Rereading it in preparation for the class, I was struck by a simple but surprisingly deep question: what does it mean for something to be haunted? Not on the surface, but as part of a deeper cultural question. What does it make sense to think of as being haunted?
Read MoreThere’s the brain bug that says that we can ignore the things we know will be happening in the future, because we don’t want to deal with it, and moreover says that planning for the desired outcome alone is fine. We habitually silo off our plans for the future. We could easily say that this means that there is no coherent future – or no future at all.
Read MoreThe book that Mark Fisher was working on at the time of his death was to be entitled Acid Communism. Its introduction is available in the K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. There has been a lot of speculation about this subject since his passing, especially in conjunction with the last course that Fisher was going to teach on “Post-Capitalist Desire." The general theory is that Acid Communism was his name for a future political project, marrying the psychedelia of the 1960s to Marxist thinking,
Read MoreThe past thirty years has been quite a ride: in the 1990s, one of the biggest phenomena on television was the X-Files, which wrestled with the hidden weirdness of the 20th century (mostly in the form of aliens.) At the core of the UFO mythos was a nominally apolitical distrust of authority – the government was hiding something from us. They were hiding the truth. Of course, much of this distrust was coupled with (the publicly disavowed) white supremacist ideology. This gave us what could be called the Interbellum Consensus, sitting as it does between the Cold War and the War on Terror: the UFOlogical Weird and the Militiaman Hauntological.
Read More
