1.
In Mark Fisher’s writing, depression is, in a way, always about something other than depression. It is a reflective surface that mirrors and refracts the wider socio-political and cultural landscape through the personal. When reading texts like Fisher’s early K-Punk posts detailing his personal struggle with depression, one is immediately thrown into the prevailing social atmosphere of 2000s neoliberal Britain — Fisher’s analysis of depression is always inseparable from his wider analysis of culture and politics. Not just because individual depression is, at least partially, a response to larger social pathologies, but also because culture itself possesses something like an affective subjectivity that can take on different moods. Just like individuals, cultures and societies can enter into states of depression.
From this vantage point, while not everyone is, strictly speaking, medically depressed, certain characteristics of the depressive experience have become almost universal features of the 21st century’s cultural atmosphere. Chief among these is a kind of generalized disbelief in the possibility of a “capital F” Future that is able to positively differentiate itself from the present. From within the midst of the depressive present, depression itself feels like something infinite and unavoidable. If today is marked by depression, then so will tomorrow, and the day after, and so on. For the depressed person, what the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls intentional threads — the successive, goal-oriented projections through which a “normal” subject pulls itself into the future (I will do this, and then that, and then this…) — are severed. As a result, the future as a temporal category itself appears meaningless, no longer able to differentiate itself from the present, since there are no novel goals or developments to look forward to, only the dark fog of the ever-same, dreary present.
2.
It seems to me that this kind of depressive temporality is broadly analogous to what Fisher, following Franco Berardi, calls the slow cancellation of the future — referring to the disappearance of the kind of 20th century political and aesthetic modernism that was both willing and able to create something so radically new and unlike the present that it would jolt the subject with a future shock, a term that Fisher borrows from the post-war futurist Alvin Toffler, whose writings also were a major influence on Juan Atkins’ conception of techno.
Critics of this analysis have often pointed out that it is simply not true that there is no more innovation at all in culture today. But I think it’s important to remember here that Fisher’s conception of the new is quite precise. It’s not that there are no more good records, of course there are. It’s rather that, while there is an incredible density and variety of quality music and culture today, for Fisher, what really defines the new proper is that it is, at least initially, simply unintelligible under presently existing categories and modes of analysis. He often reaches for a “time traveling” thought experiment to make this point: If you would beam a person from the mid-80s to the year 1993, the musical developments of the electronic music of the last few years would be simply unintelligible to them, since they are operating under categories that cannot be understood in terms of what existed prior. Whereas, if you showed someone from the late 90s the music of today, they would really be shocked by how little has changed — Fisher sometimes satirically calls this a “past shock”. People in the 90s were expecting that the kids of the 21st century would be dancing to radically different, hitherto unimagined forms of music. But exactly that hasn’t happened. The genre blueprints created in the past have remained in place, musical innovation today by and large consists of tweaks and recombinations of those already existing, now decade-old genres and forms.
Under this paradigm, for Fisher, the temporal mode of culture after modernism is fundamentally one of anachronism. Meaning that it is not just that the past coexists with the present, it’s that art and culture from all periods exist equally next to each other, decontextualized and de-historicized. The past has become unbound from any kind of real historical particularity, allowing for the melting together of styles and forms that were wildly incompatible, perhaps even directly opposed, when they were still new. Instead of a 20th century “cold war” style existential antagonism between opposing viewpoints, there is only an infinite “post-communist” marketplace in which everything can coexist in the form of mostly consequence-less consumer choices. But for Fisher, a large part of what drove cultural progress in 20th century culture in the first place was a strong sense of antagonism, especially towards the recent past. When the new thing happened, be it rock, punk, or rave, whatever happened just earlier suddenly seemed obscene and outdated, was condemned to the “trashcan of history”.
