Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future

The late Mark Fisher speaking at MaMa, Zagreb @ May 21, 2014, a talk held within the event "Everything Comes Down to Aesthetics and Political Economy".

The "slow cancellation of the future" is the idea that culture is re-running itself within the larger frame of capitalist consumption. Endless return to "classic sounds" within music, the revival of "retro fashion" or yet another band from the past getting back together to play their hits. There are millions of examples of how we are stuck culturally in a nostalgia extraveganza. Why this is so could be debated, but I believe it is to do with the promise of market capitalism now being exhausted under the weight of economic and ecological failures. Even the presently much flouted Artificial Intelligence is a dominance of technology over content, with much of it being derivative and process oriented. 

The result is a need, from economic, social and political perspectives, to maintain the ideology that supports consumption. But at the same time there is a necessity to pacify and direct the population within the possibilities of culture, towards a benign state of passive consumption.

To quote Fisher:

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflatioat then of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.” ― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Full PDF)