As the late Mark Fisher made his remarks (now a decade ago) concerning the slow decline of our western culture, the world was already in a steep decline. His examples were from music, when he pointed out the fact that very little had changed since the explosion of rock'n'roll in the seventies. His eye was especially focused on punk-rock, a genre which acted as a rebellious outlet for the underclass; a genre that was well-known for its raucasious pushing of boundaries - until, it too, got consumed by the ever-enroaching machine of capitalism, slowly turning this authentic expression of anger and rage into a parody of itself, until there was nothing left but a husk, a smouldering ember of the flame of youthful vigour.
Now, hauntology, as a term, refers to the phenomenon of "culture stalling" of which the field of music is only a singular example. This halting of progression can be witnessed in numerous parts of the western culture, coincidencing with various degenerating tendencies of the contemporary culture-war. One can not help but feel the sense that "once there was hope for the future" or "in the past, there seemed to have been a future" - future that is now lost. What was that future, exactly, and what precisely has been lost? This has been my point of fascination for the past few months. In my observation, it is evident that the phenomenology of hauntology is correct - that is (in other words), the remarks of late Mark Fisher are accurate. We are in a kind of "stalemate of cultural development", and have been so for decades now. Fischer claims that the turning point was in the nineties, with the downfall of musical culture, but for all we know it could've started earlier. The exact point does not matter - instead, what matters is the factuality of it. Numerous examples, the overly-prevalent longing for nostalgia as a prime one, are reminders of that. All the re-hashes, re-imagenings, re-visitations of the past (mostly eighties) show us that the current cultural zeitgeist of 2020's is unable to produce anything new and forward-looking. Instead, the effort is in the attempt of re-purposing the past, and with it, the hope of re-vitalization of the present is conjured forth. Unfortunately such conjuring is impossible, for the past has already, well, passed. One can go back, but not all the way back, as one great musician once remarked. In the same sense, as an example, one can revisit his or her old hometown as an adult, but it will not be the same, even if nothing has changed. Even if, via some miracle, the whole town had been flash-frozen in time, the person himself has been inevitably altered by all kinds of life-experiences, and thus, the past - the true past - cannot be brought back. This holds true all the same in small scales (the invidual), as for larger ones (the whole of culture). This is what late Mark Fisher correctly observed - and his observations are, by now, a decade old, most of his books having been published around the turn of the first decade of this millenium. Very little has changed since then in my view... or to be more precise, his words have only been proven truer than what they were back then, ten years ago - a time that feels so distant, yet so close. Welcome to a time that refuses to change.
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A.K
Gothic fiction novelist Archives
July 2023
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