II: Emancipatory Spectres

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In 2008, Chris Anderson, co-editor and founder at WIRED, published an article titled “The End of Theory.” In it, he stated that hypothetical theoretical models have been outmoded by “the inconceivably large volumes of data” available to corporations like Google, Facebook and the custodians of “Big Data”; he declares “Out with every theory of human behaviour, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.” This represents a weak and simplistic conception of theory. Strong theories, like Plato’s doctrine of Ideas or Hegel’s phenomenology of Spirit, are not models that can be replaced by data analysis. Equally, we are awash with statistics speaking to the severity of both a mental health crisis endemic to post-industrial society and ecological breakdown. This data does not, in itself, posit new theories of human behaviour or reveal the sources of such crises. Rather, the facts speak to the demand for theory which can resituate human societies and provoke re-cognition of our historical situation. Data and information is merely “positive” in the sense that it is additive, cumulative, changes nothing and announces nothing: information in itself is inconsequential. In contrast, re-cognition arrives as insight – the function of theory, and even discourse, since the time of Socrates’ dialogues. Insight, as Han describes it, is a negativity: “it is exclusive, exquisite, and executive. An insight preceded by experience is capable of shaking up the whole status-quo in its entirety and allowing something wholly Other to begin” (Han, 51). Re-cognition is imperative to achieve for those living within oversaturated hegemonies which enable unsustainable ways of being that considers extinctions, the eradication of cultures, communities and thought traditions as more “data” to be accumulated; nominal ingredients of the “loss soup.” Theory which engenders recognition of our ecological and psychic situation is therefore more critical than ever.

Fisher targets three aporias within capitalist realism where an invocation of the repressed “Real” offers emancipatory potentials within the hegemony: ecological catastrophe, mental health and bureaucracy (18-20). The latter we shall leave aside for the moment; the first he considers already contaminated, with ecological catastrophe featuring as “a kind of simulacra, its real implications… too traumatic to be assimilated into the system”. This leaves mental health. Fisher proposes an amplified politicisation of mental health – a “politicisation of much more common disorders” (19) – following from the radical theory of Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari where schizophrenia, particularly, was shown to be a political category and not a ‘natural’ one that identified the individualised bourgeois subject as “mad” or unfit for society. Modifying psychoanalysis from a bourgeois science to a theoretical lens reveals the sociostructural causes of endemic mental illness, reveals capitalism as a pathological system, or one that entails mass psychosis as a byproduct of its functioning. Fisher, noticing the proliferation of depression, anxiety, BPD and ADHD within late-capitalism, believes that this troubles the “end of history” thesis that liberal-capitalism is the fulcrum of human striving where freedom is finally achieved for the individual subject.

Yet, since Fisher’s time of writing (2009), we can observe how Capitalism has incorporated discourse on depression, trauma and mental illness too: the proliferation of “corporate mindfulness,” “Zen” techniques and the normalisation of counselling and therapeutic services have emerged to console this otherwise subversive discourse. Indeed, an eclectic mixture of Japanese Zen and Chan Buddhism – the traditions which gave rise to what is called ‘mindfulness meditation’ which were originally practised as spiritual techniques to obliterate the self – have been widely appropriated into neoliberal culture. Incorporated into capitalist realism, such techniques are used therapeutically in order to maximise self-achievement. They are selfmedication for the auto-exploiting subject who must continually have resources available to succeed in conditions of individual free-market competition. Therapeutic practices are inherently progressive in character: therapy involves a teleological trajectory from actuality to potentiality. Any therapy which is not rooted in a movement away from the socio-structural sources of psychic harm merely works to adjust the subject more fully to the system itself, leaving hegemony unquestioned. This appears to neuter a Gothic fear of “repressed” contents rupturing the present; the politics of mental illness is subsumed into the “reality” of a hypercomplex modern economy, which responds with new medical-pharmaceutical-therapeutic commodities and techniques to stave off whatever political threat the uncovering of mass psychosis might pose. Equally, radical theory is therapeutic in the sense that it both reveals the source of harm and envisions a potentiality beyond it, whilst, ideally, providing the conceptual and material tools necessary to work towards such a future. Theory is conformist when it provides conceptual resources for therapeutic adjustment. Capitalist realism is happy to incorporate therapy (and theory) of the conformist-dogmatic type: techniques that the population can practise to resolve capitalism’s own aporias where mental health epidemics threaten the rate of production, innovation and the profoundly unsettling transformation of the world.

