This is a transcription (with tracklist) of my contribution to the Repeater Books x The Neon Hospice Hallowe’en marathon. The mix itself should be made available at a later date, but most likely behind a paywall. This transcription below is for Patreons only. Enjoy!
An Introduction to Eerie Aesthetics
[Masters of Psychedelic Ambiance, “Weirdom” from Mu]
[Harmonia & Eno ‘76, “Weird Dream” from Tracks and Traces]
[Grouper, “Second Skin / Zombie Wind” from Way Their Crept]
[Grouper, “Second Wind / Zombie Skin” from Way Their Crept]
Aesthetics is, fundamentally, a discourse of the body. It is a branch of philosophy concerned with sense-perception and sensory judgement. At its most fundamental, aesthetics is standing before a landscape or a painting or listening to a piece of music and asking yourself: How does this make me feel? How do I feel about how this is making me feel? It’s an expression of embodiment and an exploration of what it means to be human.
When Mark Fisher, in his final work The Weird and the Eerie, declares that there “is no inside except as a folding of the outside”, it is likely this meta-sense of the aesthetic that he has in mind. [1] How does the world make me feel? How does that feeling inform how I understand my place in that same world? But also, to think about this more critically, how do I understand what the world is not? How do I understand those parts of the world that are unavailable to me? And how does this lack determine how I approach the world and myself, and also the things that I am not? This folding of world and self, non-world and non-self, is the central paradox of sensory perception that we have long struggled to free ourselves from or even articulate, and it leads to aesthetics becoming entangled with various other philosophical disciplines, such as ontology – the philosophical exploration of what it means to be.
In The Weird and the Eerie and, indeed, in all of his works, through a consistent engagement with pop culture and occulture, Mark Fisher brings all of these concerns to bear on one another. In declaring the inside to be a folding of the outside, just as he had done in his writings on hauntology, Fisher makes aesthetics and ontology reciprocal.
When we think about art today, chances are we find ourselves alienated from this kind of reciprocal experience, because the machinations of art production and its reception are so often obfuscated from the experience art is otherwise said to provide for us. To the casual viewer, modern art might often feel too heavy-handed and preachy or superficial and escapist; in many ways, postmodern art exists in the strange gap between the two. It is often hollow and mundane, yet attached to some grand conceptual position. It can be irritating, for sure, but at its most irritating it mirrors our ideological entrapment under capitalism. Here too, the hollow and the mundane are both emboldened and undermined by lofty ideas. For Fisher, there were good and bad examples of this. As Alex Williams once argued, Fisher’s preoccupation with hauntology was an attempt to excavate a “good” postmodernism.
Personally, when I think of aesthetics today, capitalism is always the elephant in the room. It is that which we have been taught to ignore but which nonetheless drives our tastes and desires. It drives the art market, declaring what is good, and it drives our sensorial sensibilities, fetishizing beauty whilst voiding its apparent relationship to truth. Book after book has been written on the implicit influence of capitalism on not just art but every aspect of our lives, especially those aspects that we think of as being wholly separate from capitalist production. Critiques of capitalism find new relevance in these areas as well. As far as art is concerned, we might note that Karl Marx wrote at length on how capitalist is driven by processes of alienation and abstraction but, in the twenty-first century, we have arguably found abstraction itself abstracted. How else are we supposed to understand the popularity of abstract expressionism in the home décor section of your local IKEA?
When writing The Weird and the Eerie, capitalism was surely on Fisher’s mind too, even if it is less explicitly discussed in his final book than one might otherwise expect. In many ways, we have to uncover the book’s relevance to capitalism for ourselves. This is Fisher at his least didactic. He provides a toolkit, furnished with newly-thought aesthetic categories; it is up to us to consider what to do with them. It is for us to decide how the weird and the eerie might culturally prefigure a new political imaginary – a new psychedelia, perhaps, or even an acid communism, at least one which reaches beyond our libidinal addiction to capitalism’s pleasure principle.
