It seems as if any song that you listen to on YouTube that is more than 5 or so years old will somewhere have a variation of the comment “Homesick for a time that doesn’t exist”.
Often I find myself struck with a similar feeling, although currently it’s possible I’m just feeling homesick, as I recently moved country in the middle of a global pandemic. Regardless, I am sometimes struck with such an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia for the unknown that I have to hide in a room, alone for a while and wallow in my own emptiness.
After all, logically I cannot feel nostalgic for a time I haven’t experienced. I have no idea what it was like to live in the 80’s, and I don’t particularly have any desire to go back in time to experience it. Yet I find myself nostalgic for possible relationships, for the imagined experience that I missed, for the potential of 2020 if there hadn’t been a pandemic.
Generally, I try to avoid living my life focusing on the ‘what ifs’. It seems to me there is very little point in speculating what could have been, because that is quite simply not the present day I am living in, nor in one that I can experience. If I desire change that much, I should simply change (hence the move).
How does one reconcile though, with this nostalgia for the unknown experience?
The imagining of possible futures leads us to what Derrida calls ‘hauntology’. That is, the realisation that the futures promised to us by the likes of Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future or H.G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes is not our future. Therefore, the space to imagine the future is haunted by the fictional futures. Fisher explores this, writing that this is why hauntology has the ability to capture ‘a zeitgeist, something which is already in place and which demands critical commentary’. It not only transcends space and time, it also creates a familiarisation with the haunted subject; allowing us to consider the space between the existing and the non-existing.
In his discussion of the film Children of Men, Fisher points out that what drives the plot is not so much a sudden ending of the world, but rather the slow decline of life as we know it. ‘The catastrophe, in fact, consists in this failure of the future, this absence of continuity.’ This absence is because of hauntology, which has lead to capitalist realism. We cannot conceive of what we can call a rational alternative to capitalism because it has become so inherent to our lives. As Barry Buzan and George Lawson argue, ‘non-capitalist economies [cannot] compete with capitalist ones over the long run, particularly when economies became more strongly based on information and services.’ Capitalism allows governing bodies a certain level of control but it is also suscept to weaknesses through its instability. Ultimately, capitalism increases the capacity for change, whilst simultaneously inhibiting any attempts to stray away from capitalism.
Unfortunately, Mark Fisher fails to take into account the sheer power capitalism holds. It is easy to hypothesis that we should think of an alternative, but he stops ahead of offering any answers or options as to how we can continue forward away from the apparent grim future that lies in wait for us. In fact, this ironically points towards the very problem that he brings up himself: how difficult capitalism makes it for us to be allowed to imagine an alternative. His lack of suggestion for where we should go, cements the issue which he presents us with, leaving us to consider that perhaps, ultimately, there is no alternative to capitalism. The world must come to an end, at least in some way, for us to be able to consider a different way of life. Just like Joel, we must have our memories wiped of everything, the good and the bad, of capitalism in order for us to start afresh.
Not to be one to state the obvious, but we are living in what feels like the end of the world. Certainly a new normal is awaiting us on the other side, perhaps cursing an entire generation with a deep longing for what once was. We are quite literally now haunted by the ghosts of what could have been: our plans for 2020 long gone, but still talked about; ideas for 2021 halfheartedly mentioned but not fully believed or committed too. Yet it seems that the wheels of capitalism continue to turn: we are encouraged to go out, to spend money, but doing so places blame on us for worsening the spread of COVID-19. We must safe the economy first, lives second, government’s not-so-surreptitiously announce.
This points us towards a rather worrying suggestion of Mark Fisher’s work: perhaps the end of the world is not enough to end capitalism; perhaps to end capitalism, we must first end the world.
References
Allan Bates, ‘The Real Failure of Capitalism’, American Journal of Economics & Sociology, 4.3, (1945), 394
Barry Buzan and George Lawson, ‘Capitalism and the emergent world order’, International Affairs, 90.1, (2014), 71-91
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, (Ropley: O Books, 2009)
Mark Fisher, ‘Post-Apocalypse Now’, Architectural Design, 80.5, (2010), 70-73
Mark Fisher, ‘What IS Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly, 66.1, (2012), 16-24
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