by email during the month of July 2016. This is the unpublished original English version of that interview.

Hauntology is a trend in music, and more broadly in culture, defined by Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and Adam Harper. It is linked with who are artists interested in exploring memory and its close connections with the transmission of media (hence its frequent references to radio and television). This paper is an attempt to summarize the phenomenon in the form of an alphabetic breakdown, taking into account both the main inspirations behind the movement and profiles of the artists in it.

An analysis of Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's audio-essay 'On Vanishing Land' (2013), taking up the notion of the "eerie" in it and contrasting it to melancholy.

Originally delivered at 'Five Centuries of Melancholia' conference, University of Queensland Art Museum, 4 September 2014.

This paper reads Joshua Ferris's best-selling 2007 novel Then We Came to the End as an unconventional entry into the canon of 9/11 fiction. The novel, best-known for its extended use of the first-person plural "we" narrator, deploys a number of plot echoes and strategic elisions to draw attention to events that are-nevertheless-left unstated. Drawing on narratology and Freud's sense of the uncanny (particularly critic Mark Fisher's supplemental ideas of the "weird" and "eerie"), this paper connects the use of "we" and narrative absences to larger cultural anxieties around the events of 9/11, ultimately arguing that the novel's attempt to avoid "re-enacting the 'terrorism of spectacle'" (Däwes 3) by foregrounding representational challenges runs into an alternate problem: turning readers away from the genuine historical complexities of those events. The paper closes with a discussion of how other 9/11 novels have navigated this same double-bind.

In this essay I'm looking at three modern concepts and how they provide ways of thinking critically about what is happening around us and how we can apply them in the context of art. The uncanny, the weird and the eerie are all concerned with the mysterious and strange, feelings that are difficult to simply describe. In 1919 Sigmund Freud was perhaps the first to foreground the special nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. Decades later Mark Fisher introduced relatively new ideas on the notions of the weird and the eerie. While "weird" and "eerie" may seem equivalent, they are not. Fisher argues that they are distinctively different and possess their own characters and properties.

This is the intro to The Memeing of Mark Fisher, coming out September 24th 2021.

The Frankfurt School meets Fisher in this critique of capitalism incorporating memes, mental illness and psychedelia into a proposed counterculture.

"Spring 2020 to 2021 was the year that did not take place. We witnessed a depression, not economically speaking, but in the psychological sense: A clinical depression of and by society itself."

This depression was brought about not just by covid isolation, but by the digital economy, fueled by social media and the meme.

In the aftermath this book revisits the main Frankfurt School theorists, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin and Marcuse, who worked in the wake of world war two, during the rise of the culture industry.

In examining their thoughts and drawing parallels with Fisher's Capitalist Realism, The memeing of Mark Fisher aims to render the Frankfurt School as an incisive theoretical toolbox for the post-covid digital age. Taking in the phenomena of QAnon, twitch streaming, and memes it argues that the dichotomy between culture and political praxis is a false one. Finally, as more people have access to the means for theoretical and cultural broadcasting, it is urged that the online left uses that access to build a real life cultural and political movement.

World capitalism in its “age” after the end of history has not abolished the idea of teleological progress, it has only changed its staging ground: progress is translated into space. Time is stripped of its historical dimension and reduced to a sequential marker of dehistoricized space. Although the seemingly eternal presence of the world market knows different local temporalities, these temporalities are always already mapped in spatial terms. If, as Fredric Jameson stated in the early 1990s, the postmodern mode of spatialization is driven by “the will to use and to subject time to the service of space,” today we realize that this postmodern will has created a world after its own image. It seems that the continuum of space and spatialized time has no “outside.” The post-political fantasy of a self-regulating world market bound to perfection, self-improvement, and ecological sustainability operates without a historical horizon. In the deflated space of "capitalist realism" (Mark Fisher), critical theory is invited to choose between either fetishizing the past (this is the terrain of the culture industry of commemoration: the production of memory without history) or abandoning the battlefield of history altogether to engage in more cosmological questions about the impact of an abstract humankind on the planet and the universe (the discourse on the “anthropocene” might be the paradigmatic case). But there is, as I argue in this paper, a third possibility, to reenter the battlefield of history following the theoretical marks left by Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx.

