For decades now, critics have debated our seemingly dwindling capacity to produce – or even simply recognise – ‘the New’. Too often an essential tension is missing from these discussions: the one between modernism and postmodernism.

For Fredric Jameson, for instance, while modernism “thought compulsively about the New and tries to watch its coming into being”, postmodernism “looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds”. The latter definition, encapsulating the cultural logic of late capitalism, is all the more intriguing in the context of music culture, since it has found so many breaks to play around with. But questions remain: what happens when a break, an interruption, becomes a foundation, or is recuperated as a pop cultural norm? What happens when the break, as a rupture from which the new might emerge, does not produce the new world we might be longing for?

In the mid-2000s, a community of music bloggers produced various responses to these questions, even suggesting how we might better act upon breaks when they appear. Most famously, Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher borrowed the term hauntology from Jacques Derrida to name the lingering presence of revolt that persists after a break’s recuperation, which they translate from a consideration of post-Soviet politics to post-rave aesthetics. However, despite now being closely associated with the so-called death of rave, we must remember that hauntology also sought to preserve rave’s already hauntological essence, as a spectral subculture enjoying a quasi-existence on the other side of pop culture.

Hauntology, in this context, was a doubling, naming a preoccupation with a spectre after its apparent exorcism. It was concerned with the ways in which certain forms of fugitive music continue to resist recuperation by capitalism, often drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who argued that “each time something seems to escape capitalism, seems to pass beneath its simili-codes… it adds one more axiom and the machine starts up again.”

Fisher took this understanding and applied it to the music industry itself, and even to its critical armature, being critical – even self-critical – of the role of the critic, who too often recodifies the New and recuperates what is fugitive into a more stable (and marketable) understanding of any given moment, placing the New back into an already existing order of things.

This position left Fisher with a reputation for negativity, often mistaken as pessimism. He has since been transformed into a thinker primarily responsible for the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. Cue, in response, a host of writers who have, since his death in 2017, accused him of failing to notice the New in his midst, arguing on the contrary that there are breaks everywhere for those with ears to hear them.

But this critical approach to Fisher always betrays an ignorance of the historical juncture he faced, ignoring the persistence of that core symptom of postmodernity: our attempts to identify and locate breaks in the midst of increasing homogeneity. Seeking to avoid this, Fisher asked repeatedly: what are we to make of the very real and identifiable breaks of the 21st century – grime, the financial crash, the rise of social media, (latterly) the pandemic – in the midst of a feeling that so much of what surrounds them remains the same? What is the significance of any such break within a steadfastly capitalist world – that is, breaks in a world that already feels so broken?

Opposition to hauntology soon developed regardless. Alex Williams, for example, took issue with hauntology’s overwhelming melancholia, suggesting that we might instead “posit an explicitly nihilist aesthetics of pop music” against this, “which in some senses would operate in a similar manner” to hauntology, but “would be crucially bereft of the quality of mourning”. He sought instead “a deliberate and gleeful affirmation” of the ways in which capitalism is capable of scrambling its own codes, identifying “those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecidable”.

This ambiguous position, later named accelerationism, sought a better understanding of the historical development of capitalism’s power of recuperation, if only to better identify moments within the recent past and unfolding present that remain fugitive. Fisher himself, later coming round to this position, affirmed its central contention that not “everything produced ‘under’ capitalism fully belongs to capitalism”. He adds: “There are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits.”

One way in which Fisher thought we might accelerate such processes was via Evan Calder Williams’s conception of salvagepunk. In The Wire 319, he utilised this term to illuminate the ways in which artists like Oneohtrix Point Never and V/Vm opposed the “‘inherent flatness and equivalency of postmodern cultural production [Williams’s definition]… in which any sign can be juxtaposed with any other in a friction-free space” by retaining “the specificity of cultural objects, even as it bolts them together into new assemblages”.

Fisher’s interest in these positions – and various others besides – has largely gone unnoticed by a subsequent generation of critics. His engagement with feminist, Afrofuturist and accelerationist discourses sought the reconstruction of a popular modernism that could avoid the postmodern traps so many of his peers wallowed in. This wallowing has not ceased since his death.

Ironically, given the mounting opposition to his hauntological writings from the 2000s and early 2010s, contemporary debates that choose to joust with him also end up stuck there. They fail to recognise that Fisher never denied the 21st century’s various breaks, alongside the fact that what he truly wanted was a new world, which could be salvaged from the wreckage of this one. 

​Mattie Colquhoun (aka Xenogothic) is a writer, researcher and biographer of Mark Fisher. This essay appears in The Wire 500. Pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop.Wire subscribers can also read the essay in our online magazine library.