The Weird and the Eerie

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In cultural terms these modes have evolved in a dynamic way over the years and it's easy to trace this development via The Weird And The Eerie. The weird as a mode often occurs when everyday life (the inside) is contrasted directly with a more metaphysical realm (the outside). Hence a hallmark of weird fiction and films is often the threshold, as symbolised by doors, windows, holes and hallways. One of the earliest examples of the weird Fisher provides is HG Wells' short story from 1911 'The Door In The Wall', in which a politician becomes obsessed with a door in a wall, which may or may not lead into a mysterious and magical realm and may or may not even exist. He ends the first half of the book looking at David Lynch's masterful Inland Empire (2006) from nearly a century later which is a nightmarish rabbit warren-like network of nothing but thresholds, with all rational narrative and characterisation absent, and only an overwhelming sense of weirdness left. After a period teaching in a further education college as a philosophy lecturer, [9] Fisher began his blog on cultural theory, k-punk, in 2003. [10] Music critic Simon Reynolds described it as "a one-man magazine superior to most magazines in Britain" [2] and as the central hub of a "constellation of blogs" in which popular culture, music, film, politics, and critical theory were discussed in tandem by journalists, academics, and colleagues. [11] Vice magazine later described his writing on k-punk as "lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets". [12] Fisher used the blog as a more flexible, generative venue for writing, a respite from the frameworks and expectations of academic writing. [13] Fisher also co-founded the message board Dissensus with writer Matt Ingram. [2] Career [ edit ]

Mark Fisher (1968-2017) was a Visiting Fellow in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London. The Weird and the Eerie was published posthumously in 2017. Main articles: Hauntology and Hauntology (music) Mark Fisher lecturing on the topic "The Slow Cancellation of the Future" in 2014 Fisher's short book of essays, The Weird and The Eerie, is developed from arguments he made on his iconic K-Punk blog, andlooksat how the weird and the eerie work their way through popular culture. Like so much of his writing, it is lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets.

Fisher’s terms are relatively clear. “What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange.” For Fisher, the strange is, quite simply, “a fascination for the outside […] that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.” But the weird and the eerie are quite different in how they apprehend the strange. As Fisher writes, “the weird is constituted by a presence – the presence of that which does not belong.” There is something exorbitant, out-of-place, and incongruous about the weird. It is the part that does not fit into the whole, or the part that disturbs the whole – threshold worlds populated by portals, gateways, time loops, and simulacra. Fundamental presumptions about self, other, knowledge, and reality will have to be rethought. “The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. There is something where there should be nothing, or there is nothing where there should be something.” Here we encounter disembodied voices, lapses in memory, selves that are others, revelations of the alien within, and nefarious motives buried in the unconscious, inorganic world in which we are embedded.

Eeriness, however, is produced when something is absent: "We find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human." Think of an empty housing estate, its residents "decanted" by the council to make way for luxury flats, cranes rotating silently above. Weirdness abounds at the edge between worlds; eeriness radiates from the ruins of lost ones.a b Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK; Washington [D.C.]: Zero, 2009); ISBN 978-1-84694-317-1 (pbk.); 1846943175 (pbk.). What does Solaris want? Does it want anything, or are its communications better thought of as automatic emissions of some kind? What is the purpose of the visitors that it sends? You could almost see the planet as a combination of externalised unconscious and psychoanalyst, which keeps sending the scientists undischarged traumatic material with which to deal. Or is the planet granting what it “thinks” are the wishes of the humans, grotesquely “misunderstanding” the nature of grief, almost as if it is an infant gifted with great powers? The film turns on the eerie impasse that arises when mismatching modes of intelligence, cognition and communication confront one another — or, it would be better to say, fail to confront one another. The sublime alterity of the Solaris ocean is one of cinema’s great images of the unknown. Early on, Fisher rinses Freud’s essay Unheimlich (uncanny/unhomely) as ‘disappointing as any mediocre genre detective’s rote solution to a mystery’ by only putting the ‘strange within the familiar’. Rather, he suggests that the weird and the eerie ‘allows us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.’ For Fisher, the weird points towards ‘wrongness’, carefully pointing out that it is not the thing itself that is wrong, but rather our conception of the world. The eerie is more subtle – characterized by a feeling of not knowing if something is there, contrasting presence with absence (‘the failure of presence’) OR something is present when there should be nothing (‘the failure of absence’).