The history of electronic dance music is a long and colourful continuum. Since its inception in the underground house, garage and disco scenes of Chicago and New York, it has developed an ever-increasing matrix of techno-tools and cultural manifestos. It has inspired competing and collaborating worlds of gadgets, gizmos and garments; circuit boards, synthesisers and electronic drum patterns. Rave, its enfant terrible, now stands as a global phenomenon. Born in colloquial terms in the United Kingdom during the Second Summer of Love (1988 – 1989), the cultural significance of rave has oscillated from counter-cultural ekstasis to humdrum corporate leisure-activity. Yet, despite its pre-88 genealogy and current state of techno-globalism, it was specifically the UK Rave scene of the late 80s and early 90s which fuelled the tsunami of electronic dance music that soon swept the world. Attuned to these brief and emphatic years (1988 – 1994), the purpose of this dissertation will be to critically analyse the social and experiential history of UK Rave through the current ecological discourse of Dark Ecology. Published in 2016 by philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology is a bold manifesto for a new form of ecological awareness—or ecognosis—heralded by the urgency of our contemporary geological era – The Anthropocene. Faced with objects so far beyond the limits of human epistemology, the primary task of this new ecognosis is the ontological restructuring of human and non-human relations, or the radicalisation of post-Kantian philosophy toward a weird metaphysical realism. Moving beyond straightforward environmentalism to the corollary proposition of an 'Ecology without Nature', I will look to the work of Morton, supported by further engagement and comparison with the writings Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to argue that the heyday of UK Rave culture is in many aspects better understood through the concept of Dark Ecology: as the dismantling of post-Kantian correlationism and the opening up of human experience to a truly symbiotic ecological awareness. Furthermore, I will argue that the countercultural phenomenon of UK Rave is thus less a question of social escapism and rather a positive drive towards this new ecognosis. A will to both access and be accessed.

This short, co-written essay draws on our (the authors') shared practice of watching BoJack Horseman to discuss BoJack and Diane’s friendship arc across the series -- two characters through whom we mediate and come to understand our own friendship. Reworking Mark Fisher's articulation of hauntology to think the interpersonal, we explore how BoJack and Diane stage a common but difficult to parse experience: how it is sometimes the indeterminacy, not the certainty, of a relationship’s future that sustains it.

In a society on the road to globalization through a neoliberal economic system and pervasive information networks, it seems counterintuitive to propose that an artistic movement can be critical of this situation by using visual elements such as shopping malls and the music aimed to ambient it, muzak. The Internet has not only brought more ways to keep the world interconnected, but also new artistic practices. It is in this world that vaporwave stands out, as it is a musical Internet phenomenon that is closely intertwined with a visual aesthetic.
The aim of this paper is firstly to describe the aesthetics of vaporwave and to apply a media aesthetics methodology to it by analysing the re-contextualization of the music and their visual aesthetics through glitch and remix techniques of what I have called “the dystopian shopping malls”. This then becomes a convergence between music and visual representation of malls, which helps situate this type of musical expression in the field of Media Art.
Under the post-digital critical framework, the second point of the essay provides a critically understanding of what kind of relations between society, cyberspaces, and networks are being produced and represented by Vaporwave, which can also be read as statements against current economic system values and lifestyle. With this in mind, I will deepen the aesthetics aspects of the genre to support my argument that vaporwave is a networked music product haunted by culture references of past representations of the future. Finally, the last segment of this article discusses how this kind of Internet-based communities and artistic expressions can be preserved and documented taking into consideration the characteristics of the movement so that it does not lose fidelity or sense, since vaporwave has many characteristics that must be understood in order to succeed in the preservation of this digital culture.

How to cite:
Zavala Barreda, Karla. (2018, May). Dystopian Shopping Malls: Vaporwave and The Ghosts of The Future. Paper presented at Cool Retro Camp Trash, Aesthetic Concepts in Popular Culture, Freiburg, Freiburg University.

David Lynch’s sonic resonances echo through projects and media. Pulsating room tone, eerie acousmêtre, electronic wash, static drones, thwarted resolutions and remediated retro textures frequently trouble the image, while imploding lip-syncs violently tear sound from sight and disembodied noises lead attention beyond the edge of the screen. In this chapter, I argue that Lynch undoes our traditional understanding of transmedial flow by emphasising moments of audiovisual discontinuity. Significantly, many of Lynch’s soundscapes outstrip their visual containers without linking to anything that supports, explains or bolsters what we are seeing. In fact, audiovisual ruptures and disembodied sounds do not lead to substantiated worlds or knowledge but rather to greater uncertainty, hovering beyond the limit of sight, and reverberating between platforms, worlds and dreams. Here, I suggest that these moments of dissonant sonic disruption operate as audiovisual affect able to signify significant emotional or aesthetic upheaval that manifests transmedially, through and across different, seemingly unrelated, texts. By embracing audio and visual fissures, Lynch’s cross-project transmedia arises through absences and echoes; or what Mark Fischer has described as an “eerie absence”. Building on the idea of the eerie, I trace these moments of audiovisual disruption across Lynch’s films, TV shows, internet projects and music videos in an attempt to understand his undoing of conventional transmedial practice.