This negation of the past also opened up the space for new things to happen in the present. In his book Retromania, Simon Reynolds points out that back in the 1970s, before the major label’s back catalogue became the industry’s main revenue driver, it was a regular occurrence for important records from the past to be simply not available. A blessing in disguise for the young musicians of the time, since it is a lot easier to just do your own thing when you don’t have to worry about living up to every good record ever made. Today, being able to effortlessly flip through almost every seminal record of the past has made young musicians painfully aware of the sheer weight of the archive pressing on their back: nothing less than the entirety of recorded music. Perhaps a feeling of depression is an appropriate response, because who can live up to that?
The internet also tends to present its archive in a weirdly decontextualized and dehistoricized manner. When listening to a record from the 1980s or 1990s on a streaming platform, there is no trace of the ecosystems — scenes, institutions and larger infrastructure — that made that music possible in the first place. As Fisher details in the context of 90s electronic music, it was really the scene’s finely tuned “circuit” of internal figures and institutions, from DJs to producers to promoters to engineers to magazines, that drove the music’s rapid innovation. Today, everything is instead collapsed into a single, always-online universal discourse-circuit that forces artists to take on many roles at once, making it difficult for them to carve out the time and space to grow and mature.
So it is not that Fisher thinks that the younger generations lack creativity or talent, it’s rather that the wider social circumstances under which they live are less forthcoming to artistic production in general. Fisher points to the existence of the post-war welfare state as one of the main enabling factors of 20th century popular modernism, since it was acting as a buffer between artists and the dreary reality of capitalist wage labor. But beginning with the 1980s, this buffer was increasingly stripped away and replaced with the neoliberal ideological paradigm of atomized “self-reliance”. And as Fisher argues, when subjects are forced into this kind of social atomization, the familiar and nostalgic can become something like a coping strategy, an attempt to conjure an imagined solidarity from the past that is missing in the present.
3.
Like for many of his generation, for Fisher, the very idea that there would come to be a time where radical collective cultural transformations would no longer be possible seemed itself impossible. For Fisher, the realization that this has, in fact, come to be the case leads to deep sense of melancholia, because an object — the future — that was taken for granted has now just disappeared:
So you see, things that are taken for granted just disappear. And this brings us to a melancholia, a hauntological melancholia. (K-Punk, p. 684)
One gets a good sense of this melancholia in a recorded panel discussion held at the CTM festival 2013 entitled “The Death of Rave”. In his comments, Fisher is heard constantly repeating phrases like “I can’t really cope with this…” or “I just can’t come to terms with this…”, a repeated circling around his own inability to come to terms with what has been lost. Yet, for Fisher this isn’t just a personal malaise. For him, the inability or refusal to come to terms with the loss of the object is precisely what defines the psychic structure of melancholia, which he structurally and politically opposes to depression:
But the melancholia I’m describing is a completely different thing. That’s why I’m opposing it to depression: it’s a much more conscious articulation, an aestheticised process. I would actually say that if depression is taken for a granted state, as a form of adjustment to what is now taken for reality, then melancholia is the refusal — or even the inability — to adjust to it. It’s holding on to an object that should officially be lost […] you simply refuse to accept the loss of the object. (K-Punk, p. 684-685)
If melancholia is an awareness of the loss of the object and a refusal of the collective reality of the object’s loss, depression is instead privately bowing down to the reality principle, saying, yes, I know, the object is lost, and there is nothing I can do about it, it probably was never there in the first place… Fisher associates this private “realism” of the depressive experience with the wider affective structure of what he calls capitalist realism:
There is clearly a relationship between the seeming ‘realism’ of the depressive, with its radically lowered expectations, and capitalist realism. (K-Punk, p. 464)
For Fisher, one of the defining features of capitalist realism is that, unlike earlier ideological conceptions of capitalism, it doesn’t really make any claims to capitalism being the best — or even a good — socio-economic system. Instead, it merely posits that all the alternatives are worse, and impossible to implement anyways. As a depressive ideological position, it eagerly grants that the object has been lost and is impossible to ever recover. But despite claiming that collective transformation is impossible, on the level of the individual, it posits what Fisher terms“magic voluntarism”, according to which anyone can really do anything, as long as they just work hard enough. Capitalist realism posits a society where collectively, nobody can do anything and yet individually, anybody can do everything, since “there is no such thing as a society”. That is, everyone except for the depressed person of course, who considers themselves to be “good for nothing” and can never catch up with what is demanded of them.
