rhapsode

Created by Sha FrasierBrooklyn, NY · 2026

Idea

Lost futures

Franco Berardi begins by redefining the word. When he says “future,” he writes in After the Future (2011), “I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception,” the “cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization.”1 The future, in this usage, is a feeling a culture manufactures — the twentieth century made it in bulk, and somewhere in the 1970s and 1980s the production line began to shut down. Mark Fisher borrowed Berardi’s phrase for that shutdown, “the slow cancellation of the future,” credited it, and turned it into the governing argument of Ghosts of My Life: what should haunt us is “not the no longer of actually existing social democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialised.”2 Hauntology, in Fisher’s telling, has two senses. The first is the past that will not stop repeating, “the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat.‘” The second is stranger and does the real work: the not-yet, a future that never arrived but still acts on the present — in Fisher’s borrowed definition of the specter, “that which acts without (physically) existing.”3 Mourning, in this argument, is a refusal to accept that the trajectory is gone.

The evidence of the ears

The argument was road-tested on records before it had a name. In April 2006, reviewing Burial’s debut on the k-punk blog, Fisher heard “a city haunted not only by the past but by lost futures” — the phrase put to a record for a South London producer mourning the rave decade, years before the book that made it famous.4 The evidence Fisher kept returning to was comparative: play the new decade’s records to the past and nothing shocks, a test Ghosts of My Life runs through jungle’s compressed evolution. “The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations,” he wrote, and the mood it leaves is “the feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush.”5 Simon Reynolds supplied the other half of the case in Retromania, the ledger of the ‘Re’ Decade, and the aphorism it is quoted for: “The avant-garde is now an arrière-garde.”6 Dyschronia, Reynolds’s coinage from his 2006 hauntology piece in The Wire, is, in Fisher’s gloss, “Reynolds’ name for the broken-time proper to hauntology, in which it is no longer possible to securely delimit the present from the past.”7

Time was out of joint before

In a 2013 essay for the journal Dancecult, Fisher widened the argument past British melancholy. He read hauntology through the crackle — the surface noise that Burial, Ghost Box, and the Caretaker leave audible, which “restores the uncanniness of recording by making the recorded surface audible again.” Crackle is how “we hear that time is out of joint.”8 And broken time, he argued, was an old experience for some listeners: “Time was always-already out of joint for the slave, and Afrofuturism and hauntology can now be heard as two versions of the same condition.” The essay builds on Mark Sinker’s 1992 argument in The Wire that Black science fiction begins from an apocalypse that already happened, and it relocates sonic hauntology’s origins in what Fisher calls the Afrofuturist sonic sciences — dub and hip hop, the traditions that made sampling, the audible presence of the past inside the present, a compositional language decades before anyone quoted Derrida about it.9

The counter-attack

The backlash arrived early and from the left. In 2008 the theorist Alex Williams published “Against Hauntology,” calling the position “a cowardly move, lusting after utopias that never were” — mourning as retreat, a politics of grief where a politics of construction was needed.10 Benjamin Noys gave the counter-position its name, accelerationism: push through the present’s technological force rather than grieve its foreclosed alternatives. Fisher himself moved with the argument, drifting from what Matt Colquhoun calls the “arch-hauntologist of 2006” toward popular modernism and, in his final work, a politics of new desire — while never renouncing the mourning that made his name.11 The 2020s gave the counter-position a sound: Colquhoun’s history of the debate reads SOPHIE and the PC Music circle as “anti-hauntology,” music that manufactures future-shock in the present tense.12

The argument’s middle age

A later round of objections came from writers asking whose futures were lost. At a Bookforum roundtable on Retromania, Daphne Carr observed that the anxieties driving the thesis “are not concerns for people ten or twenty years younger” than Reynolds, and Ann Powers put the generational point in one line: “My friends and I did not think of ourselves as revivalists.”13 Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3 (2025) built a book against the discourse from five careers (SOPHIE, Oneohtrix Point Never, FKA twigs, Earl Sweatshirt, and Blood Orange), arguing that the internet age has icons of its own invention; Tribune greeted it under the headline “No More Lost Futures.”14 The defense answered within weeks. Colquhoun, who introduced the 2022 reissue of Fisher’s book, argued that the challengers attack a strawman: Fisher distinguished the conservatism of the platforms from the experimentation of artists and “held no animosity toward” recombination itself. A criticism reduced to “client journalism,” he added, had lost the depth the argument requires.15 The clearest fact in the debate is its persistence: nearly two decades after a blog post put the phrase to a Burial record, the books are still being written against it. By Fisher’s own definition, that is how a specter behaves.

