The name Mark Fisher was first mentioned to me by an acquaintance and fellow philosophy student at when I was an undergraduate. I failed to understand Capitalist Realism the first time around. Simply because I did not have the life experience necessary to appreciate it. The argument didn’t really click in my mind, until I went home for Christmas, endured the usual spectacle of political debate at the family reunion, and realized how resigned people are to our current political-economic system. This experience with Fisher’s work was the beginning of my long relationship with his work. His blog k-punk was the impetus for the formulation of my own pseudonymous online identity. The seriousness with which he took every subject is admirable, even aspirational. Although I do not share all the literary, musical, or cinemagraphic tastes, a deep, critical examination of the culture I embed myself with is necessary to me. It allows for a reflective value-determination of what you engage with, and orients oneself to more productive, fulfilling works of art, science, and culture.
This diversion from typical Mark Fisher “professional book” topics of discussion provides all the more reason to love The Weird and the Eerie. It is a celebration of the mode of thought that I am most accustomed to — weird, strange, uncanny. It serves as a list of film, musical, literary, and visual arts — a list that one can return to as a reminder that they are not the first to confront the Lacanian collapse of the symbolic order.
Mark Fisher is talented at making difficult theoretical positions clear to the lay audience. I do not claim to have absolute knowledge, but I probably have read more culture theory than the average person. After fighting dense treatises by Williams or Althusser, it is refreshing to be able to pick something up and understand it instantly. If you have ever had a passing interest in science fiction, horror novels, or the Lovecraftian Cthulu-mythos, this is likely a relatively easy read. His analysis of the “weird” is situated much more in terms of horror — specifically weird horror — than Fisher’s conception of the “eerie.” Much of this definition of the “weird” is about transgressing, about moving between, inside, and outside worlds. Fisher gives the example of the Color out of time (emphasis) mind a prime example of invasions from outside our natural world. Though this concept is may best be presented in Robert W. Chambers’ work The King in Yellow, where there is greater emphasis in the “fighting-agianst” the weird, attempting to downplay, deny, or ignore any of the extra-natural invasions into the natural.
Thus, we must make our wrenching turn into how this book, in some “weird” way, is itself an expression of the very artistic mode that he describes. This book was published mere weeks before Fisher died, making this book a difficult read with that hindsight. The book does not deal explicitly with depression or difficult lost futures as Ghosts of My Life does. The Weird and the Eerie instead reads as an expression of a man’s love for art, music, literature, and philosophy. As in all of Fisher’s works, it is utterly sincere, disinterested in if or how people may think of it as “kitschy” (in the same way that Fisher discusses Nolan’s Interstellar). The book does not necessarily make any groundbreaking points, in fact, it rarely really makes any new points at all beyond the first 45 pages. However, it is ready to burst with insightful literary analysis, a new hermeneutic with which to re-watch Tarkovsky’s Solaris, re-read Philip K. Dick, or to re-engage with Magritte.
This book is not a particularly emotional book. It does not dwell in depression or grieve the awaited futures that are promised in advertisements. But the expression of loneliness in this book is profound. There is a hollowness in this text, that is only punctuated by only the occasional agent provocateur that is so common in Fisher’s texts. I happened to read the section on Brian Eno — specifically the opening paragraphs where Mark Fisher offers a glimpse into a “real” experience he had while taking a walk with a friend and seeing a port — while on a the Union-Pacific Northwest Metra train out of downtown Chicago.
If you have ever been in the South and West loop areas of Chicago, you are familiar with the strange interplay of heavy iron trains surrounding the sleek glass of emerging tech companies. If you happened to also have lived in the Loop, as I have, you know that it is empty on the weekends, relatively speaking. Walking in to the Ogilvie train station from the empty sidewalks of Madison Street in the middle of the day, surrounded by buildings designed to fill thousands, yet holding none. Moving from the grimy perpetually-under-construction streets of downtown to the cold unfeeling panopticon of the Accenture tower, to the sudden thrust into the dark, damp, hole from which the trains move in and out in some horrific phallic cacophony of screeching metal. The gray, cold air clung to my almost-empty train cars as we lurched along creaking tracks as if we were a mammoth creature beginning to move. I felt the oppressive effects of the urban planning into which I have been thrust. I read:
The port and the burial ground offer two different versions of the eerie. The container port looms over the declining sea-side town, the port’s cranes towering above the Victorian resort like H.G. Wells’s Martian Tripods. Approached from the countryside, from Trimley marshes, the cranes preside over the rural scene like gleaming cybernetic dinosaurs erupting out of a Constable landscape. Viewed in this way, the port appears almost as a weird phenomenon, an alien and incommensurable eruption in the “natural” scene. Ultimately, however, it is the feeling of the eerie that is dominant. There’s an eerie sense of silence about the port that has nothing to do with actual noise levels. The port is full of the inorganic clangs and clanks that issue from ships as they are loaded and unloaded; what’s missing, at least for the spectator watching the port from a vantage point outside, are any traces of language and sociability. Watching the container lorries and the ships do their work, or surveying the containers themselves, the meta boxes racked up like a materialised version of the bar charts in Gibson’s cybeerspace, their names ringing with a certain transnational, blank, Ballardian poetry — Maersk Sealand, Hanlin, K-line — one seldom has any sense of human presence. The humans remain out of sight, in cabs, in cranes, in offices. I’m reminded instead of the mute alien efficiency of the pod distribution site in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The contrast between the container port, in which humans are invisible connectors between automated systems, and the clamour of the old Longdon docks, which the port of Felextowe effectively replaced, tells us a great deal about the shifts of capital and labour in the last forty years. The port is a sign of the triumph of finance capital; it is part of the heavy material infrastructure the facilitates the illusion of a “dematerialised” capitalism. It is the eerie underside of contemporary capital’s mundane gloss. Ghosts of My Life pp. 76-77. Repeater Books. 2016.
And thus, my symbolic order collapsed. And I cried in public over some architecture.