This, of course, complicates Fisher’s conceptions of the weird and the eerie quite a bit. They appear to us as aesthetic categories because, by their very nature, they are sensations – but they are also alienating sensations. So, how do the alienating tendencies of capitalism more broadly affect how we understand this kind of aesthetic experience? After all, the weird and the eerie certainly aren’t new sensations in human history – etymologically, they have been a part of various European vocabularies since the 1300s, and the sensations themselves surely predate our having proper names for them – and so Fisher’s book implicitly wonders: Does capitalism exacerbate or deny the existence of these sensations? And isn’t it weird how, more often than not, it seems to do both simultaneously?
[Grouper, “Living Room” from The Man Who Died in his Boat]
[Graham Lambkin, “The Currency of Dreams” from Salmon Run]
Fisher clearly acknowledges that his consideration of these two terms – the weird and the eerie — is informed by Sigmund Freud’s famous exploration of the unheimlich – that is, the unhomely or the uncanny; that sensation which, for Freud, “belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread.” [2] Within the context of Freud’s work, his fascination with such a negative sensation is not unprecedented. Whilst he declares that it’s rare for a psychoanalyst to “feel impelled to engage in aesthetic investigations”, the uncanny nonetheless resonates with Freud’s considerations of what lies beyond the pleasure principle. [3] He wonders why we enjoy being scared and disturbed, and seems to ask what these desires tell us about our psychological constitution in our present time and place. It is a question that still fascinates today — what does our cultural conjuring of the uncanny say about that which troubles of our collective unconscious?
Mark Fisher, in complicating Freud’s theory and splitting the uncanny into two further categories, extends this question outwards into a world of capitalist critique. The examples he draws upon are very telling in this regard. With the exception of Christopher Nolan and David Lynch, readers would be forgiven for thinking his examples were somewhat outdated. However, what is most striking about Fisher’s investigations into weird and eerie is that the modes he champions seldom exist today beyond the realm of retrospection and pastiche. Personally, having spent much of October catching up on many recent horror films I’ve previously missed, it seems readily apparent that the weird and the eerie are seldom well-portrayed in your average schlock horror blockbuster but they are strangely abundant in real life.
Why is this? Perhaps this tells us something about our cultural expectations under capitalism. From satire to horror, we like our laughs and our scares upfront and explicit. We like things lukewarm and predictable. Is this because the world is anything but? Once upon a time, horror was a powerful mode of critique in this regard. Now it seems that we have forgotten this. Films that attempt to poke at the mask of neoliberal propriety still get made – of course they do – but they seem to find it harder and harder to -penetrate through to the other side and reach the sort of audience that might hear and understand their call for another world.
With this in mind, it is Fisher’s conception of the eerie, in particular, that resonates with much of his previous writings. In Capitalist Realism, for instance, he draws on Freud’s theory of dreamwork to explain the false consistency of late capitalism. In his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud attempts to account for the way in which, whilst we are in the midst of a dream, we do not question those moments where sense is lost. We ignore the inexplicable, the displaced and the atemporal. In fact, chances are that, if we were to record our dreams as they actually appear to us, they would likely be an odd jumble of images and sensations with little relation to one another. It is the dreaming mind, however, that engages in a kind of dreamwork – that is, a process of sense-making — stitching together the pieces and presenting us with something that seems, at least on the surface of the unconscious, to be a consistent experience. Fisher explains that our experience of capitalism is somewhat similar. He writes that, when
we are dreaming, we forget, but immediately forget that we have done so; since the gaps and lacunae in our memories are Photoshopped out, they do not trouble or torment us. What dreamwork does is to produce a confabulated consistency which covers over anomalies and contradictions, and it is this which Wendy Brown picked up on when she argued that it was precisely dreamwork which provided the best model for understanding contemporary forms of power. [4]
The weird and the eerie, then, are names for those moments where the dreamwork fails. The weird, as Fisher’s term for “that which does not belong”, points to failures in the capitalist imaginary. Much like in The Matrix, where Neo experiences déjà vu, to witness the weird in waking life is to suggest that capitalism has changed something or perhaps stalled in failing to keep up with its own illusion. However, today, that which emerges from the cracks in the capitalist firmament is seldom recognised as anything other than an inconvenience or a mistake. We might recognise these faults as “weird”, in Fisher’s sense of the word, but, aesthetically speaking, we may find ourselves ambivalent towards these moments. They are not opportunities for imagination but mundane inconveniences, symptomatic of what Fisher would call our “boring dystopia”. When we think about automated checkouts at the supermarket, for instance, and find ourselves assaulted by the computer’s declaration that there is an unexpected item in the bagging area – or, to use Fisher’s phrase, “there is something present where there should be nothing” [5] – we do not claim the imposition to be eerie. But perhaps we should…
[Mount Eerie, “Emptiness” from SAUNA]
[Gazelle Twin, “Belly of the Beast” from UNFLESH]
[Xasthur, “Prisons of Mirrors” from Subliminal Genocide]
For Fisher, the eerie is a kind of spooky serenity. It has to do, he writes, with a “detachment from the urgencies of the everyday.”