4.
Fisher further elaborates on the notion of the loss of the object and its relation to depression when talking about what he terms the “secret sadness of the 21st century”. In a discussion of Drake and Kanye West — two superstars that have everything, yet still make music about feeling empty and depressed — he writes:
No longer motivated by hip-hop’s drive to conspicuously consume — they long ago acquired anything they could have wanted — Drake and West instead dissolutely cycle through easily available pleasures, feeling a combination of frustration, anger, and self-disgust, aware that something is missing, but unsure exactly what it is. (K-Punk, p. 393)
With modernist-futurist discourse largely gone from popular culture, the loss of the object — the future — is not experienced directly, but indirectly, as a vague “spectral presence” and sense of sadness and loss, especially among the young:
I think that they [the young] still feel a need for futurism, but it’s in terms of a spectral, virtual presence of the former sense of it. I think that this leads to the fact that there’s no specific discontent about the present. But when you produce something and you have the feeling that everything’s already been done… it’s sad, you know? (K-Punk, p. 689)
I find the idea of there being a prevailing sadness despite there being no “specific discontent about the present [state of cultural production]” quite pertinent. I have found that people often tend to want to strongly reject the notion that the present is lacking anything, and yet, nobody will seriously argue that we currently have anything like the immense innovations that existed in the music of the post-war years. For younger generations, the loss of the future is present, but only rarely felt acutely, instead just kind of accepted as part of the underlying reality in which we live: well, they had bands like this in the 80s or 90s, but of course we don’t have anything like that today, because why would we…?
If this kind of attitude is “depressive” in the sense that it resigns itself to the loss of the object, then hauntology is melancholic in that it posits an awareness and subsequent refusal of the loss of the object. It “constitutes a refusal to give up on the desire for the future”. Often misunderstood as just a special form of nostalgia, for Fisher hauntology is not nostalgic — instead of referring to any specific empirical past, it looks towards the past’s virtual futures that never came to be, the still-unfulfilled hopes and promises of the post-war era. It points to the fact that there was a moment in time when it was almost universally agreed upon across the political spectrum that there would be a universal 20-hour work week in the future. That today, this seems to us as alien and impossible as flying cars or inter-galaxy space travel is both a grim reminder of the political consequences of neoliberalism’s depressive realism and the latent utopian political content of hauntology, pointing towards a future-to-come that is still haunting us with its spectral presence, refusing depression’s reality principle.
5.
When thinking about depression, hauntology and utopia in the context of Mark Fisher’s work, one inevitably stumbles across his frequent engagement with electronic dance music and rave culture. Fisher’s own history with this music and culture dates back to his time as a graduate student at Warwick university in the 1990s. At that time, early electronic dance music’s future rush was a perfect fit to the manic cyber-theory that Fisher, Nick Land, Kodwo Eshun and others were channeling at the infamous CCRU. But as everyone knows, the music’s future rush wouldn’t last forever, already by the mid-90s, its breakneck creative pace came to a noticeable slowdown. As Simon Reynolds chronicles:
The participants [of rave culture] had hurtled down the road of excess at top speed only to crash into various aesthetic and spiritual dead ends. Once so future-focused, ravers began to look back wistfully. (Retromania, p. 234)
Fisher’s point in this respect is that, even though rave may have only possessed the future briefly, there is still something quite miraculous about that fact, since it should have never had it to begin with, at a time when modernist futurism was already considered long passé in the art world and tepid Brit-Pop was dominating the charts. Fisher further elaborates on these themes in a lesser known essay called Baroque Sunbursts that traces the political implications of 90s rave culture happening in the direct wake of Thatcherism and Blairite post-Thatcherism, at a time when the neoliberal psychic privatization of culture, particularly in the UK, was already well underway.
