I think of Mark Fisher as something like the Prometheus of critical theory. He absconds with academia's niche ideas and repackages them with characteristic clarity and humanity. And for all this he never cheapens the ideas that he talks about, he only consolidates, enriches, and edifies them.

Capitalist Realism took its title and central arguments from Frederic Jameson, the recently passed titan of postmodern thought. Ghosts of My Life repurposed Derrida's notion of "hauntology" within the framework of Fisher's own interactions with media and our modern capitalist landscape. Fisher's poignant and exceedingly human analysis makes these abstract concepts more approachable. He takes a crack of lightning and gives us a torch.

In his final posthumously-published work Fisher sets his eyes on an ambitious Olympian flame: modern philosophy's obsession with horror.

In particular he highlights the growing significance of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and how the ideas therein have impacted modern thought. He argues (as Lovecraft himself and many before and after him have) that Lovecraft presents a new concept that had been only marginally appeared within literature before his time. "The weird", as it is termed, is the idea that large unknowable things sit just outside the realm of our perceptual world--that the void beyond our reach is filled with an exorbitant presence.

Here's his fun quote on it:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

This idea has run a curious thread through the history of philosophy that has recently started to become unwound and inspected through the lens of Lovecraft's oeuvre. Kant gave us the idea of the /noumena/, that which resides outside of the knowable yet entices us with its impending and impossible presence. More recently Nick Land and the CCRU have explicitly weaved the idea of the /noumena/ together with the tentacular weird fiction of Lovecraft. Given Fisher's involvement with the CCRU, this is likely where he was exposed to the strange cultural significance of the weird. Perhaps the best testament to the difficulty of grappling with these ideas is that Fisher wouldn't wait almost twenty years after the heyday of the CCRU to publish his thoughts on the weird. Ten years after his self-hosted conference, "Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Theory".

It's almost trite at this point to reference the philosophical importance of the weird. And this is in large part to thinkers like Fisher midwifing the idea of the weird into the cultural zeitgeist. So many people writing in the post-CCRU world have bumped into the significance of the oozing tentacular void that it became the central pillar for Urbanomic's fourth installment in their journal Collapse.

What makes Fisher's contribution to the discourse unique is his notion of "the eerie". The eerie is defined in this book as "either the failure of absence or the failure of presence" i.e., something being [there] when nothing should be [there] or nothing being [there] when something should be [there]. From my read this definition includes the concept of the weird. The weird represents an impending presence where there should be only an abyss. The weird is a failure of absence. But then what about the failure of presence? If the weird is encroaching into our lives more and more fabulously all the time in this post-WWII post-Atomic post-Lovecraft age, then where is the analogous nothing-where-there-should-be-something?

Well, it's all around us. Everyday we walk through a manufactured wasteland of the eerie. Unnatural desires architected from outside of us create a permanent sense within us of an eerie absence. Fisher alludes to Freud's concept of /unheimlich/ to help with this point. The term is often translated to "uncanny" or "unhomely". Freud understood our sense of the eerie as a strangeness of the ordinary specifically originating from a thread to our superego. And what is the modern condition more succinctly than a constant bombardment on our superego in an attempt to generate desire?

This idea of the strangeness of the ordinary frameworks our entire haunted world, not just ourselves as individuals. We live among the specters of destroyed alternate realities as much as we live among the specters of alternate possible selves. We feel the eeriness of our empty unfulfilled desires.

How strange and how fitting that the final eerie absence is that of Fisher himself?

mickey

mickey

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