See also

  • Ghosts of My Life — the argument’s central text, with the life and the reception behind it
  • Retromania — the companion diagnosis, argued from the record collection outward
  • Sampling — the technique every side of the argument reads as evidence: séance or renewal
  • Electronic — Burial’s family, where the phrase was first put to a record
  • Hauntology — the shelf of records the argument was read from, told through its labels and its ghosts

Footnotes

  1. Berardi as quoted in Fisher’s opening chapter, per the full text of Ghosts of My Life at the Internet Archive (accessed August 7, 2026); After the Future (AK Press, 2011), ed. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn. ↩

  2. The same full text, verbatim; Fisher’s crediting sentence names Berardi and the book. The biography, contents, and reception of Ghosts of My Life are its own note’s telling. ↩

  3. The two senses and the de-supernaturalized specter per the same full text; the “no being in itself” formulation Fisher builds on is Martin Hägglund’s (Radical Atheism, Stanford, 2008), quoted there. ↩

  4. Fisher, “London After the Rave,” k-punk, April 14, 2006, as reprinted in Ghosts of My Life — quoted from the full text at the Internet Archive (accessed August 7, 2026): “the LP is very London Now — which is to say, it suggests a city haunted not only by the past but by lost futures.” The post’s original address was k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007666.html; the blog’s host is offline, and the reprint is the accessible text. ↩

  5. The same full text, verbatim; the jungle thought experiment is quoted in full in Ghosts of My Life’s note. ↩

  6. The book’s Goodreads quotes page (accessed August 7, 2026), verbatim; the ‘Re’ Decade ledger is Retromania’s note’s telling. ↩

  7. Mark Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2), 2013 (accessed July 29, 2026), quoting and citing Reynolds’s November 2006 piece. ↩

  8. The same Dancecult essay, verbatim: “Hauntology restores the uncanniness of recording by making the recorded surface audible again”; “In sonic hauntology, we hear that time is out of joint.” ↩

  9. The same essay: the always-already sentence is its abstract’s thesis, verbatim; Mark Sinker’s “Loving the Alien — Black Science Fiction” ran in The Wire, issue 96, February 1992, and Fisher cites it there as the argument’s precedent. ↩

  10. Alex Williams, “Against Hauntology (Giving Up the Ghost),” Splintering Bone Ashes (blog), 2008, as quoted in Matt Colquhoun, “Un-Popping the Bubbles of Pop: A Brief History of Anti-Hauntology,” xenogothic, February 6, 2021 (accessed July 29, 2026); the original blog is offline, so the quotation is carried secondhand. ↩

  11. The same xenogothic essay (accessed July 29, 2026) — Benjamin Noys’s 2008 coinage, and Fisher’s own movement from the “arch-hauntologist of 2006” toward accelerationist and popular-modernist positions; the final-work clause refers to the unfinished “acid communism” project his posthumous editors describe. ↩

  12. The same essay (accessed July 29, 2026) — the SOPHIE/PC Music reading, with the strategy described as making future-shock now. ↩

  13. Retromania: A Roundtable with Ann Powers, Carl Wilson, and Daphne Carr, Bookforum, January 3, 2012 (accessed August 7, 2026), both quoted verbatim. ↩

  14. The book’s five subjects per its publisher listing (White Rabbit, 2025) and its Goodreads record; the reception framing per the Tribune review “No More Lost Futures,” April 2025, which places the book in a wave of challenges to the lost-futures discourse (page blocks fetching; framing carried per its search-indexed text — all accessed August 7, 2026). ↩

  15. Matt Colquhoun, “Music Criticism’s Lost Futures,” xenogothic, April 2025 (accessed August 7, 2026) — the strawman argument (Fisher separating platform conservatism from artists’ experimentation), the “client journalism” judgment, and Colquhoun’s standing as the 2022 reissue’s introducer. ↩

The shelf behind this

  • Reynolds — Retromania — The 2000s were the 'Re' Decade — pop stopped producing its own present and began consuming its archive — and the open question is whether nostalgia stalled the culture or a stalled culture made nostalgia inevitable.
  • Fisher — Ghosts of My Life — The twenty-first century's cultural stasis is political — the futures popular modernism trained us to expect were slowly canceled — and hauntology is the music that mourns them.

Published August 7, 2026