And in that moment, rave not only made the impossible possible, it did so by making use of the latest technology developed under capitalism, thus pointing to the possibility of a political constellation that abolishes capitalism while plugging into the same desire-circuits that it thrives off, what Fisher later also called post-capitalist desire. For him, this also explains why the British state’s response to rave was so draconian and apparently disproportionate for a seemingly “non-political” movement, leading to the formation of new laws like the infamous 1994 Criminal Justice Act. There were mass police deployments and the development of new tracking and surveillance technologies that would later come to be used more broadly. All of that for what, on a surface level, amounted to kids in fields dancing to music without much calls to concrete political action. But of course, what was politically incisive about rave weren’t the slogans, or lack thereof. It was the lived practice of a generation of young people refusing the “sadness of work” and experimenting with alternative social arrangements and ways of living, implicitly challenging the reality principle of the established political order.
In the posthumously published introduction to his unfinished book on Acid Communism, Fisher problematizes what he diagnoses as a common depressive attitude on the political left. In this context, he makes the simple, but incisive argument that, rather than the left, it is really capitalism that is always playing on the defensive side, because it is always forced to continuously ward off an almost infinite number of — no matter how small or large — collective impulses that threaten the established sense of “reality”, pointing to the possibility of a different socio-political arrangement. In a way, this argument could be seen as the utopian reversal of Fisher’s argument that personal experiences of depression are a refraction of wider social and political life. If during experiences of depression, the subject feels the whole “reality” of the world’s social pathology on its psychic back, then during such utopian moments, the subject suddenly feels a break in reality, the weightlessness of a whole new possible world. For a subject, experiencing such a “crack in reality” can have profound psychic implications. As Leyland Kirby, aka The Caretaker, states in the context of his Death of Rave project:
Everyone thought everything was possible on those long nights [in the early days of the rave movement]. The World was ours. Now I think this generation is very disillusioned. They saw a glimpse of light on the dance floors, but that light has gone out and the future seems grim and predictable. (Retromania, p. 357)
I find it striking how closely intertwined depressive and utopian moments are in this account. For these subjects, experiencing the possibility of a different kind of life has made a return to “grim and predictable” reality all the more unendurable, resulting in an almost textbook description of depression. A similar account can also be found in the book Der Klang der Familie, an oral history of the early years of the Berlin techno scene. In it, many of the protagonists express a vague yearning for the loss of something special that felt very graspable in those early years. The unique historical situation of post-unification Germany, in combination with new music and new drugs enabled a singular feeling of community among the small and tight-knit early scene. But this situation would only last for a few years. By the mid-90s, techno and rave culture had gone mainstream and become big business. The unique sense of community that was present during those early years of the scene could no longer be sustained.
Some of those involved in those early years were simply unable to cope with the fact that the rest of life wasn’t going to be like this. Being thrown out of rave-utopia and into the cold reality of everyday capitalist life broke something in the very core of their subjectivity, turning them into life-long “reality casualties” — in a way textbook depressives, but also true melancholics in the sense of being unable or unwilling to accept the loss of the object. This ambiguous mixture of depression and melancholia can also be felt in Fisher’s account of “post-rave London” in his discussion of Burial:
Burial’s London is a wounded city, populated by ecstasy casualties on day release from psychiatric units, disappointed lovers on night buses, parents who can’t quite bring themselves to sell their Rave 12-inches at a carboot sale, all of them with haunted looks on their faces, but also haunting their interpassively nihilist kids with the thought that things weren’t always like this. (Ghosts Of My Life, p. 99)
Far from incidental, I think for Fisher this “thought that things weren’t always like this” is precisely the positive content of melancholia that is lacking in depression: the possibility of a collective re-appraisal of how things could be different than they currently are.
6.
