Hauntology, or the cultural logic of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Mark Fisher argued that twenty-first century neoliberal culture is haunted by “lost futures” – futures that were “cancelled” and thus failed to happen. This was evident in the way that popular culture from the 2000s onwards had resorted to recycling and reusing old styles whilst appearing “new”. His thesis proposed that this haunted culture was made possible by the disappearance of the conditions enabling artists to produce genuinely new culture. By the mid-2000s Fisher identified certain artists that had picked up on this condition, producing artwork and albums that could be considered “hauntological” in their mixing of past, present and future together in a way that postmodernism had failed to do. Importantly, Fisher had adapted the idea of hauntology from the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida, who had confined its use to the strictly philosophical realm, where it appeared to be somewhat detached from reality. Fisher therefore introduced hauntology to a more popular audience. With specific reference to the artist Laura Grace Ford, the musician Burial, and various vaporwave artists I use Fredric Jameson’s method of analysing texts through the ‘political unconscious’, arguing that more than declaring culture to be “haunted”, the “hauntologists” actually attempt to restore a sense of history and class politics (although not always successfully or coherently) to a culture and society trying so hard to suppress those things; and that further to this, the texts in question even try to present an “imaginary resolution” to Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism”: the idea that “there is no alternative” to our current socioeconomic system.

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English