How to escape the slow cancellation of the future
Read an excerpt from Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life reviewed by Gerry Hassan below, here.
Every day someone somewhere complains about a rejection. The supposedly ever-present threat of the “breakdown culture,” a malevolent, all-powerful force, is presented to us all as an elemental threat.
It’s almost impossible to avoid celebrities judging how they got “canceled.” Some of these occasions are deeply controversial, involving real injustices and attempts to monitor and control public debate. Others are no more than storms in a teacup.
But many of the causes that have garnered media attention relate to accusations from right-wingers that “the awakened” are the greatest threat to Western civilization that has ever faced — said with a straight face, despite the severity of the climate crisis.
“Cancel Culture” clearly hits a sore spot. It’s also helped by the fact that it’s a memorable sentence. Numerous fault lines have emerged in Western societies regarding how we speak and listen collectively and what words and language we use.
But while that phrase is circulating, there is another kind of annulment that gets little attention and yet informs much of our politics, public debate, and government. It is a widespread feeling that the future, our collective future on this planet, has been postponed – or more specifically, that humanity’s potential to create alternative futures to the present is seriously faltering.
The future postponed
The late theorist Mark Fisher, whose Ghosts of My Life has just been published in a revised edition, wrote of “the slow unraveling of the future” – the collapse of hope that the world could be bettered politically, economically and socially – and the need to resist this trend.
Fisher drew on concepts like “hauntology” to create the idea of a “lost future,” both of which appear in the subtitle of Ghosts of My Life.. These describe the long legacy of a series of once-powerful ideas that helped shape Western societies but are now little more than echoes and clichés. Jacques Derrida’s original idea of ”hauntology” related mainly to the influence of Marxism in the West; Fisher’s analysis is about a much broader interpretation of Western culture and politics.
Fisher’s work is related to that of the critic Simon Reynolds, who writes a pithy epilogue to the current collection. Reynolds has questioned the increasing influence of nostalgia on popular music culture, most notably in his book Retromania.
Nostalgia is increasingly defining the content not only of popular music but of the wider terrain of art, culture and creativity. There is an audible nostalgia for past glory and a belief in earlier golden eras of expression and invention: the 1960s obviously, but now the 1970s and even 1980s.
With that palpable feeling of looking back comes a deep sense of loss and a feeling of lesser worth in the present. Why are Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and the Stones still so important? Fantastic and cheerful as they were, couldn’t it be that a little too much is being invested in Beatles history?
As Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker pointed out, the constant reliving of the 1960s in the here and now makes us “children of the echo,” constantly living in the shadow of that decade’s “big bang,” plagiarizing it to ever-lower earnings: “Britpop.” everyone?
“Where’s the 21st-century Kraftwerk equivalent?” writes Fisher in Ghosts of My Life—a sentiment shared by many of us who grew up listening to pop music as it shattered barriers and created new sounds. Where does the music take us out of the now and outline other identities – even liberations – and the possibilities of a different future?
These shifts relate to the changing contours of social class in post-war Britain. The 1950s and 60s saw increasing opportunities for working class people in employment, life choices and opportunities, and in the world of arts and entertainment. This was a time of new openings in television, theatre, music and the arts and the overthrow of the old stuffy, constrictive attitude of Victorian Britain that still seemed to hold power.
The long tail of this era of British creativity continued as a counter-history to Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s, but slowly disappeared as social mobility collapsed, welfare was withdrawn from the poor and younger, and the forces of privilege regained their position. Alongside the growing power of nostalgia, popular culture became less about a sense of liberation and challenging authority and more about playing it safe.
The band Coldplay isn’t the only culprit here, but they and a slew of painless, privately trained white men became the new mainstream norm, playing music to numb your senses. In “Steal as Much as You Can”, critic Nathalie Olah calls this the “toffification” of culture: the marginalization of the working class and defiant voices. This is a real “breakaway culture” if only we could recognize it.
The suspension of the future is a product of the epic political, economic, and social changes we have witnessed over the past few decades. The emergence and dominance of an unrepentant, turbocharged aggressive capitalism; The rise of a billionaire class and their idolization in the wider culture now seems unstoppable.
“Cut culture”, globalization and the future
Some may think Fisher is exaggerating his thesis; that it is melodramatic to say that the future has been taken from us. But others support his perspective.
In 2004, in Well and Good: How We Feel and Why It Matters, Australian writer Richard Eckersley suggested that the only version of tomorrow on offer is a greater version of today: an accelerated, more materialistic, more prosperous version of the present globalized order . This was effectively telling Westerners, “Don’t worry, the future has already been decided by people with more power and influence than you. You know what is best for you and the planet.”
In today’s grim climate, Eckersley seems overly positive, if anything. Writing this, before the 2008 financial crisis ended the long economic boom, he saw the problem as “linear optimism”: political elites could only promise a bigger, better version of the present. Now, with our ongoing economic and environmental crises, we don’t even have that slim supply. But his broader reasoning agrees with Fisher.
Disappointment, anger and loss shape so much of our politics, government and culture. Nobody really believes that Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or even Keir Starmer have anything original to say or are up to the challenges we face. But where are our viable alternatives at the world system level?
Instead, concepts like “cancel culture” dominate our politics. It is no coincidence that in the current climate it is the ideologically charged right that has developed some of the most effective framings: alongside “cancel culture” are terms such as “culture wars” and “virtue signaling”.
The forces of the right have been on the rise around the world for the last four decades. But while their version of the world once had at least the semblance of a brighter future, it has been blown apart. Everywhere we face new challenges and burdens.
The emergence of concepts such as “cancel culture” is partly a distraction from the abject failure of the right, particularly in the economic dimension. But it is also a belated recognition on the part of the right that the old cultures of authority, deference and control have been steadily disappearing and that new forms of social control and manipulation are needed. The goal is not just to delegitimize new voices, but to keep us from thinking about the big questions and being creative – from imagining a different future.
But that’s only part of the story. We are living through times of epic transformation: of capitalism, technology and climate.
Everywhere there now seems to be resistance and dissatisfaction with the existing global capitalist system – and in Britain against the dominance of right-wing ideas. This can be seen in all sections of society: from the return of workers’ power and striking workers to the collapse of privatization as a rigged energy distribution market impoverishes more than half the population and England’s rivers and seas are filled with crude sewage.
Add to this the widening rifts in the union that makes up the United Kingdom. A new political mood in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales is increasingly centered not on Westminster but on new regional alliances in the islands and beyond. Meanwhile, a destructive British state nationalism projects a mythical version of Ukania that never existed.
None of this would surprise Mark Fisher, who witnessed the first major expressions of these creative currents, new solidarities and emerging new political cultures. But he would also have recognized the dangers of nostalgia in all these strands – labour, opposition to private monopolies in public goods, the Scottish independence movement. We must avoid nostalgia for the civilized capitalist world and for the pre-1979 Britain that was never so compassionate, progressive or liberating.
We must dare to dream. Conceiving and building different futures is central to being human. We must not let the real “breakdown culture” steal our future.
Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher appeared in a new edition by Zero Books
Teaser photo credit: Allegory of Melancholy, c. 1729–40, etching and engraving, sheet dimensions: 42 × 25.7 cm, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City). By Henri Simon Thomassin – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See Open Access Policy for Image and Data Resources, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90497035