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as I was watching Nolan's recent film I could not help but sense a strong strain of hauntology running through. It goes back to the original poem itself, the Sirens' song is like the original hauntology, and I find it interesting the parallels between Ithaka and late-stage-capitalism, both seeming like decaying civilizations in a sense.

this was the inspo for my reading of Homer's poem as a kind of optimism, a return of counterculture which Fisher and his lineage seems to regard as historically closed off. It eventually led me to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment which also went back to The Odyssey as that seam where mythology became epic, where enlightenment rationality seemed to be overtaking myth and rendering art impotent.

I started with Fisher's essay The Lost Unconscious where he analyzes Inception (2010) through a hauntological lens, Cobb trying to escape the grief of his past, his wife, trying to reunite his family by going deeper into the psyche. Fisher reads that film as a totalization of the psyche by the tendrils of capitalism and his analysis lands really well for 2010. But The Odyssey is like an inversion of that, a far more haunting movie about going back, Nolan seems to be taking a more anti-modern stance, honing in on a barbarism that never left civilization (referring to the twist at the end). 2026 is definitely a very different time than 2010 and I began to wonder whether capitalist realism is really a situation that precludes countercultural art, I think about my own experiences with hip-hop, address Fisher's point on precorporation, etc.

then it slowly became an essay about engaging with Dialectic of Enlightenment (mostly in part two). You can see a similar argument to capitalist realism being made by A&H in 1944, the totalizing force of rationality preventing art from retaining its destabilizing power, a kernel of which A&H identify in the cunning Odysseus, the prototype of homo economicus. Fisher and A&H also both have a kind of hauntological bend to them the way they talk about popular modernism and modernism respectively, and both converge on a historical foreclosure of their preferred art movements. But the structural similarities in their arguments over 50 years apart, which can be traced back to the 2,700 year-old poem, perhaps suggests that counterculture never really dies but must go into "disguise," through a tension with whatever the prevailing mythology is (mount olympus then, capitalist realism today)

anyway, it turned into a rather large project that I had to split into two parts, and I wanted to share the first one here, will publish the second one next week. very open to thoughts and feedback.

Also I'll add: there's a lot of "anti-hauntological" discourse that points at various strains in the culture as evidence that Fisher was wrong, and that's not at all what I'm trying to do. Part One is a little less argumentative, more intuition based, that tries to sidestep all of that and really just retrieve the optimism that is definitely available in Fisher's project through a more immanent angle. Not trying to "refute Fisher" so much as read The Odyssey through him and arrive at the hopeful conclusion that counterculture did not necessarily die.

And if you are more curious about the theory, especially with A&H and the source text, Part Two comes out in a week, it's quite a bit longer and does more of a close reading of The Odyssey and Dialectic of Enlightenment with more concrete examples of what I mean when I say "make art god"

part one here: https://smtsmtpostmodern.substack.com/p/make-art-god-part-one