We turn then to what Fisher sidelined as a source of the ‘Real’ which could rupture capitalist realism: environmental catastrophe. He de-emphasises this in 2009 because it is not “repressed” so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing (18); “sustainable” commodities are to climate crisis as “mindfulness” apps are to mental health. Both mental health and climate crisis, through this incorporation and reflection in the “desiring-production machine,” lose their subversive edge, their spectrality or alterity. Yet in both cases they are imperfectly incorporated and their reality is not entirely subsumed into the capitalist Real; indeed, both promise to incarnate more frequently and violently as time moves forward unless the hegemony mutates into a new epoch to reformulate its repression or is infiltrated and transformed by its ghosts. Climate change, in fact, emerges as perhaps the most powerful spectre of all – the vengeance of “Nature,” once thought tamed and domesticated by the expansion of “rational mastery” which converted it to sheer “standing reserve,” returns to reassert its ontological primacy over its Promethean children. Malm describes the unique temporality of climate change as “the rolling invasion of the past into the present” (2016: 10), the Gothic unravelling of repressed contents which flows into a monstrous external Other which all-the-while has been accumulating above our heads and swelling the atmosphere of the planet. Rampant wildfires, smoke-blotted skies and blood-red suns mark just one dread image of the world which once again wears the face of alterity in its unpredictability and growing hostility to hosting human life.

The recurring visitations of this spectre offers the ambivalence of a symbol which cannot be reduced to something either positive or negative and therefore resists metabolization into hegemony. Marx described how the gaze of historical time “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (which is never more true than for climate crisis) yet, at the same time, this spectrality is generative in its inspiring (literally: “to breathe in”/”divine guidance”) gift of visions of a utopic future-to-come. The spectre of a changing climate exhibits this “angelic” quality, where it visits those of ailing hope to rejuvenate them with fresh visions; Fisher returns to environmental catastrophe as an emancipatory Real when he says it “provides what a political unconscious totally colonised by neoliberalism cannot: an image of life after capitalism”. The spectre of climate change (not its statistical representation) delivers the long-sought for “transcendental,” yet utterly material axis point upon which all future theories must come to rest: ecological sustainability – which regenerates our political will and practises of global thought. Yet its negativity casts an arguably longer shadow: we are haunted by apocalyptic dreams of a world on fire.

The spectrality of climate crisis is perhaps nowhere better embodied in global thought than in music. Particularly I would draw attention to Leyland Kirby’s most recent work, We are in the shadow of a distant fire, released 5th March 2022 through V/VM Test Records.

In this twenty minute recording, a reverb-laden sample from a choir singing an excerpt from St Luke’s Passion – To save our souls from bitter, shame, and mourning / Thou bearest, Lord, base treachery and scorning / From lure of gain or gold save us / We pray Thee, Lest we betray Thee – is looped, cyclically, until the last minute where the sample fades and we are left only with the crackle of vinyl. Kirby’s music often attends to the liminality of the past: entropy, fading memories, the attrition of time; here, the looped intonation of the choir slowly breaks down as the circular form of the sound disintegrates the longer we listen to it. In this quality, the music resembles the state of a doomed hegemony as it reckons with the spectrality of climate crisis: repetition of itself even in a state of decay, entropy and forewarned death. The choir, intoning through the hiss and crackle of the vinyl, which itself reaches us through modern digital mediums, is laden with the spectrality of the past, the kind which creeped up on Eliot in the Wasteland: “at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear”. Eliot himself would have been sensitive to the recurrence of religious, eschatological messages included in postmodern music which have only accumulated historical gravity, prophesy, and messianic connotations as time progresses. The eschatology in Kirby’s music, however, resembles what Derrida calls “messianic without messianism… a nonteleological eschatology”. Cheah comments: “Unlike teleology, which always involves a return to self, messianic affirmation is the sheer loss of self through exposure to an alterity that cannot be anticipated” (390). The mournful, haunting, decaying repetition of Kirby’s music acts as a primer for this sheer loss of self, as we stand before the alterity of “the shadow of a distant fire” which, in a final inversion of the telos of Progress, has no promise of a benevolent end. As Jeffers writes in his poem looking at the archaic grave of a long-dead Irish King: “We used to wonder at the world, and have wished / To hear some final harmony resolve the discords of life – / Here they are all perfectly resolved.”

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