Society today is undergoing a series of processes and changes that can be only be described as weird. From the apocalyptic resonance of climate change and the drive to implement increasing powerful technologies into everyday life, to the hyperreality of a political and media landscape beset by chaos, there is the uneasy feeling that society, culture, and even consensual reality is beginning to experience signs of disintegration. What was considered the insanity of the margins is now experienced in the mainstream, and there is a growing feeling of wrongness, that the previous presumptions of the self, other, reality and knowledge are becoming untenable.
This thesis undertakes a detailed examination of the weird and eerie as both an aesthetic register and as a critical tool in analysing the relationship between individuals and an impersonal modern society, where agency and intention is not solely the preserve of the human and there is a feeling not so much of being to act, and being acted upon. Using the definitions and characteristics of the weird and eerie provided by Mark Fisher’s critical text, The Weird and the Eerie, I set the weird and eerie in a historical context specifically regarding both the gothic, weird fiction and with the uncanny, I then analyse the presence of the weird and the eerie present in two cultural phenomena, the online phenomenon of the Slender Man, and J.G. Ballard’s novels Crash (1973) and Concrete Island 1974). By exploring the presence of the weird and eerie in contemporary texts and online communities, I show that they are aesthetic modes that are prevalent in many levels of cultures in society. The weird and eerie I conclude provide the elements in making new conceptual tools for making sense of an increasingly chaotic and inhuman social world.

What does it mean to speak of artistic autonomy at a time when art is fully commercialized and aesthetics has become the guiding principle of economic production and policymaking? This book takes a fresh look at this question by summoning three heroes of the aesthetic revolution to confront the challenges artistic practice faces today. Turning Kant into a campaigner for the Anthropocene, Schiller into a creative entrepreneur and Schelling into a political activist, it lays the groundwork for a critique that identifies the contemporary itself as contemporary art’s greatest challenge. Only by taking up a struggle against the contemporary, it argues, can art reinvent its autonomy and regain its relevance to society.

Amid yet another crisis in the boom and bust cycle of capitalism coupled with the rise of barbarism which was thought to be defeated in the battlefields, it can be said that there is no better time to reflect on the question of why it is that capitalism still maintains such a tight grip on the psyche of the human being. The economic and social problems of the present time, however, are not new. We find ourselves presented with the very same question which has been asked and extensively taken to task by other writers for centuries. This dissertation is therefore no more and no less than another endeavour ‘to relate the current impasse in philosophical thinking to the concrete dilemma of the human outlook for the future’. 

By staging a dialogue between two thinkers, Herbert Marcuse and Mark Fisher, whom, as far as I am aware, have not at the time of writing been put into dialogue by others, I revive a concept which the capitalist administered society has attempted to bury. This is the concept of the negative. As will be made evident in ‘Part I: Capitalist Realism’, the negative brings to the fore the contradictions and alienation which exists within the established order. In so doing, unconcealing the possibilities of liberation contained within the present state of affairs which were hitherto concealed in the process of covering over and absorbing the negative in one-dimensional society and thought. But where the negative regards future possibilities as that which ought to be, post-capitalist realism steps in to declare that this ought is not only a real possibility but more crucially, an absolute necessity. ‘Part II: Post-Capitalist Realism’ will demonstrate that it is by virtue of presupposing the actuality and absolute necessity of these possibilities that post-capitalism realism triumphs over the reign of capitalism realism. And in this triumph, a new found realism proclaims that today no longer is there a viable nor imaginable system except that of post-capitalism.

In the article we propose the theoretical differentiation of three different spectral forms that haunt modern history, two of them – which are better known – concern the temporal tensions between past, present and future, while the third concerns the relation between center and periphery of world-economies. We focus on this third type of phantasmagorical tension in order to explore the conditions for the emergence of modern historical time and for its contemporary exhaustion.

