rhapsode

Created by Sha FrasierBrooklyn, NY · 2026

Source

Fisher — “Ghosts of My Life”

Cited in 4 notes
Changelog, Hauntology, Lost futures, Reynolds — Retromania

Find it in a library:WorldCat·Open Library

Author: Mark Fisher
Title: Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
Year: 2014
Type: Essay collection (Zero Books; 2022 reissue with a new introduction)

The book opens inside a canceled TV serial. In the 1982 finale of Sapphire & Steel, two agents sit trapped in a roadside café suspended outside time, and Fisher claims the image for the whole century: “It is the contention of this book that 21st-century culture is marked by the same anachronism and inertia which afflicted Sapphire and Steel in their final adventure.”1 The stasis hides, he argues, behind a surface frenzy of novelty, and his test for it is musical. Beam a current hit back to 1995 and nobody flinches; “play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.”2 The frame is borrowed and credited: “the slow cancellation of the future” belongs to the Italian theorist Franco Berardi, and what Fisher adds is the ear, down to the dare that the years “from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised… as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s.”3 The thesis lands away from nostalgia entirely: what should haunt us, Fisher argues, is the not yet — the futures popular modernism promised and never delivered, the argument Lost futures takes up at full depth.4

The collection rebuilds a decade of Fisher’s writing — the k-punk blog he ran from 2003, pieces for The Wire, Sight & Sound, and Film Quarterly — into the closest thing hauntology has to criticism from inside, written as the records appeared. The central section runs the canon. Fisher interviewed Burial for The Wire while the producer was still anonymous, and he had introduced the Caretaker’s Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia in its own liner notes. The Ghost Box acts he had called hauntology as early as September 2005 follow, with the party-hauntology strain he heard reaching the mainstream through James Blake and Drake.5 The title is a lineage lesson in miniature: Japan’s “Ghosts” (1981) passed into “Ghosts of My Life” (1993), the jungle track Goldie cut as Rufige Kru with the Japan original sampled inside it, and Fisher admitted he nearly named the blog “Ghosts of My Life” after the pair of them. The epigraph is a line from Drake likening himself to the amnesiac lead of Memento: a pop star announcing he can no longer form new memories.6 Depression, the subtitle’s first term, runs through the book via Joy Division, read as evidence that the era’s mental anguish is public rather than private, the claim that turned record reviews into politics.7

The reception split between the critic outside the music and the musician inside it. In ArtReview, Brian Dillon heard “a voice of relentless intelligence” but found the contents “remarkably comforting and familiar rather than energising,” a “soft canon” of Fisher’s own generational landmarks.8 In The Quietus, Paul Wolinski of 65daysofstatic took the book “as a yardstick” for electronic culture’s paralysis: “It’s rare for non-fiction to resonate with me in such a compelling way.”9 Then the book’s meaning changed. Fisher died by suicide on January 13, 2017, at forty-eight, and a body of writing about mourning lost futures began to be read as mourning its writer; by 2019 the New Statesman could say he had “posthumously assumed the sort of legendary status reserved for thinkers considered to be among the most important or insightful of their time.”10 A decade on, its standing is plain: the genre’s primary documents collected between covers, the posts that named the music bound to the argument for why it mattered.

Key contributions

  • The lost-futures argument made audible: Berardi’s cancellation thesis run through records, the 1993-jungle thought experiment, and “formal nostalgia” as the name for a culture recycling itself.
  • The two senses of hauntology, de-supernaturalized: the no-longer that keeps repeating and the not-yet that never arrived, with the specter stripped of the supernatural.
  • Popular modernism named as the canceled trajectory: the music press, post-punk, brutalist architecture, Penguin paperbacks, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop as one public project.
  • The genre’s primary documents gathered: the September 2005 Ghost Box post, the anonymous-era Burial interview, the Caretaker liner notes.
  • Depression made political: read through Joy Division as the era’s public symptom.

