Stats for nerds
3recommend
7mentions
7people
2018–2023years
43% recommend57% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- if you want to indulge in this feeling more, read some Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism, or Ghosts of My Life
- I sincerely never thought I'd see Fisher on HN. His work is fantastic, tying together politics, pop culture, and philosophy into a cogent reading of our times. I would recommend reading Capitalist Realism over Ghosts of My Life if you're looking to get a sense of his ideas, or, at least I found the latter to be a harder read to get into. Both are good.
Younger folks have more and more trouble imagining a better world. It's crippling.
- I just came across Mark Fisher this past year - his ideas are interesting. He reminds me of David Foster Wallace for some odd reason. Here's a few of my favorite excerpts from Fisher's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures:
> Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal — from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms — but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before. Or, as Simon Reynolds so pithily put it, in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down.
> The most productive way of reading the ‘personal is political’ is to interpret it as saying: the personal is impersonal. It’s miserable for anyone at all to be themselves (still more, to be forced to sell themselves). Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves.
> Joy Division always sounded as if they had experienced one too many of those desolating voidings, so that they could no longer be lured back onto the merry-go-round. They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t want really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road.
> To leaf through other people’s family photos, to see moments that were of intense emotional significance for them but which mean nothing to you, is, necessarily, to reflect on the times of high drama in your life, and to achieve a kind of distance that is at once dispassionate and powerfully affecting. That is why the - beautifully, painfully - dilated moment in Tarkovsky’s Stalker where the camera lingers over talismanic objects that were once saturated with meaning, but are now saturated only with water is for me the most moving scene in cinema. It is as if we are seeing the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an Alien-God. Otto claims that the sense of the numinous is associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness, experience with a ‘piercing acuteness [and] accompanied by the most uncompromissing judgement of self-depreciation’. But, contrary to today’s ego psychology, which hectors us into reinforcing our sense of self (all the better to ‘sell ourselves’), the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace. There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us.
> [A]s Rudolf Otto establishes in The Idea of the Holy, encounters with angels are as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons. After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy? Otto, a conservative Christian, argued that all religious experience has its roots in what is initially misrecognized as ‘daemonic dread’; he saw encounters with ghosts, similarly, as a perverted version of what the Christian person would experience religiously.
> Capital can never openly admit that it is a system based on inhuman rapacity; the Terminator can never remove its human mask.
- Mark Fisher would say current music sucks because it's lost the ability to articulate the present.
“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation 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
- You jest, but one of the main features of cyberpunk is a sense of hauntology, the economy of futures that never were:
"Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is it just a figure of speech? The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing."
-- Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, emph. added.
- This week, I’m reading Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. I picked this up after finishing Oliver Sacks’ The Mind’s Eye last week – both are hauls from a library book sale a couple years ago. I also recently read Don't Look Now And Other Stories (a Daphne DuMaurier collection), & I'm working my way through PKD's little-known hardboiled novel Humpty Dumpty In Oakland and another book (called "The Book") that's a history of the codex format.
The Mind’s Eye is, like most of Sacks’ books, a series of compulsively readable case-studies with an autobiographical element – in this case, the overarching theme is the way people produce elaborate adaptations in order to remain functional when some of their faculties are removed, such as partial or total blindness late in life or the loss of the ability to speak or read.
The Signal and the Noise is shaping up to be a sort of forgettable retread – Silver isn’t a poor writer, but he’s not enough of a stylist to make the book compelling (the way Christian Rudder did with similar material in Dataclysm), and meanwhile, aside from some specific details about topics I don’t care very much about (like the names of specific election forecasters), the material seems to be composed mostly of things I’ve already read elsewhere – Tetlock’s fox/hedgehog model of personality, some stats 101 best practices, warnings about apophenia, a quick rundown of bayesian logic. This almost certainly belongs in that second tier of popular science books, where neither the ideas nor the style are shiny enough to somebody with a casual interest in the subject to justify the price of the thing (but I spent a dollar on it, so I don’t mind so much).
