Book cover of Mark Fischer’s book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014).
Book cover of Mark Fischer’s book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014).
Group reading
In this collection of texts, Mark Fisher presents us with a haunted gallery: from the mediumistic music of Joy Division to the spectres drifting through the hauntological productions of The Advisory Circle, from the mesmerising Memento by Christopher Nolan to the unclassifiable Robinson in Ruins by Patrick Keiller — the cultural objects he examines with his singular eye all bear witness to an unsparing verdict on our present: the future has been cancelled.
The traces attached to these ghostly presences, to these elusive absences, play upon unstable memorial phenomena and repetition. And if the idea of the future no longer exists, it is because time itself has become disarticulated, epochs telescoping into one another. We are living through a generalised experience of science fiction: cultural artefacts drift untethered, the simulacrum reigns. We find ourselves on the reverse side of the capitalist realism Fisher explored in his previous work — on the other side of the dream, in a reality that recomposes itself: a present that lasts forever.
A method of collective reading that originated in the workers’ struggle, surveying is a way for several people to discover a book, with a view to its critical appropriation.
Mark Fisher
Mark Fisher (1968–2017), also known by his pseudonym k-punk, was a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London and a keen observer of cultural forms. His work Capitalist Realism brought him to the attention of a wider audience; he also contributed to publications such as Wire, Fact, New Statesman and Sight & Sound.
