“ …Another Thought experiment posits the concept of Angels as a connection between things -. An entity that only exists between. A sort of web or connection… The Gnostics thought that the world was… a murky, muddy mire in which fallen Angels… are trapped.”

Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life is a haunted book. Internally, Ghosts of My Life is obsessed with haunting. The theme of Haunotolgy — “the agency of the virtual” — is meticulously traced through the nooks and crannies of popular culture. In each essay, he returns to a scenes that haunts his work; and what he finds is a near-universal sense of dread that we are “living after the gild rush.” the neoliberal regime defeated the imagined futures of post-war social democracy and counter culture; now, we are stuck a timeless present whose forward motion has been stalled by the weight of what is no longer and not yet. Externally, the book is haunted by its own lost future. There is a real sense in which Fisher’s work feels forever incomplete: in the last essay’s gesture to a post-humanist future, the absence of Acid Communism (which he died before completing) is made present. 

I discovered Mark Fisher when I stumbled into Capitalist Realism at 15 — only a few years after his death. Though many of the book’s references (and much of its nuance) went over my small head, it nonetheless reshaped my understanding of the world and gave direction to my disaffection. Since then, I have been an avid fan of K-Punk; getting around to reading Ghosts of My Life has convinced me to start a blog of my own. 

A recurring motif in Ghosts of My Life is the image of the Medium; the artist who is (dis)possessed by people and things out of time. From Ian Curtis’s entranced stage presence, to Burial’s sound which “does not come from anything with a face,” to Marc Richter’s desire to hear objects sing for themselves, Fisher is fascinated by those who can channel the echoes of the past. This channeling is different from the slavish necromancy of past forms (reboots, remakes, remasters; crystal Pepsi is back on shelves near you!) that suffocate much of the pop-cultural landscape: where the endless re-rendering of past images in higher and higher definition denies the present a sense of identity, he finds value in the fuzzy crackling that surrounds the half-remembered or dreamed image. Through this channeling of echoed forms and voices, boundaries of selfhood collapse as we realize that “our misery, like our dreams, our cars and our refrigerators, is in fact the work of many anonymous hands.” 

I find Fisher’s essay on Christopher Nolan to be one of the most compelling in the book. In the sanitized dream-spaces of Inception, he sees an unconscious entirely dominated by globalized capital: “Dreams have ceased to be the space where private pyschopathologies are worked through and have become the scenes where competing corporate interests play out their banal struggles.” In opposition to the Dom Cobb’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) cookie-cutter grief, which ostensibly drives the interpersonal conflict of the film, Fisher is interested in “[an] impasses of a culture in which business has closed down any possibility of an outside.” Though Cobb believes himself to be the master of his own house (his ego, his self), the film depicts the subconscious in the form of familiar and glossy action movie sets. The true horror of Cobb’s predicament is that the attempt to escape a global sense of grief (the grieving of futures lost) through inward reflection reveals an inner-world that is entirely manufactured by forces beyond oneself. 

Self-help and inward reflection is difficult when our misery is the work of anonymous hands. The Medium radically rejects individuation: at their most attuned, it is clear that their soul is nothing more than a collection of ghosts. Fisher himself was one of those special mediums — his Angels are most vivid when he is speaking through the words of others. 

He is also one of the spirits that will haunt this blog. As I take up the task of navigating the lost present and straining my ears to hear the echoes of better futures, I know I am not working alone.