In Cano’s view, Fisher’s posturing can be dangerous if mourning his loss is romanticized. “We can’t equate that to the experience of continuing to have him as a living theoretician. He was basically a 21st-century Spinozist. He linked thought with corporeality; that is why his suicide is so traumatic. To keep Fisher’s voice heard, you have to avoid making him a fetish.” While such books can be informative and helpful, reading them can be akin to the slightly woozy feeling one has after having gone down a combined Google/Wikipedia/YouTube rabbit-hole, emerging with bewildered eyes and terabytes of regurgitated data. However, recent writing on the horror genre takes a different approach, eschewing the poles of either the popular or the academic for a perhaps yet-to-be-named third space. One book that takes up this challenge is Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, published this year. (Fisher is likely known to readers through his blog K-punk, which had been running for almost two decades before his untimely death.) What Fisher’s study shares with other like-minded books is an interest in expanding our understanding of the horror genre beyond the genre itself, and he does this by focusing on one of the deepest threads in the horror genre: the limits of human beings living in a human-centric world. Fisher, Mark, Goldsmiths, University of London". gold.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 22 June 2015 . Retrieved 1 August 2015.

Exhibiting Poetry Today”. Collaboration and Politics in Thomas Hirschhorn and Manuel Joseph; by EricLynch

Hay una idea general que obsesiona y seduce, que atraviesa todos los textos (como el fantasma de Marx) y que nunca logra ser enunciado, pero que podría formularse como una apuesta por interrogar los mecanismos que intervienen en la interacción entre lo que es ficticio y lo que es real, entre lo que ha sido producido y el marco que lo va reproduciendo, entre el artefacto cultural disponible en el mercado y el consumidor que lo escoge. No es la intención de Fisher en este libro, ni siquiera lo menciona, pero es una idea que está flotando, como si tratara de averiguar por dónde la ficción altera o irradia en la realidad. No lo logra, nunca devela el misterio (ni de los relatos que aborda ni de estas posibles preguntas), pero deja la huella, la pisada, el papelito sobre el suelo lunar, por decirlo de alguna manera, la evidencia casi anónima de que alguien estuvo o quiso estar merodeando por aquí. ¿Cuál aquí? El aquí oscuro e insondable, incognoscible, que se extiende sin fin detrás de un simple elemento inoportuno o de una situación dirigida por lógicas descnocidas. a b c d e f " Mark Fisher's K-punk blogs were required reading for a generation" by Simon Reynolds, The Guardian, 18 January 2017 ACTION #5 [THE POET AS PRODUCER] & ACTION #6 [THE BUSINESS OF MR JULIUS CAESAR AFTER BRECHT OR THE MIGRANTS OF REGGIOCALABRIA] Many books on the horror genre are concerned with providing answers, using varieties of taxonomy and psychology to provide a therapeutic application to “our” lives, helping us to cathartically purge collective anxieties and fears. For Fisher, the emphasis is more on questions, questions that target the vanity and presumptuousness of human culture, questions regarding human consciousness elevating itself above all else, questions concerning the presumed sovereignty of the species at whatever cost – perhaps questions it’s better not to pose, at the risk of undermining the entire endeavor to begin with.Y también: «la sensación de lo espeluznante es muy diferente a la de lo raro. La manera más sencilla de comprenderla es pensando en la oposición (con una gran carga metafísica) entre presencia y ausencia. Como hemos visto, lo raro se constituye por una presencia -la presencia de lo que no encaja. En cambio, lo espeluznante, se constituye por una falta de ausencia o por una falta de presencia. La sensación de lo espeluznante surge si hay una presencia cuando no debería haber nada, o si no hay presencia cuando debería haber algo». Brand: Maybe it means something more — something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Tal vez por ello, por esa naturalidad en el tono que despliega Fisher para acercarse a las ficciones de su interés, el volumen luzca a simple vista compacto y justificado, pleno de ideas, frases y novedades. Hay un ímpetu que obnubila y distrae al lector, y que se prolonga con sutileza en cada interpretación, en cada comentario, aumentando o disminuyendo de acuerdo a lo que el mismo Fisher encuentra en el devenir de su propia prosa o en lo que ya conoce y busca incorporar. Es un ímpetu que presiona desde el texto mismo, desde sus propias entrelíneas, y que muchas veces emerge a la superficie e inunda y opaca el sentido, o el orden, de un posible argumento racional. Es un ímpetu que dificulta la aprehensión de lo que Fisher quiere o pretende sugerir y que ahoga cualquier juicio detallado a posteriori y cualquier matiz intempestivo durante la lectura, real o esperado, en un tautológico pero placentero decurso de sentencias. For Tarkovsky, the Zone is approached largely as a space in which faith is tested. He avoids the idea, mooted in the title of the Strugatskys’ novel, that the Zone could be nothing more than an accident. Instead of being a miraculous sign of some kind of providence, the Strugatskys suggest, the Zone and all its “magical” properties, could be no more than the trash unintentionally left behind after the alien equivalent of a roadside picnic. Here, the eerie becomes an absurdist joke.