In July 2024, I spoke with Maxim Velli for an episode of the Solarpunk Manifesto podcast, and it has just gone live. We talk about blogging, the work of Mark Fisher, and how hauntology and accelerationism still have lots to offer to those thinking about our post-capitalist futures.
You can listen via YouTube above or on other platforms listed here.
In this month’s issue of The Wire (#501), Robin James has written something of a response to my contribution to the Against the Grain column in last month’s issue (#500).
It’s a bit exasperating, honestly, because the position James adopts is precisely the sort of position I was trying to critique last time when I wrote how Mark Fisher has
been transformed into a thinker primarily responsible for the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. Cue, in response, a host of writers who have, since his death in 2017, accused him of failing to notice the New in his midst, arguing on the contrary that there are breaks everywhere for those with ears to hear them.
It is unfortunate that James repeats this, seemingly unknowingly, tarring Fisher with an id-pol ignorance that he didn’t suffer under. It renders James’ argument an unnecessary knot that suggests Fisher had some unfortunate blind spots, only to then utilise the same examples Fisher did to back up his position on hauntology.
Hauntology “is the name Mark Fisher and his colleagues gave to their perception that ‘what haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the 21st century is not so much the past as the lost futures the 20th century taught us to anticipate'”, James argues. But then she uses the example of Grace Jones — an artist Fisher adored from the 20th century — to somehow contradict this, when in fact it was a lack of any clear pop-cultural successor to Jones’s advances that Fisher was disappointed by. The future Jones promised didn’t arrive — do we need any more evidence of that than the fact that James has to go back to Grace Jones herself to argue inexplicably against Fisher’s own position?
Beyond this, James seeks to put more distance between Fisher’s trajectory and her own, not identifing with the ‘us’ that Fisher often speaks to. This is partly because James is American, but also because she is a “pluralist”:
In grad school, as I realised I wanted to write about popular music, I thought it was important that I take advantage of the courses on the critical philosophy of race and Africana philosophy because I needed to understand something about Black aesthetics and racial politics if I wanted to have anything meaningful to say about 20th and 21st century American popular music … There is huge value in understanding continental philosophy, feminist philosophy and non-white/non-Western philosophies to be in the same boat, institutionally: if one of us sinks, we all do.
The insinuation here is that Mark Fisher did not share this same background, but I’m sorry, that’s woefully inaccurate. No one so indebted to Deleuze, as Fisher was, would describe themselves any other way either — Fisher was a pluralist too. James does not see him as such, for reasons I don’t understand. When she claims that “the problem hauntology was invented to name just didn’t seem like a problem, especially in the context of Black Atlantic popular musics”, this ignores the extent to which Fisher was utterly immersed in discussions around the Black Atlantic at the time that Paul Gilroy published his book of the same name.
Fisher’s network of hauntologists wasn’t simply those figures who became fixated on the output of the Ghost Box record label; it included the likes of Kodwo Eshun and Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman most notably. To assume that Fisher’s milieu was ostensibly white — and it may have been predominantly so — only perpetuates the erasure of black and brown people from the Ccru itself, like Jessica Edwards.
What’s more, one of the most significant outcomes of the Ccru’s dissolution was Hyperdub Records. Label head Goodman has written explicitly how “Hyperdub started as a kind of umbrella term to talk about the electronic music of the Black Atlantic that had converged into the 90s musical singularity of jungle” — something I wrote about when discussing the malignment of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic as a core influence on the Ccru back in March this year.
Goodman even wrote on the Ccru website at the time that a “redesign of sonic reality generates genetic destratification for subaquatic martial arts, for insurgency on the distributed pod network which the AOE was installing, constituting a carceral archipelago … under the Black Atlantic.” And after Fisher’s death, he also acknowledged that there would be no Hyperdub without Fisher himself — and that’s to say nothing of how closely Fisher is associated with Burial, who was for him a prime example of the black repetitions James is arguing for, albeit immersed in a post-rave melancholia that Fisher and others saw as indicative of a 2000s ‘hardcore continuum’ — a term complementary to ‘the Black Atlantic’ — in general.
But it is most telling that James talks about Grace Jones here, since Fisher also talks about her here, here, here, and here. Jones is a near-constant reference point on k-punk, in fact, mentioned in passing so many more times than this.
For all these reasons, if James is asserting a counter-argument to my own, I simply don’t understand it. A lack of any explicit mention of the Black Atlantic in my own Against the Grain contribution shouldn’t be taken as an ignorant omission. The essay sought to speak to a plurality, condensing the content of a talk I gave at The Wire‘s Cafe Oto salon a few months earlier, which discussed the Black Atlantic at length — in print, I am left a victim of word-count restrictions, reducing a 6000-word talk to a 1000-word essay.
So let me be clear, I fully support the rallying cry James ends on:
This circulation calls together a community that collectively looks after their common creative tradition(s). Jones is reheating her own nachos, but in a way that exceeds the calculus of both European theories of repetition and capitalist enclosure.
But I think it is disingenuous to presume that Fisher would not agree, or that his sense of hauntology did not include this kind of reflection. I’ve written plenty on this myself before as well, such as here when writing about Edward George’s The Strangeness of Dub in 2023.
It makes no sense to me that Fisher can be continually used as a scapegoat, indicative of where 00s/10s music criticism went wrong, falling into some kind of myopia — that was the overarching point of my column. To me, that myopia is a product of a lacklustre readership, who skim the surface of Fisher’s popular writings and associate him, the white British man, with an ostensibly white British patriarchal culture. It does him an unnecessary disservice and only perpetuates a laziness that is inappositely attributed to his writings as a whole rather than the reductionist gloss of his work that predominates in the popular culture he despised. Fisher was explicitly interested in all the same currents as James is.
I’ve been saying this for almost a decade — this blog turned eight years old on October 10th — and I’m clearly already blue in the face about it. When I end my contribution to last month’s Wire with the accusation that “contemporary debates that choose to joust with [Fisher] also end up stuck” in discourses of the 2000s he was seeking to advance, James’ response only proves my point, I fear. We return to a discourse, hinged on Grace Jones, that is really quite similar to what Fisher was arguing twenty years ago. He was way ahead of a contemporary academia only now trying to reckon with its own privileges and blind spots.
I contend that when James says that “Jones situates herself as the steward of an artistic tradition where creative ideas circulate as something other than private property that accumulates value”, Fisher would have wholeheartedly agreed — the receipts are all linked above. The problem was that he did not see a new steward of the same pop-cultural prominence as Jones ready to pick up the mantle this side of the 21st century.
That’s not to say he didn’t offer up examples of underground artists who might be primed to take her place. He saw Moloko as one such example, but Roisin Murphy’s descent into TERFdom (or Kanye West’s descent into fascism, to offer another example) only shows how his own attempts at optimism didn’t always bear the fruit he hoped to see.
Fisher was persistently optimistic, contrary to his reputation. The problem is that, since his death, many of the examples he hung his hopes on have only confirmed that his pessimism was more prescient to others. If we make those failures Fisher’s own responsibility, we continue to ignore the crux of his various critiques. Fisher continues to deserve a better readership than those who choose to strawman him.