The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether. It is this release from the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality, which goes some way to account for the peculiar appeal that the eerie possesses. [6]
In her new book Theory of the Gimmick, Sianne Ngai explores aesthetic categorisation in a way that is perhaps the inverse of Fisher’s approach to the eerie. For her, the gimmick is a kind of aesthetic shorthand; it is the most blatant and unsubtle tool deployed within capitalist dreamwork. “Repulsive if also strangely attractive,” she writes, and “with a layer of charm we find ourselves forced to grudgingly acknowledge,” Ngai describes a gimmick as something deployed to save both labour and time. [7] The most obvious cultural example is, perhaps, the comedy catchphrase – instantly recognisable, familiar, something that might make us laugh just by being uttered, whether that is within a certain context or without any context whatsoever. It is practical and procedural and, once established, requires very little effort to put to use. For Ngai, the gimmick epitomises abstraction in aesthetic labour. She describes it as a “compromised form bound to an ambivalent judgement that its perception spontaneously elicits”; it is “an entirely capitalist aesthetic.” [8] Much like the uncanny, whilst it is a name for a sensation that is far older than capitalism itself, the gimmick has nonetheless come into its own over the last century.
What is most peculiar about the gimmick for Ngai is that we judge it to be both a wonder and a trick. It is that which, at first, perhaps enthrals us, only to lose its novelty all too quickly. “It is a form”, she writes, that “we marvel at and distrust, admire and disdain.” [9] She considers the narrative or theatrical gimmick known as the “deus ex machina”, for instance – “the machine or crane used to transport gods to the stage in ancient Greek tragedy, [which] has become the name for a ‘cheap’ or aesthetically unconvincing contrivance for achieving narrative closure.” [10] What results from this strange tension between fascination and cynicism is a kind of “perpetual slippage”, she continues, between “positive and negative judgements”, which open “a porthole to this genre of ambivalence in a way that the precapitalist device does not.”
It was this same tension within aesthetic categories under capitalism that long fascinated Mark Fisher. Indeed, this “porthole” described by Ngai is arguably an inversion of the kind of egress that Fisher sought to interrogate in The Weird and the Eerie, and he deploys the eerie in particular as an attempt to access the alternative worlds beyond the capitalist porthole.
The question today, perhaps, is how this mode of exit became so twisted. How is it that the gimmick has come to dominate even horror? But horror still does what it has always done – it still reflects and exacerbates the darkened corners of the collective psyche. The most terrifying thing about the 21stcentury is that horror has become so boring and predictable, precisely because we have as well. Indeed, capitalism’s turn towards communications technologies in the age of social media is precisely predicated on technology’s ability to predict us. Fisher’s preoccupation with the eerie, then, is arguably a cultural interrogation of our own boredom (or lack thereof); of the strange calm that results from our extended time spent gazing into the mirror of social media.
