VOID_MELBOURNE
23 March to 23 April 2022
A MOTLEY PAINTING OF EVERYTHING THAT EVER WAS
In the introduction to his 2009 publication Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?, English cultural theorist and philosopher Mark Fisher paraphrased the words of philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek: ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’
And who hasn’t thought about the end of the world recently?
It was alarming – but hardly surprising – how quickly online streaming services started capitalising on the Covid19 pandemic by promoting ‘curated’ selections of post-apocalyptic and dystopian films including Contagion, Outbreak and 28 Days later while country after country succumbed to lockdowns and experienced soaring infection rates in early 2020. Much like the zombies in George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead who instinctively drift towards to the mall, we sought comfort in online shopping, staring endlessly into the black mirror of our devices.
Now, we’re all haunted by a future that never took place. We spend time thinking about what the world would be like if the pandemic hadn’t disrupted our lives, changing the way we work, socialise, consume and simply exist. The term ‘Hauntology’ – a portmanteau of haunting and ontology - was first used by Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Simply put, Hauntology is is the idea that the present is haunted by the metaphorical ‘ghosts’ of lost futures. This haunting manifests itself in a collective mourning and deep sense of nostalgia for a futuristic world that has never come to exist.
Mark Fisher popularised and interrogated the meaning of Hauntology at length in the early 2000s on his blog ‘k-punk’. Woven into Fisher’s blog posts were references to music, television, film, popular culture and politics through the lens of Marxian and post-Marxian cultural theory.
Fisher argued that the twentieth century was a period of idealism in which the future was imagined to be a better world. He theorised that the perpetual recycling of art, music, fashion and popular culture will result in a future that is conceptually dead and that the watering down of culture through repetition and recycling will allow capitalism to maintain its grip on society. He quoted philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari from their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: ‘Everything returns or recurs: States, nations, families. That is what makes the ideology of capitalism “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.” The real is not impossible; it is simply more and more artificial.’
Sadly, Mark Fisher ended his own life in 2017. His early writings can still be accessed in their entirety on his k-punk blog online. Reading a November 2003 blog post with a 2022 lens makes it feel as though Fisher is haunting us from beyond the grave:
Just in case there’s anyone still out there: believe it or not, to compound the recent overwork situation, I’ve actually been ill with that floating virus which seems to be afflicting most of the British population at the moment. I haven’t given up.
Julie McLaren, March 2022
Julie McLaren is a curator currently on hiatus from her role at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in order to undertake research, writing and other creative pursuits.
