adieu to old england - hauntology, stone circles, mark fisher, being an artist.
thinking at length about useful ways to navigate the past
I work in internet archiving. It’s a common refrain in the sector that the internet, which asserts itself as an infinite multi-nodal brain, is so keenly prone to forgetting, so afflicted by a loss of historical record, that our work is often described as a fight against a ‘digital dark age’ - eliciting the image of monks seated in long lines, hand-copying down facsimiles of websites from old PC’s.
“Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts Of My Life
Perhaps the internet and her contagious dementia is to blame for the reoccurrence of return rumbling along England’s by-ways - the perseverative belief that if we return to the litter of history, we’ll find an ekphrasis of our future buried in the mud.
The fetish for old stones and British folklore has increasingly crowded the shelves of bookstores since the mid 2000s, with - ‘A Treasury of British Folklore: Maypoles, Mandrakes and Mistletoe’ by Dee Dee Chainey (2018), ‘Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country’ by Edward Parnell (2019), ‘The Old Ways’ by Robert McFarlane (2012), ‘Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain’ by Amy Jeffs (2021), etc etc - and has crept into the hedgerows of contemporary British culture, with celebratory movements such as the Right to Roam, Weird Walk and Stone Club, all advocating for a return to older ways; walking across the land, appreciating Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, singing and writing forms of traditional British Folk music, etc etc - before reaching the admirable zenith of being the topic of a Guardian thoughtpiece, “Cool as folk: why Britain’s young rebels are embracing ancient rites”. Stone circle mania. Only way out is down. It’s worth noting that I come at this from the heart, having spent the last four years writing, reading and making art centred on ancient England and ritual - giving these thoughts emotional urgency, as any criticism of the movement I’ve aligned with erodes the value of my work.
I’m sitting in my bedroom, surrounded by memento mori - a room filled with my own prints of old stones, anglo-saxon jewellery, fossils and stone circle remnants, an eerie environment to re-read the afterword of Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life - ‘Spectres of Mark: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New Fisherati’ by Simon Reynold. He begins by announcing the irony of us, the reader, communing with a ghost, given that it is now seven years after Fisher’s death, and the texts compiled into the book cover Fisher’s thoughts on the Derridean concept of ‘hauntology’. Hauntology can be given a rough identification as Derrida’s flip on ‘ontology’ in his Spectres of Marx - ‘hauntology’ being the continuous condition the past exerts on the present in its absence, as opposed to an ‘ontological’ study of what exists and is present.
“…nothing enjoys a purely positive existence. Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede and surround it, allowing it to possess such consistency and intelligibility that it does.”
These persistent spectres of the past haunt us in the shape of lost origins, nostalgic dreams of former coherence, aborted futures - the returning ghosts of miscarried futures that never came to pass. In Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life, these aborted futures are the echoes of the 1990s cyber-utopianism that passed through the veil of the millennium and can be heard only as ghosts in Burial’s unlistenable music.
There’s a wry acknowledgement in Simon Reynold’s afterword that hauntology, much like all late 20th-century Fukuyaman threats of future foreclosure, is a relic itself already - thought has moved on. But you can’t kill a ghost, which by nature haunts, and Fisher’s thoughts on hauntology are an ourobouros - at once becoming dated as we moves on from his 2000s cultural reference, before coming back to bite it’s tail as a vital critical lens to understand the ennui of the moment. Hence what Reynold called the New Fisherati - or the cult of Mark Fisher in youth politics. This is not what I want to write about, though. The interbreeding of these two ideas - hauntology and folk revivalism - I seem to live somewhere here. Folk revivalism is an artistic movement haunted by itself by the very nature of it’s chosen fetish - traditional ‘folk’ is a relic of history, a simulacra of a distant utopian authentic genre, spectralised the moment it is penned as ‘folk’. The more post-modernity added to this revival - the psychic re-wilding, neo-Celtic pagan religion, old stories of the land, urban-wassailing, streamed walking, ritual mask-wearing on Instagram - does not wrench it from the past. This new folk offers to its users a patriotic salve to sooth an English soul in crisis, but as a vanguard, alienates the working class by the financially gatekept operating mechanisms common to any middle-class arts movement. But it feels good to have an identity rooted in the authority of the past, to disavow this stinking present. At it’s core, stone worship is a hopeful movement - a belief that by praying to the past a different future can be nurtured.