It seems to me that what all these accounts ultimately revolve around is really the question of what remains after the party, the spectral traces that keep haunting reality. What now, on this infinite morning after? The final flyer of Berlin’s Ostgut club (the predecessor to Berghain) featured an image of birds in flight, along with a single word, the neologism Restrealität, “remainder-of-reality”. What reality though, the reality of the everyday, or rather the sense of reality (or un-reality) that emerged during “those long nights”? Perhaps at some point, it is longer possible to tell which is which, with both sides having been fractured and melted into a single broken fragment of what used to be a single reality, underpinned by a depressive-melancholic mourning for what used to be, or perhaps what is still yet to come. What I find interesting about Fisher here is that, for a thinker that has generally become known as a melancholic, he is decidedly utopian on the question of the “morning after”. In Baroque Sunbursts, he writes:
Why should rave ever end? Why should there be any miserable Monday mornings for anyone?
While Fisher is mainly trying to get at the inherent malleability of wider social structures here, I think that his affinity for the utopian side of counterculture suggests that he really thinks that, at least under radically different social conditions, there could be something like an “infinite rave” that eternally postpones the “miserable Monday morning” after. For Fisher, those ravers that “saw a glimpse of light” on the dancefloor were forced back into the depressive reality principle by social circumstances, not because it inherently has to be that way.
This is a fascinatingly strong claim, insofar as most psychoanalytically informed readings would posit that this is psychically impossible, capitalism or not, since pleasure always ends up hitting at its own inherent limit. Which is not to say that Fisher is unfamiliar with the psychoanalytic view. In a different essay on Joy Division and depression (“No Longer The Pleasures”) he states that “true depression” doesn’t set in because one is unable to fulfill one’s desire, but is the result of a “desolate voiding” that sets in after one has successfully fulfilled one’s desire, affirming one of the basic lessons of psychoanalysis: there are few things more painful than actually getting what one wants. Fisher himself never really worked through the obvious contradiction between these two positions. But I find it fitting that both can be found in his work, highlighting the oscillation between utopian and depressive moments in his thinking. It’s not that either one is decisively true, it’s rather that both are moments in an ongoing psycho-political struggle that could flip in either direction at any moment — a contingency that can be equally terrifying and liberating.
7.
Nonetheless, across Fisher’s work, rave seems to always appear on the utopian side, as a force of collective consciousness that is inherently opposed to the atomized experience of depression. The idea that a rave could be itself something that is alienating or depressive isn’t something that Fisher seems to consider. But aren’t there also sometimes certain depressive moments to the rave experience itself, even while it is happening? One proponent of such a perspective would be Terre Thaemlitz, aka DJ Sprinkles, who’s early experience with club and rave culture were marked by the AIDS crisis. Accordingly, Thaemlitz has often described a Sprinkles DJ set as being a kind of “funeral processing”; for Thaemlitz, clubs are really spaces of mourning, rather than oases of joy. This view is summed up in the famous opening monologue to Midtown 120 Blues:
There must be a hundred records with voice-overs asking, what is house? The answer is always some greeting card bullshit about life, love, happiness… The House Nation likes to pretend clubs are an oasis from suffering, but suffering is in here, with us…
Needless to say, this is far from a popular point of view. As an industry, night life is dependent on selling people the fantasy of a (limited) time and space without sadness. And yet, I also personally have had some of the most intensely depressive and miserable experiences of my life while on a dancefloor, often towards the end of a party, when the structured euphoria of the peak time has given way to something that is in a way already over, but also somehow still stretching on. In those hours, one can find oneself in a kind of melancholic purgatory, a space in which a very specific kind of suffering becomes possible.
I think that whatever such experiences amount to, it seems to me that they aren’t suffering in the everyday sense. Rather, the circumstances give rise to something that could perhaps be classified as a kind of Freudian Trauerarbeit. Standing on a dancefloor, at odd hours, enshrouded in darkness, approaching a kind of trance state, with nothing to do except to be present, there is suddenly space for feelings to emerge that are repressed in everyday reality. One is suddenly able to strongly feel that something is missing, even if it is not entirely clear what it is that is missing.