See also

  • Energy Flash — the rave decade whose forward motion is this book’s yardstick: the jungle records Fisher plays against the stalled present
  • Retromania — the companion argument, published three years earlier, from the critic who named the tendency alongside Fisher
  • Electronic — Burial’s family, and the music at the center of this book’s one interview with an artist nobody had yet seen
  • Lost futures — the thesis argued at full depth, with its lineage and its critics
  • Hauntology — the genre his September 2005 post named, told record by record

Footnotes

  1. The full text of Ghosts of My Life as scanned at the Internet Archive (accessed August 7, 2026), quoted verbatim; the Sapphire & Steel finale (“There’s no time here, not any more”) opens the book. Publication facts split by carrier: Winchester and the 232-page count per the Internet Archive’s catalog record of the Zero Books printing; the May 30, 2014 date per the book’s Goodreads record (both accessed August 7, 2026). ↩

  2. The same full text, verbatim; the companion claim is that 20th-century experimental culture’s “recombinatorial delirium” gave way to “a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future.” ↩

  3. The same full text. Fisher credits the phrase in the chapter that borrows it as a title: Berardi, he writes, “refers to ‘the slow cancellation of the future [that] got underway in the 1970s and 1980s’” (Berardi’s book: After the Future, AK Press, 2011). The phrase is routinely misattributed to Fisher; the credit is his own. ↩

  4. The full sentence, per the full text: “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” — independently quoted in Tom Whyman, “The ghosts of our lives,” New Statesman, July 31, 2019 (accessed August 7, 2026). The definition beneath it: hauntology’s first sense is that which is no longer but persists as “a fatal pattern”; its second, that which has not yet happened “but which is already effective in the virtual.” ↩

  5. The contents per the full text’s table of contents (accessed August 7, 2026): four sections — 00 Lost Futures, 01 The Return of the 70s, 02 Hauntology, 03 The Stain of Place — with the hauntology section running Burial (the April 2006 k-punk essay plus “Downcast Angel,” the interview from The Wire’s December 2007 issue), the Caretaker (liner notes plus interview), The Shining, Little Axe, the Focus Group and Belbury Poly, the Advisory Circle, Philip Jeck and others, John Foxx (essay plus interview), and the party-hauntology essay on Darkstar, James Blake, Kanye West, and Drake. The chapter credit lines run to k-punk, The Wire (issues 286 and 304), Film Quarterly (two 2011 essays), and Sight & Sound’s website; the acknowledgments thank the k-punk readership and the two magazines’ editors for the reprints. The September 2005 application of the word to music is Fisher’s k-punk post “Unhomesickness,” September 21, 2005 (accessed July 29, 2026), on Ghost Box — the founding sentence is quoted in full at Hauntology. ↩

  6. The title lineage and the almost-naming per Fisher’s k-punk post “Hauntology Now,” January 17, 2006 (accessed July 29, 2026) — he “almost called the site ‘Ghosts of My Life’, in homage not only to Japan, but to Rufige Kru.” “Ghosts” first appeared on Japan’s Tin Drum (1981) and became a UK top-five single the following spring; the Drake epigraph sits on the book’s opening page, per the full text. ↩

  7. The Joy Division chapter is “No Longer the Pleasures,” per the table of contents; the public-not-private argument runs through the introduction and the depression essays, per the full text (accessed August 7, 2026). Fisher’s earlier Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) supplies the frame the book assumes. ↩

  8. Brian Dillon’s review, ArtReview, Summer 2014 (accessed August 7, 2026), verbatims re-verified on the page: “Fisher’s has been a voice of relentless intelligence and (at his best) unabashed vulnerability”; the contents “seem remarkably comforting and familiar rather than energising”; what once felt “like a truly ghostly irruption of past futures into present predicaments has resolved itself in his writing into a soft canon of sorts.” ↩

  9. Paul Wolinski, “Wrote Through Ghosts To Get Here: Ghosts Of My Life & Cultural Paralysis,” The Quietus, June 22, 2014 (accessed August 7, 2026, read in-browser), quoted verbatim; the standfirst frames the book as the “yardstick” for the paralysis argument. ↩

  10. The death date and age per The Wire’s memorial, January 16, 2017 (accessed July 29, 2026): “The writer, theorist and Wire contributor Mark Fisher died on 13 January. He was 48.” The standing line per Whyman’s New Statesman essay (accessed August 7, 2026). The 2022 Zero reissue carries a new introduction by the Fisher scholar Matt Colquhoun, posted in full on his site in 2025 (accessed August 7, 2026). ↩

Published August 7, 2026