The DuMaurier collection was great. She has the kind of easy cruelty I associate a bit with Matheson, but moreso with the adult short fiction works of Dahl & Salinger (who I guess she was competing with for space in the men's magazines); unlike Matheson, she is hesitant & subtle with supernatural elements. Every one of the stories in the collection could have been an episode of the 70s anthology series Tales of the Unexpected.
Humpty Dumpty In Oakland is about on par, in terms of polish, with Dick's later work like A Scanner Darkly, but it's got his trademark circular amphetamine monologues too. It switches perspectives between two characters & it's sometimes hard to tell which is which because their inner voices are the same & they have similar problems.
The Book is very pretty (with glossy full-color pages), but thus far it hasn't actually told me anything about books that I didn't already know (as someone who has configured printing for self-published stuff & also has read some antique volumes).
Next in my queue is a general-audience introduction to cognitive science from 2000 called Mindware, whose author I have forgotten.
Over the course of my vacation (a few weeks ago), I managed to finish several books that I had previously started, and read a couple new ones all the way through:
* C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength combines some campus-politics satire with weird arthuriana in the style of The Dark is Rising and is political in ways that sometimes remind me of 1984, but the main appeal is how utterly alien Lewis’s political positions (which he takes to be obvious & universal) are to me. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that the previous books in the series are some kind of John Carter style sword & planet SF, & that this entry is a departure in genre.
* Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain is full of interesting technical & biographical detail I wasn’t aware of from a lifetime of being casually interested in cybernetics, & makes some interesting meta-philosophical points about cybernetics as a discipline being performance-oriented. He claims that the way that cyberneticians are interested in the performative aspects of processes as opposed to a focus on categorization & situated knowledge is to blame for how difficult it was for early cyberneticians to find permanent slots in academia & that it made a lot of people find cybernetics hard to understand (since cybernetics is not really concerned with how information is stored or formatted, but only with how past experience can be made to influence future action).
* Many of the stories in The Best of Richard Matheson are familiar from adaptation, but adaptation gets rid of some of Matheson’s interesting tics (like extensive use of eye-dialect and unreliable narration). LaVaille’s introduction is fantastic & worth the price of admission alone.
* Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel was a lot more compelling than I expected it to be – Mizumura’s style (as modulated by the translator) is quietly engaging, and she paints a vivid picture without ever resorting to the kinds of fireworks that I usually prefer in prose. I was not caught out by having not read Wuthering Heights. I feel like the localization was somewhat inconsistent: in some cases, the translator fails to make explicit things that would confuse somebody totally unfamiliar with the japanese language, culture, and recent history, while in other cases, translation choices are made that are unnecessary to such a person or that actually eliminate information that would be of interest to such a person. (A concrete example: the translator fails to explain that pampas grass is a signifier of a haunted place in japanese ghost stories, says that the name ‘Fuyue’ is unexpected without explaining that the sisters’ names refer to seasons, and yet eliminates all honorifics & uses the same english word for two different japanese translations of ‘maid’ while talking about the distinctions between them.) However, the translation is generally very good, & I would have liked to read the translator’s notes. I got quite engrossed in it, even though it covers material that I don’t generally find interesting (I’m not enough of a weeb to be interested in Figuratively everything japanese).
* Mark Fischer’s Ghosts of My Life hung together less than I expected it to – it’s an essay collection composed mostly of previously-published material – and I was already familiar with some of the material in it simply from being in the general ecosystem of extremely-online left-theory people. However, it reminded me that Fischer, in addition to having a lot to say about Theory, was a skilled cultural/music critic, and as a result, I have a bunch of stuff I need to check out (and a new frame for making stuff I had previously dismissed interesting).
Also in my stack (partially finished): A People's History of Computing (which is hard to get through because it's structured to be extremely repetitive, in a way that would be necessary in a thicker & denser academic volume but is completely unnecessary in what has clearly been dumbed down and cut to pieces with an eye toward the general market), Jeff & Ann VanderMeer's anthology The Weird (which I've been chewing on since 2015), Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky (natch), and Interactive Programming Environments (an anthology of ACM papers on the subject edited by Barstow).
