Fisher, Jameson, and the University of Leeds

Frederic Jameson played a key role in informing the concepts of historicity and postmodernism that create one of the crucial backbones to my practice. But as I have already touched upon Jameson in the positioning statement, I shall instead use this space to expand on his ideas, but more importantly to outline how the theorist Mark Fisher progressed Jameson’s ideas and their relation to the architecture of the University of Leeds.

In Capitalist Realism Fisher refers to a weakening of history. Fisher’s theory of the weakening of history is indebted to Jameson’s concepts of historicity within capitalism and/or postmodernism. Fisher continues Jameson’s argument that the schizophrenic nature of Capitalism has resulted in the disengagement with history (see. positioning statement). Fisher takes the concept further and argues that through ‘pre-emptive formatting’ (Fisher, 2009, p.9) of desires, thoughts, and emotions, by capitalist culture, this malaise has reached our subconscious, resulting in an inability to imagine new futures, or more specifically the inability to imagine a future beyond capitalism. Fisher departs from Jameson in his belief that during the eighties (the time in which Jameson wrote Postmodernism, Or, the…) there were (or at least seemed to be) alternatives to capitalism; alternatives which Fisher argues no longer exist today, and therefore Fisher argues that we’re now experiencing capitalist realism and not postmodernism. This change over is also a symptom of a change in relation to modernism, and the disappearance of an ‘other’ in relation to Capitalism since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Fisher expands this ‘temporal malaise’ to Hauntology. Hauntology has its origins in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, and is defined as the return of persistent elements of the past. Fisher divides hauntology into two divisions:

"Provisionally, then, we can distinguish two directions in hauntology. The first refers to that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which is still effective as a virtuality (the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat,’ a structure that repeats, a fatal pattern). The second refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)." (Fisher, 2012, p.16)

In simplified terms, the above passage describes two divisions of hauntology: a hauntology sourced in the past, and a hauntology sourced in the future. Fisher focuses on the latter. Due to the failure of the future:

"What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate. […] the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live." (Fisher, 2012, p.16)

On the topic of ‘unimaginable futures of modernism,’ Fisher states “As Owen Hatherley has argued, bulldozed brutalist buildings are one sign that this future did not arrive.” (Fisher 2012, p.18) Here we see the most explicit connection to subject matter within my practice. As Hatherley argues, demolished Brutalist buildings truly are an erasure of a lost future. This lost future is an example of hauntology sourced in the future, within the anticipations of the future. In Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-war Britain, Owen Hopkins states - “Seeing this towering ambition laid bare, the photographs in this book offer us a haunting glimpse of a future that never quite happened.” (Hopkins, 2017, p.27) It was this ‘lost future’ which seems bound to Brutalist architecture that pulled me to the University of Leeds architecture. After listing various ways in which the University have misused the building, or even attempted to erase it, Hatherley, in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, remarks that “The old campus [at the University of Leeds] is a place that cannot make sense in the present, yet this might be what is most valuable about it.” (Hatherley, 2011) Here we witness how this ‘lost future’ resembles a ghost residing within a present it does not recognise.

To conclude this section I want to be clear in the importance of rejecting pessimism. The concepts by Fisher and Jameson could easily be interpreted as fatalistic and miserable, but I don’t believe that to be so. Here Fisher proposes a potential solution or path against this capitalist condition: through what he refers to as the real. Fisher states three things as our best forms of the real: the environment, mental health, and bureaucracy. Here is the last paragraph in Capitalist Realism:

"The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again." (Fisher 2009, pp.80-81)

I also want to be clear in rejecting a nostalgic desire for the past or for the previous mode of modernism, especially so in our current climate of reactionary conservatism exploiting nostalgic longings for a ‘time gone by’. In a talk titled The Slow Cancellation of the Future, Fisher warns against taking the seductive path towards nostalgia of the past. Instead of overrating a past or present, we should instead overrate our dissatisfaction with the present. Fisher concludes the talk by stating that we should resort to a refusal of a present which isn’t really a present, and a refusal of the failure of the future.

Bibliography:

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Winchester: Zero Books.

Hatherley, O. (2011). A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. London: Verso Books.

Hopkins, O. (2017). Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-war Britain. London: Royal Academy Publications.

Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. United States: Duke University Press.

Philosophy Guy (2019) Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IXvaFCauLw&t=493s (Accessed: 8 April 2020).

Pmilat (2014) Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ&t=1512s (Accessed 10 March 2020).