Speaking at a roundtable discussion on the topic of “Speculative Aesthetics” in 2013, Fisher probes the problem of social media explicitly. In a transcript of the talk later published by Urbanomic, Fisher notes how “we’ve seen massive behavioural mutations of the human population in the last decade”, to a degree that would feel plenty at home in some 20th century dystopian fiction, but these mutations have been put to use “towards banal ends”. [11] In his accelerationist mode, Fisher wonders if these libidinal tendencies that have us glued to social media on our smartphones can’t be diverted towards other ends instead. The inside is a folding of the outside, after all, and at present, as Fisher explains, this means that “increasingly cultural time is taken up with forms which, at the psychological level, mirror people back to themselves in the most banal possible manifest image.” [12] Fisher’s solution to this narcissistic curse of diminishing returns isn’t a reactionary one, however. The solution is not to destroy the mirror in front of us but affirm its innate but also productive alienating qualities. Just as Fisher writes in The Weird and the Eerie – and to quote the sentence in full this time: “There is no inside except as a folding of the outside; the mirror cracks, I am an other, and I always was.” [13]
For Fisher, this was the strength of modernism. As he explains during the roundtable, “the alienating power of the arts in modernism” was that it provided “an experience that makes one question one’s own experience”; “it is an experience which confronts one with the conditions of experience.” [14] We are still capable of producing this kind of mirror, especially at the level of pop culture. Charlie Brooker’s hit television series Black Mirror is perhaps the obvious example, but it is a show that seems to have fallen from critical adoration for its prescient view of the present into becoming something of a gimmick itself. To say that something is like an episode of Black Mirror is now an unforgiveable cliché, but is that Brooker’s fault or simply an inevitably in our culturally cannibalistic age. Perhaps we just don’t need any more reflections. We have enough to be getting on with.
So where, exactly, should we focus our attentions?
[Lil Peep, “Mirror, Mirror” from Live Forever]
[Gate Zero, “So Many Faces in the Mirror” from Schwerelos]
The mix you are about to hear was made by Mark Fisher back in 2011. It has a simple and almost banal title: “Eerie”, and the sounds we hear over the course of its fifty-minutes are certainly that.
There is something to be said for the way that eeriness is an explicitly audible quality. Something is at its most eerie when it can be heard but not seen. What use is the eerie, then, as a mirror if we cannot see ourselves within it?
In listening to this mix, I’m reminded of the sound mirrors that were installed on England’s Kentish and Yorkshire coastlines in the inter-war years of the twentieth century. As objects, they are austere and imposing but they exist precisely to reflect that which we cannot yet see. As a sort of rudimentary form of radar, they functioned as an early warning system against military invasion. As far as our own unconscious is concerned, the invasion happened long ago, and it seems we were powerless to stop it, but it is perhaps still within sound that we find space to truly reflect and consider that which we are missing – that is, the gaps in ourselves that have not yet been filled.
With that, and if you haven’t already, I’d recommend turning off the lights and finding somewhere quiet to lie down. Over the course of the next hour, I implore to look inside yourself – not as some kind of mindful act, doing capitalism’s job for it by covering over the cracks in your ego. Instead, feel the tentacular creep of the attention economy as you drift further inside of yourself. Look for those cracks, prise them open, and allow the sound to seep in. On tonight of all nights, there is perhaps no task more terrifying.
[1] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 2016, 11-12.
[2] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin Books, 2003, 123.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Mark Fisher, Capitalism Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2009, 60.
[5] Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 61.
[6] Ibid., 13.
[7] Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form. London: Harvard University Press; Belknap Press, 2020, 53.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 54.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Mark Fisher, “Practical Eliminativism: Getting Out of the Face, Again” in Speculative Aesthetics, eds. Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, James Trafford. Falmouth: Urbanomic Media Ltd., 2014, 92.
[12] Ibid., 94.
[13] Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 11-12.
[14] Ibid., 92.
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