rhapsode

by Sha Frasier.the Continuing Education Project.New York.

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)

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures is a collection of essays by the writer and theorist Mark Fisher, published by Zero Books in 2014. It argues that twenty-first-century culture is marked by anachronism and inertia, and that the present is haunted by the futures that the popular modernism of the twentieth century trained people to expect and that never arrived. Fisher takes the phrase “the slow cancellation of the future” from the Italian theorist Franco Berardi and applies it to music. The evidence is a decade of his criticism, from his k-punk blog and from The Wire, Sight & Sound and Film Quarterly, including essays and interviews on Burial, the Caretaker and the acts of the Ghost Box label, whose records he had described as hauntology in 2005, and an essay that reads depression through Joy Division as a public condition. Brian Dillon in ArtReview praised its intelligence but found its canon familiar, The Quietus presented Paul Wolinski’s essay on it as a yardstick for the paralysis of electronic culture, and after Fisher’s death in 2017 the New Statesman described his posthumous standing as legendary.

Fisher, a writer, theorist and contributor to The Wire, published the collection with Zero Books in May 2014, and a 2022 reissue added an introduction by Matt Colquhoun.1, 2, 2 The book opens with the final episode of the television serial Sapphire & Steel (1982), in which two agents are trapped in a café outside time, and Fisher writes that “21st-century culture is marked by the same anachronism and inertia which afflicted Sapphire and Steel in their final adventure.”1 His test is musical: a jungle record of 1993, he writes, would have sounded entirely new to a listener in 1989, while a current record played to a listener in 1995 would not.3 He credits the phrase “the slow cancellation of the future” to Franco Berardi, and he predicts that the years from about 2003 onward will be recognized as the worst period for popular culture since the 1950s.4 He writes that the present should be haunted by “the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialised.”5

The collection gathers writing from the k-punk blog, which Fisher began in 2003, and from The Wire, Sight & Sound and Film Quarterly.6 Its section on hauntology includes his interview with Burial from The Wire of December 2007, liner notes and an interview on the Caretaker, and essays on the Ghost Box acts the Focus Group, Belbury Poly and the Advisory Circle, whose label’s records he had described as hauntology in a k-punk post of September 2005.6 An essay on what he called party hauntology discusses James Blake, Kanye West and Drake, and the book’s epigraph is a line by Drake.6, 7 The title comes from “Ghosts of My Life” (1993), the jungle track Goldie recorded as Rufige Kru, which samples Japan’s “Ghosts” (1981), and Fisher wrote that he had almost given his blog the same name.7 A chapter on Joy Division, “No Longer the Pleasures,” reads depression as a public condition.8

Brian Dillon, reviewing the book in ArtReview in 2014, called Fisher’s “a voice of relentless intelligence” but found the contents “remarkably comforting and familiar rather than energising,” a soft canon of Fisher’s own landmarks.9 The Quietus presented an essay on the book by Paul Wolinski of 65daysofstatic as taking it for a yardstick of the paralysis of electronic culture.10 Fisher died on January 13, 2017, at forty-eight, and in 2019 Tom Whyman wrote in the New Statesman that he had “posthumously assumed the sort of legendary status reserved for thinkers considered to be among the most important or insightful of their time.”2

Key contributions

  • Twenty-first-century culture described as marked by anachronism and inertia.
  • Hauntology as the haunting of the present by the futures that popular modernism promised and did not deliver.
  • Berardi’s “slow cancellation of the future” applied to popular music, with jungle as the measure of how fast music once changed.
  • The collected writing in which Fisher described hauntology in music, from Ghost Box to Burial.
  • Depression treated as a public condition, read through Joy Division.

See also

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

  2. 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). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. 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.” ↩

  4. 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). ↩

  5. 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.” ↩

  6. 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. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. 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. ↩ ↩2

  8. 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). ↩

  9. 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.” ↩

  10. 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. ↩

Published August 7, 2026