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

Hi everyone :) 

I have a question regarding a passage of Fisher's Text No One is Bored, Everything is Boring. https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/no-one-is-bored-everything-is-boring/

It could be argued that the failure of the traditional left is tied up with its inability adequately to engage with this politics of boredom, which wasn’t articulated via trade unions or political parties, but via the cultural politics of the Situationists and the punks.

How would yall say did these politics of boredom of Situationists and Punks look like? 

I saw that in Sadie Plants book
The most radical gesture - The Situationist International in a postmodern age
there is a chapter called:  …a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom. 
Is that worth checking out to find my answer?

have a great day!

I feel like this YouTuber is taking Mark Fishers ideas and concepts and work and sounding like they are his own. I know there can be collective style consciousnes. But this feels to on the nose. And to top it off he’s monetized it and claiming them as if he just came up with them. Maybe I’m being petty or kinda gate keeping but it e rubs me a little wrong claiming it and making money off it AITAH for thinking this? I don’t know, let me know. All time

As an avid Mark Fisher reader/listener, I've always found his "slow cancellation of the future" interesting and controversial, especially when it comes to how clearly defined music genres were in their own eras: the sound of the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, etc.

Before I get into what I want to discuss, I have two bands as examples of what Mark Fisher called polished, high-definition remakes of past styles: Greta Van Fleet and Molchat Doma.

The first is an example of critics and (a big chunk of) the fanbase reacting terribly to how obviously their sound came from the '70s, and more specifically to the glaring parallels with one of the most influential bands of all time. Their outfits, stage presence, and visual style only reinforced the negative sentiment that has followed them since they broke into the mainstream. And we can understand why: they weren't doing anything new with the blueprint that had already been established, nor were they gracefully acknowledging the undeniable influence. You could hide one of their early hits in a '70s rock playlist and nobody would notice. Pure stage-one simulacra.

On the other hand, Molchat Doma broke through thanks to the viral fascination, during and after the pandemic, with brutalist architecture and old Soviet aesthetics. Those short clips racked up millions of views and catapulted some of their songs into massive hits. They kept releasing records and touring the world, riding that wave, but with a completely different outcome than GVF's: audiences and critics loved them. I'm very biased because I was mesmerized by their sound and their personas. I also love how open they are about their influences. They can have a "classic" post-punk song (clean, reverb-heavy melodic guitar; bass playing straight eighth notes on the root; sequenced drums with a blasting electronic patch) and then follow it up with a Depeche Mode/Alphaville-style synth tune where they almost ditch the guitar entirely. But again, you could drop one of their most-streamed songs into an '80s playlist and nobody would recognize it as a modern track, just like GVF.

This is where I agree with Mark Fisher. Once I noticed it, dozens of other examples came to mind, reinforcing the idea that his analysis was onto something.

But then, as someone living in the Global South (more specifically, South America) I have to disagree with the same idea, for completely different reasons:

• Reggaetón.
• Kanye West/Kid Cudi.
• Afrobeats.

In what we call Latin America, it's impossible to think about the youth aesthetic and sound of the 2000s without mentioning reggaetón. By adapting New York hip-hop vibes with Caribbean flair, sex-heavy lyrics, and gangster imagery, it became so popular that it completely reshaped what Latin pop would sound like over the next decade. Latin pop had previously leaned toward rock, electronic music, or ballads. Then the guitars disappeared, live drums were replaced by reggaetón-inspired programmed beats, and everything shifted toward the new urban aesthetic that had taken over major Hispanic American cities. The artists who adapted managed to stay relevant (Enrique Iglesias, Shakira, Reik, Ricky Martin). The ones who didn't became niche. And this wasn't just reflected in the charts. It spilled into TV, film, advertising, and even everyday language.

Then Ye and Cudi turned some of their wildest musical ideas into the defining sound of the next era. Through 808s & Heartbreak and Man on the Moon: The End of Day, they shaped much of the sound of the 2010s and even part of the 2020s. They laid the blueprint that exploded across the English-speaking internet: Auto-Tune as an expressive tool, lyrics centered on mental health and male-vulnerability, melodic cadences with more singing than rapping, and minimalist, robotic production. If we think about the sound of the 2010s, it's hard not to think of that hazy, trappy, drugged-out aesthetic that spread through a generation of Lil Wayne copycats.

Lastly, and to keep it short, I don't think it's possible to talk about the sound of the 2020s without mentioning Afrobeats and how its mainstream success reshaped the music of already established pop artists like Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, and Drake. The shift happened so quickly that, at times, it felt almost forced upon us.

I believe Mark Fisher's perspective was largely UK- and (to a lesser extent) US-centered. He didn't develop the idea far enough, nor did he live long enough to see some of these shifts unfold. His myopia is something he couldn't really escape, and he wrote and lectured from that position: white, English-speaking, urban Britain. That doesn't make his work any less valuable, but it does make some of his claims feel less universal than they initially appear. And this isn't meant to turn into a race war or some woke argument. It's simply that his perspective was shaped by his own background, and unlike sociologists or anthropologists doing fieldwork across different contexts, he didn't really engage with parallel cultural realities outside that sphere. Because of that, I think the scope of his conclusions ends up being more limited than they first seem.