Like all artistic movements many roads led to this mania - across the British Isles, a heightened interest in the natural world brought on by sudden post-Brexit fragility, the self-flagellating act of going outside and touching grass coming up to meet a climate-change awareness of the depletion of our natural resources, recession and global instability spiking a desire to magick & manifest an absent future, and that on-time pagan revival that returns every 20 years or so - counterculture swaying from a call to order to a call to disorder. I won’t discount the influence, too, of the question of the nation’s sovereignty dominating political imagination for over nine years now. Some Wodenite ancient spirit of Britain awoke under the feet of those marching.
When I first began enveloping my personal artistic practice with the revival of the old ways, it felt insurrectionary, abolitionist. The vision of the British Left I had grown up with gently collapsed/was ‘slowly cancelled’ via planned assassination and a failure to provide... in searching for a home, the tested leftists roots of union meetings, labour Folk, chartists, trespass - all this feels familiar and comforting. To braid a future out of the past seemed to ease the sick feeling in my stomach when I looked out into the future where the cyber-utopian projections of the previous generation had rotted away in our grip. There’s something very particular in the swamps of modern England that I’ve chosen, and I’m sure you have too if you’re reading this, to turn away from in pursuit of the old ways. A void.
“And strangest of all, they (ancient British) can endure hunger and cold and any kind of hardship; for they plunge into the swamps and exist there for many days with only their heads above water, and in the forests they support themselves upon bark and roots.”
The swamp is very familiar to us here. It brings back good memories. My mother and father were raised in that swamp, it served them well, etc, etc. I’d prefer to stay in here than to look too closely at the product of recession after a decade of austerity, stagnating wages, a rental sector in crisis, rising inequality predicting me no money to have children or a family, Labour reneging on their ‘Green Plan’ - The future of Britain is foreclosed. Neo-pagan ritual will not bring about the revolution. Dancing won’t bring the old ways back. Particularly because myself and the tories share this same necromantic desire to animate and romanticise what is dead and gone - these dark magicians, necro-fetishists in power worship the spectres of past structures just as we do - the echoes of a once coherent Britain, and offer it up again and again as solution, pre-digested. There’s little praxis here.
So we grasp for things in the past, dig things up, tend to fantasy, corvids and bones. This is not work of a healthy society, this is witches’ work that the common populace should probably not be handling lightly. The reanimation of the dead is worked from the hedges, not from the streets, for the simple reason that communing with the spectres of a dead past requires careful fingers - and beyond the new folk movement lies a thin line between stone worship and a belief that English soil is set apart for ancient, special, spiritual reasons, which leaves you a short walk to far right nationalism.
Ghosts of ideas leave no space for new ones. This essay was strangely difficult to write - I can explain it as playing a role in the self-criticism needed to be a useful activist, in unravelling what movements to pick and follow, or as an amateur philosophy student interested in the echoes of culture I see revolving around me, but truly, it comes from a bitter victimhood at my own inability to move on from the old, and produce the vanguard new - at the heavy weight of the spectres of failed futures and lost origins I feel we bear, weighing on my ability to absorb the present and transmute it into art. Reading this passage from Ghosts of My Life felt like a hand on my chest:
‘Despite all its rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new. In the UK, the postwar welfare state and higher education maintenance grants constituted an indirect source of funding for most of the experiments in popular culture between the 1960s and the 80s. [...] 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… in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down.’
I am bitter, I am furious, at the work that has been taken from me, and the brighter spectres of past art cultures that haunt my movements. The internet, the great brain of future creation prevents the act of noumenal creation by eroding your neurons like alzheimers. The internet eats others in the womb. It’s an easy circumnavigation:
Proposition 1: Modern digital life, particularly the Web 2.0 net, prevents the formation of the new, of ones own art and happiness.
Proposition 2: Therefore in order to create art, I must reject the new, embrace the old, to find vanguard creation.
Proposition 3: In our forgetfulness as children of the internet age, the mud of the past seems like fertile ground for this new … from a distance.
I hope I’ve done some justice in explaining why this path can’t be followed. And anyway, the pivot swings, and I hope once capitalism absorbs, commercialises and spits out this underground current of neo-pagan necroromantics we can critically examine what modes within aborted future we feel we lack, and summon the hedge-witches to help bring all that into the future with us. Only forward. All of this leads me to a clear conclusion that folk revivalism far from a harmless matrix through which to navigate the present. It is not useful, because it does not truly soothe the ache of alienated existence in modern Britain. But it is useful. Because it sustains the void, and the void is lack, and lack is desire, and desire is hunger for a future with more, and desire by it’s nature can’t be satiated until we get what we want - anything that helps us stay this hungry is welcome.