S01E03

hat Fredric Jameson once identified as the cultural logic of late capitalism—“the waning of historicity,” i.e., the demise of popular modernist movements and the installation of a stagnant, homogeneous culture industry that recycles old forms while emptying them of their real historical content—no longer requires any of the author’s obscurantist language to describe. Twenty years into the new millennium, the pessimistic adages of late-20th-century theorists have become so tangible that we now feel them in our muscles. It’s no coincidence that the late Mark Fisher wrote so often about the correlation between the cementing of what we now know as neoliberalism and the increasing ubiquity of depression, a condition which he himself struggled with and sadly succumbed to in 2017, when he took his own life. If Fisher what Jameson, it should not be taken for granted that the effects of this cultural logic are uniformly experienced by all. What Fisher, an adolescent of Thatcher’s Britain, referred to as “hauntology,” a melancholy for futures never actualized (and popular modernist movements that never came to fruition), is not the same trauma experienced by those of us whose lives have come after the so-called End of History. How could we mourn the loss of something that was never ours to gain in the first place?