On Ghosts of My Life

This is a hard book to review, and I think it’s because I don’t share enough of Fisher’s cultural reference points to judge how convinced I am by his readings. The opening chapters, on hauntology and lost futures, are excellent — Fisher engaging theory and culture thoughtfully, and his idea of hauntology as artifacts (lost from the past, or still owed to us from the future) that press on the present is a powerful one. Hauntological artifacts force us to mourn the paths that could have been taken but, for one reason or another, weren’t. That could be personal, but Fisher is mostly talking about Western, largely Anglophone societies that took the neoliberal road.

For him, the moment of loss came in the late 1970s; the turn from 1979 to 1980 was the moment of truth, when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and Ian Curtis of Joy Division hanged himself. The first section is about the ghosts of the 1970s and how they haunt the present. The second is largely, though not entirely, about music — the death of community after rave, musicians reflecting on the London that could have been, the burst of upbeat electronic music we used to distract ourselves from the 2008 crisis, and an incredible chapter on The Shining. The third, “the stain of place,” has some wonderful writing but is the least coherent: Nolan’s Inception and what it says about dreams and neoliberalism, an outstanding reading of Robinson in Ruins (the last of a documentary trilogy on Britain’s neoliberal transformation), and so on.

Most of these pieces were written and published elsewhere before the book, so they may be familiar to anyone who’d read Fisher already. Part of my difficulty is that he draws on a very different set of cultural references than I know; this is a British book before it’s anything else, and its specific choices of cultural criticism feel generationally defined. Even so, he unifies his interests beautifully around hauntology and lost futures, and the whole thing is underwritten by a melancholic atmosphere.