In this intervention, I reflect on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism as a work better known for its title, as a phrase or slogan, than for the substance of the book. While indicative of the success of Fisher’s diagnosis, one borne out through the experience of capitalist crisis and austerity, I want to turn to the problem of the alternative and the future that was a constant concern of Fisher’s writing. In particular, probing the “realism” in “capitalist realism,” I want to consider Fisher’s interest in the breakdown of capitalist realism. This “breakdown” is indicated negatively by psychic suffering and collapse, but also positively by the cultural forms of the weird and eerie as markers of a consciousness beyond “capitalist realism,” the mapping of capitalist crisis, and the futures that might positively emerge through breakdown. At stake in the substance of Fisher’s work, I suggest, lies a class phenomenology concerned with not only grasping the suffering inflicted by capitalist culture, but also the possibilities of a breakdown of realism that would imagine a future oriented to a new collective experience beyond the existing limits of psychic and social formations.

This paper utilises hauntology and cryptonomy, alongside abjection, as lenses for textual narrative analysis of David Lynch's 1977 cult body horror film Eraserhead, his first feature as a writer-director. This investigation will uncover how Lynch formulates a filmic narrative articulating a critique of patriarchy, with an understanding that the concept can be considered a hauntology in itself. I will then proceed to explore how this engagement with hauntology has influenced further works by Lynch himself, and by other cinematic auteurs such as Stanley Kubrick.

Una reseña extendida del segundo y tercer libro de Mark Fisher traducidos al español y publicados al mismo tiempo este tiempo. "Los fantasmas de mi vida" (Caja Negra Editora, 2018) / "Lo raro y lo espeluznante" (Alpha Decay, 2018). Reseña publicada online en El Ministerio. Revista CTXT

The reality that has been presented in rap music and its celebrity culture has always been connected with two extremes: the reality of the " thug " life of the streets on the one hand and with a specific sort of " American Dream " reality that presents climbing from bottom to top on the other hand. This article explores the reasons why trap music, which originated as a type of rap music in the south of the USA, is now with its specific mixture of hedonism and nihilism, darkness and joy, becoming the music of our times. It argues that this is not a coincidence: the twofold reality, the cruel reality of living " in a trap " on the one hand and the idealized, dreamy reality full of gold and diamonds on the other hand, is the main allegory of " real " life in late capitalism. How to get out of the trap? In the article, I investigate some crucial problems of contemporary theory regarding class and racial differences and argue that we can extract far-reaching social, political, and theoretical statements through interpretation of music that is often presented as apolitical, vacant, and of poor quality. Interpretation of contemporary development in pop culture will be combined with readings of theorists such as Foucault, Mbembe, Balibar, Marx, Moretti, and Deleuze and Guattari. I argue that identification with trap music, even if it seems conformist and non-critical, is producing paradoxical minoritarian universalism, that could, if we understand the universalization of a dream of individual success as an implicit request for egalitarian society, present certain emancipatory potential.

Tradução inédita de trechos do volume de Mark Fisher (Ghosts of my life. Writing on depression, hauntology and lost futures. Winchester: Zerobooks, 2014. Parte introdutória, seções 2 a 4). Foi traduzido para o podcast Doenças Tropicais, episódio #08 (anchor.fm/doencastropicais / Aetia.com.br)

"'Ser realista' já significou fazer as pazes com uma realidade experimentada como sólida e imóvel. No realismo capitalista, entretanto, implica que nos subordinemos a uma realidade infinitamente plástica, capaz de se reconfigurar a todo instante [...]" (Realismo capitalista: é mais fácil imaginar o fim do mundo do que o fim do capitalismo? São Paulo: Autonomia Literária, 2020, p. 93.)

In cultural studies, neoliberal capitalism has been critically discussed in connection with a rise of mental illness. Within this discourse, psychology and psychoanalysis are being ambivalently debated as either complicit with the capitalist representational system or as potential tools to critically interrogate it. This paper traces these arguments in publications by writers such as Mark Fisher and Franco Berardi, and examines their relationship to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of schizoanalysis. It re-assesses Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas and concludes with an outline for the complimentary use of psychoanalytic theory and schizoanalytic ideas as a meta-discourse within cultural studies.

Future imaginaries -that go beyond futurisms, the latter being merely accelerated versions of existing technologies- are significant in the sense that they are constitutive of what is deemed imaginable and thinkable at a given moment. They therefore constitute the very
limits of collective imagination. Following Kim Stanley Robinson, I will propose that certain types of science-fiction narratives today act as “realism of our times” as opposed to the dominant capitalist realism (Fisher 2009).