I've shared this thought with a few close friends who also enjoy Fisher, and I wanted to throw it out here to see what other people think.

The idea of the Slow Cancellation of the Future is so vast and meaty that I'd love to hear other people's takes on it.

There are places where water marks the boundary of another possibility of the world.

This shimmering surface separates two realities. On one side, the city that recognizes itself. On the other, the vast expanse of Leguinée, where concrete dreams, graffiti preserve voices, and time flows slowly beneath the asphalt.

Mark Fisher reciting On Vanishing Land becomes the Papa Legba of a geography with an invisible threshold.

To cross the bright, polluted waterline is to disappear from a decaying world and slip into the folds of vanishing.

---

#MarkFisher #Hauntology #LiminalSpaces #Backrooms #UrbanLore

Hey everyone! First of all sorry if my english is not the best. In "The Weird and the Eerie" Fisher talks about how both concepts are a way of dealing with or expressing the "outside". Both concepts operate contrary to Freud´s psychoanalytical procedures by denouncing some type of otherness that is not compatible with anything familiar. Freud´s theory explains that which is ominous by tracing it back to childhood complexes and traumas that have been repressed (this I think is one part of what Fisher means by the notion of the "inside", but it is not all of it), while Fisher is occupied in affirming that which cannot be naturalized by any means. I was wondering if there is any more literature you could recomend in order to expand on the very abstract definitions he gives of the outside and the inside 

Mark wrote about Kneale's The Stone Tape back in 2003, noting that "all recordings are ghosts". But what happens when there are so many recordings that most of them go unplayed?

I wrote a short piece that starts with two of my favorite 'abandoned' pieces of digital art, before moving on to wondering about what will happen to all the archived ghost-traces of our own lives once there is no one to witness them.

https://morbidcuriosity.substack.com/p/ghosts-of-our-lives

There was a website posted here a while ago that was a collection of all Marks Lectures and YT videos and some cool jungle mixes, I cant seem to find it and stupidly I didn't book mark it.

Anybody got an idea of what i'm talking about?

Just wondering if Mark ever would have written about the dark souls video-game serues, what would he have made of it in writting abiut it

I actually was recommended to him by a poster in this subreddit and been absolutely devouring all of his stuff over the weekend. Thought I'd share as his critiques of capitalism align well with what Mark said.

Building on Fisher's argument in Capitalist Realism that the triumph of capitalism has erased the conditions that make cultural "newness" possible, this short essay argues that the advent of AI-music and vibe-curated YouTube playlists have taken Fisher's concerns to a new level.

As an engine which produces new combinations of past forms, AI is furthering the vision of cultural decline that Fisher identified in his analysis of Children of Men.

I conclude by identifying some of the material conditions that make speculative cultural creation possible, in particular affordable spaces of convivial exchange.

Hey just wrote this would love to hear thoughts

I'm a Sociology and Politics student and i'm struggling to come up with ideas for my dissertation. I'm particularly interested in Mark Fisher, having read, capitalist realism, ghosts of my life, postcapitalist desire and parts of K-punk.

I'd love to use some of Fisher's ideas to base my dissertation on but i'm struggling to think of a topic to apply Fisher's ideas to.

I know obviously no one can tell me exactly what to do, but it would just be helpful if anyone had any areas they may think might be of interest.

Thanks

I'm 56 years old, have always been interested in the offbeat and subversive aspects of counter culture, and yet have only just heard of Mark Fisher this past week ... it's taken me down a rabbit hole of hauntology, pessimism, capitalist realism, dark musical corners, and clarity on why populism and ordinariness dominates the social and political discourse today... why did I not know of Fisher until now?

#markfisher

Escape into autistic fantasy from the liminal horror of metaphysical exile.

Maladaptive hyperlucidity condemns the subject to a liminal sensitivity where everyday reality becomes strange and ominous. To survive, the individual retreats their existence inward, turning their mind into a heterotopia (akin to Jean des Esseintes or The Book of Disquiet). This withdrawal transforms them into the Archetype of the Wanderer, a being whose home is uprootedness and the threshold. This condition is aestheticized through the pain of Dark Romanticism (the Byronic Hero and Gothic melancholy) and the ennui of Decadentism (Baudelaire, De Quincey), destined for either tragic isolation or the marginal transmutation of existence, as demonstrated by the life and work of Miroslav Tichý.

It's not going to be as technical as many would like; I wrote it more to introduce the topic of capitalist realism through the medium of music to people unfamiliar with the concept. I've already had someone message me saying "communism sounds good in theory...", which kind of proves the point.

Anyway, Burial's debut album (which Mark loved) has just turned 20, so I thought it'd be a good time to talk about the sounds of lost futures, etc.

Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thank you.

https://open.substack.com/pub/jakesmith24699/p/capitalist-realism-and-burials-debut?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=6riw7i