Since his death in 2017, Mark Fisher has reputationally ascended to the status of dissident national treasure. His work as a leftist cultural critic continues to inspire the young in particular – Fisher murals adorn Goldsmiths, University of London, where he used to teach – who have adopted him as one of their heroes. His books were not widely reviewed in his lifetime, however, and his influence has been a largely word-of-mouth phenomenon. Now his publisher, the tiny indie press Zero Books, is reissuing Fisher’s 2014 essay collection bolstered by a context-establishing introduction by Fisher archivist Matt Colquhoun and a poignant afterword by music critic Simon Reynolds, a friend of Fisher’s with whom he was closely allied.
Reading this book the first time round, I was intoxicated by the searing, impassioned brilliance of Fisher’s writing, the thrilling futurism of his ideas and his anarchistic range of reference (science fiction, electronic music, postmodernist theory, renegade literature, post-punk). On second reading, it seems to me no less dazzling. What makes Ghosts stand out from Fisher’s more well-known Capitalist Realism is that here, instead of engaging head-on with political theory, he trains his volatile intellect mainly on popular music, as well as film and television (as he also does in his superb posthumous collection k-punk). His gift for infecting the reader with his fascinations is immediately evident, even when these concern long-forgotten or adolescent subjects. Beginning his analysis of “hauntological” culture with a reminiscence of 1980s fantasy TV series Sapphire & Steel, he launches into an elegy for the era of “visionary public broadcasting” and “popular modernism” that blossomed in late 1970s Britain, alongside a postwar welfare state and a culture of higher education grants, cheap rents and squatting. Fisher insists that vital art necessitates “withdrawal”, unhurried experimentation and a disregard for quick profit turnovers – rarities in our era of notifications, towering rents and the “destranging” glare of online visibility. His art pop golden age of “rigorously modernist”, working-class autodidacts lasted until the advent of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal fanaticism.