There is an interesting parallel between the dancefloor experience and the world of the smartphone here that Fisher also gets at by describing the smartphone experience as a “depressive hedonic reversal of MDMA festivity”. In both cases, one ends up “stuck” in a sort of eternal present, but I think the difference between the two is that the former always demands full existential participation, while in the latter, one is never really present for anything, since everything else is always just a scroll or tap away. Whereas the depression of the phone is defined by the crushing weight of an all-encompassing reality principle, a strong feeling of being both atomized and being totally “plugged in”, the suffering of the dancefloor is marked by a localized sense of unreality that differentiates itself from the everyday.
I don’t think this difference is merely psychological. Any kind of festive experience beyond the norm is always materially unreal in the sense that, if it were to become more than a fleeting thing, it would threaten the very structure of the social normal necessitating that people always eventually “have to go back to work”. That is why Fisher’s “infinite rave” is such a politically radical idea — it would require a total restructuring of how society organizes time and labor. And any rave in progress that hasn’t ended yet is always virtually infinite, insofar as we know it probably is going to end, but we also cannot say that with logical certainty, the liminal promise of infinite enjoyment keeps lurking in the background.
Perhaps it is precisely this that is invoking sad feelings on the dancefloor: grasping at the real possibility of a different kind of reality, while also knowing it likely won’t last beyond such fleeting moments. That might also be why the perennial question — “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” — can amount to a serious psycho-ethical conundrum. Leaving, one is missing out on the possibility of an infinite enjoyment that always could be setting in once one has left; staying, one is anxiously awaiting for that infinite enjoyment to arrive, while also knowing it probably won’t. One is hoping that something will happen, but also can never be certain that anything will happen, stuck in a perpetual state of suspense.
It seems to me that the sad feelings that such moments evoke are also related to the inherent sense of finitude that accompanies them, something that doesn’t really exist in the digital realm. The contemporary music streaming economy promises that we will never miss out on anything again, since any recorded music can be instantly, exactly and infinitely repeated. But any event happening live in the flesh is inherently “lossy”. If you weren’t there, you weren’t there. Once over, the object is lost for good with no possibility of an exact repetition. Which might also be why, when younger people talk about seminal events from music’s past, it often seems to be accompanied by an acute sense of sadness: why couldn’t I experience that, why am I always too late for everything? (Too bad you weren’t there). Faced with the finitude of having missed out on something that can never be repeated, the loss of the object is felt acutely. We might colloquially call this “nostalgia”, but I think what it really amounts to is rather a melancholic awareness of the loss experienced.
Interestingly, the reverse also seems to produce a kind of sadness: being-there, while knowing that others are missing out. Looking back, I remember some of the most genuinely euphoric moments I’ve experienced at a party always being accompanied by a vague kind of sadness, the lingering question of why can’t everyone else also experience this, why am I here, when others are not? In a nightclub environment, this is made explicit even by the very definition of the word “club”, implying a split between those that are in and those that are out. As the Midtown 120 Blues monologue goes:
If you can get In [to the club], that is. I think of one time in New York when they wouldn’t let me into the Loft, and I could hear they were actually playing one of my records on the dance floor at that very moment, I shit you not.
Being in while others are out, it is almost like one is feeling the loss of the object for the other, feeling guilty (but perhaps also secretly enjoying?) that one is in possession of an object the other will never possess. It seems to me that Fisher was strongly afflicted with this kind of guilt. He was mourning not just “personally”, but also “collectively” for the younger generations that will never come to experience the kind of enjoyment of the future that he did in his youth. Personal privilege — enjoying what the other is not — serves as a reminder of what is lacking in universality, scraping at the limits of social finitude.
8.
It is worth taking a closer look at Fisher’s exact conception of “enjoyment” here, since he has a very peculiar notion of it that is far removed from any kind of “love, life, happiness”. Rather, for Fisher, what is enjoyable about a rave is really a kind of death-drive, a desire for the dissolution of identity, an enjoyment of the destruction of everyday personhood:
Alain Ehrenberg has that phrase, the title of his book on depression, The Weariness of the Self. It’s miserable for everyone to be themselves! It’s not just you. It’s miserable for everyone to be themselves […] On the ’90s dancefloor […] We all wanted that enjoyment of the dissolution of identity, which is just miserable to be human, for all of us. Instead of that, the key kind of social technologies of the twenty-first century, then, are facializing, encouraging us back into this identification with ourselves […] It’s much better to be these kind of depersonalised intensities than to be a person. (CTM Festival 2013, quoted from this transcription)
This is an interesting account that directly inverts the popular trope that being offline and living in the moment (with “not a cell phone in sight”) is superior to being logged-on, since it is a more “truthful expression” of one’s authentic self. But for Fisher, rave is fundamentally in-authentic in its offering of a (temporary) destruction of self-identity — destruction as a gleeful negation that positively sets free what Fisher (in a Deleuzian mood) calls “depersonalized intensities”. We could perhaps also call this kind of experience psychedelic. If depression is the state of being “stuck” in the self, then psychedelia is “anti-depressive” insofar as it offers up an escape from the confines of the self. In an early K-Punk post on Spinoza, Fisher coins the term “emotional engineering”, which I think really gets to the heart of the matter: it is about creating socio-emotional spaces that allow for new forms of living and experiencing to emerge. This explains why Fisher became so interested in 60s and 70s psychedelic counterculture towards the end of his life, not as any kind of hippie nostalgia, but as real historical evidence of how emotional engineering can shape material political events.
In the introduction to Acid Communism, Fisher argues that in the 21st century, materially (in terms of productive and technological capacities), the conditions for utopian modalities of living are much better than they were back in the 1960s and 1970s. The reason for why things often feel depressive and hopeless in the 21st century is rather the prevailing “existential and emotional atmosphere” that confines everyone to the “sadness of work”. This is why he found Herbert Marcuse’s utopian notion of a “new sensibility” — the idea that there are yet-unimagined ways of sensing and experiencing — so politically appealing. In promising that there is a yet unheard-of richness of living and experience still awaiting, it posits that reality can really be more than is currently given, whereas the depressive always thinks that there is less to reality than is currently given. If depression cuts off all access to the future, then the “new sensibility” opens up a bridge towards it, by positing the possibility of experiences that can exceed current definitions of what is said to be “reality”.
9.
Private and collective experiences of depression always mirror each other, not precisely, but as a sort of kaleidoscope, interrelated, but also not reducible to each other. Fisher’s discussions of depression point to the fact that depression is always related to larger cultural, social and political issues. A theoretical insight that becomes practically articulated in his concept of melancholia as the explicit refusal of the depressive reality principle. If the depressive position is saying that’s just how it is now, no more enjoyment for anyone anymore, then the melancholic position is clinging to the idea that enjoyment is still possible, even if that enjoyment can be painful. Despite spending much of his life wrestling with his own personal depression, Fisher always maintained that politically, one should never take depression at its word — despite what depression may say, different ways of living are still possible, a fact that for Fisher shines through in the rave experience. As the closing paragraph of Baroque Sunbursts goes:
‘From time to time’, writes Fredric Jameson in Valences of the Dialectic, ‘like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays of from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces are still possible.’ This psychedelic imagery seems especially apposite for the ‘energy flash’ of rave, which now seems like a memory bleeding through from a mind that is not ours. In fact, the memories come from ourselves as we once were: a group consciousness that waits in the virtual future not only in the actual past. So it is perhaps better to see the other possibilities that these baroque sunbursts illuminate not as some distant Utopia, but as a carnival that is achingly proximate, a spectre haunting even — especially — the most miserably de-socialised spaces.
This article originally appeared on the Infinite Speeds site
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