HOPE IN THE DARK:
IN MEMORY OF MARK FISHER
ThIS POST IS THE THIRD POST IN the On / with Mark Fisher series. Click here for THE FIRST POST, “The Politics of The Dark Knight Rises: A Discussion”. CLICK HERE FOR THE SECOND POST, “HOSTAGE SITUATION: NOTES ON Mark Fisher”.
1. Jürgen Moltmann, The Experiment Hope, trans. M. Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 185.
2. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (1959; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 8.
3. Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 95.
4. W. J. Verdenius, A Commentary on Hesiod: Works and Days, vv. 1-382 (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1985), p. 69.
5. Fisher, Mark. “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/.
6. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Ropley, Hants: Zero Books, 2009), p. 81.
7. Mark Fisher and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Give Me Shelter”, www.frieze.com/article/give-me-shelter-mark-fisher.
8. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p. 81.
“Exiting the Vampire Castle” begins with depression and ends with a familiar utopian rallying call. These framing sentiments, the essay’s alpha and omega, seem to demonstrate the power of hope.
Everyone knows what hope is: the positive outlook of optimism which enables you to cope with adversity and, better still, achieve success. Put like that, hope too mirrors today’s secular business ideal. And that ideal has more in common than it should with certain revolutionary and religious presentations of hope. In both Jürgen Moltmann’s radical theology and Ernst Bloch’s esoteric Marxism, hope was identified as the energy of social transformation. “The demoralized society surrenders to its own death wish,” Moltmann wrote in The Experiment Hope: “only rebirth to living hope brings back the wish to live—and this is true socially and politically as well as personally.”1 And as Bloch put it in the first volume of The Principle of Hope: “Only thinking directed towards changing the world and informing the desire to change it does not confront the future (the unclosed space for development in front of us) as embarrassment and the past as spell.”2 Revitalising change was their shared project.
Bloch and Moltmann rooted their work in Christianity but the validity of the connection is debatable given that the noun hope (ἐλπίς, elpis) isn’t ever used in the Gospels.
It seems obvious that to affirm hope is to reject despair, but maybe it isn’t so simple. Certainly hope is something more complicated in Hesiod’s telling of the Pandora myth in Works and Days. The poem recounts how Zeus, as punishment for Prometheus’ theft of fire, ordered Pandora to be created and sent down to earth with a storage jar containing “grievous toil and distressful diseases, which give death to men”.3 Zeus allowed Pandora to keep back only one trouble when she replaced the lid: elpis, which in the Greek meant expectation or anticipation of bad as well as good. Had Zeus not shown this mercy after all the other torments had been released, “continual expectation of evil would have made life a torture beyond bearing,” to quote the scholar W. J. Verdenius.4
The other, darker hope, then, is disillusionment as opposed to optimism, clear-sightedness in straitened circumstances not wishful thinking. It is having to face the worse that is to come. It is an affliction. It is care in the strict sense, a grief.
Only because elpis was locked away could cheerful expectation prevail outside. Yet captive elpis never disappears, as someone diagnosed with life-threatening illness may discover, together with others who are cast into the spiritual confinement where elpis is their companion. This other hope belongs to the tragic, ineluctable dimension of life, where optimism has no place. When it is called for, elpis is the acceptance of truth.
Elpis names an imprisoned condition not a carefree one, and perhaps suicide is the outcome of a failure, once such a clamped-down existence has become necessary, to survive in this cold storage. Perhaps suicide enacts a longing for infinite bright space as an alternative to the cramped, eerie enclosure that someone’s life has become. And it is with such a life, his own, that Mark Fisher began “Exiting the Vampire Castle”: “This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics. Exhausted through overwork, incapable of productive activity, I found myself drifting through social networks, feeling my depression and exhaustion increasing.”5
In his writing, Fisher exposed as neoliberal propaganda the idea that the political–economic system can’t be overthrown. He insisted, on the contrary, that transformation through collective action could be achieved in spite of the present strength of capitalism. “From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again” was how he concluded his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? in 2009.6 His optimism persisted during the retrenchment years after the financial crash. In dialogue with Fisher in 2012, Franco Berardi offered a bleaker assessment: “I’ve started to believe that this precarious generation is unable to start a process of autonomization. This is because of a sort of psychic frailty produced by precariousness, competition and loneliness.” But Fisher was undaunted. He advocated “thinking ahead of” capitalism in order to generate “a multiplicity of visions of a post-capitalist future”.7 Berardi expressed the sadness of living with elpis, trapped and disheartened, while Fisher represented bold hope, defying evil and regretting nothing.
A melancholy probably it is too late encountered a resolute time is on our side. The two kinds of hope involve contrasting temporal experiences. The trapped time of hope-as-affliction is narrow and it loops back on itself. The time of hope-as-optimism is expansive and confident by reflex. There may be some kind of spectrum spanning the two conditions in everyday life, but ultimately they are apart. Pandora’s airtight jar was shut just twice: if optimism could pierce elpis’ container then there would be only one kind of hope.
Fisher’s positive vision returned at the end of “Exiting the Vampire Castle”. “The goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate—and transform—itself,” he wrote, and then went on: “Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.” The absolutism of this statement repudiated the exhausted confession at the start. Its optimism suggested the possibility of a structural break from the boxed-in, looping-back time of a depression which comes and goes, and then comes and goes again. The statement can be compared with an earlier one in Capitalist Realism: “The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizon of possibility under capitalist realism.”8 The rallying calls seem similar but hasn’t the viewpoint relocated in the later statement? It is as though Mark Fisher had, by the time he wrote “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, already stepped through his own “grey curtain” and gone “outside” in search of the space of infinite possibility. Such a movement would strangely resemble the tribulations’ flight out of Pandora’s jar, leaving only elpis behind in the locked-down gloom. Conceivably such an exiting really could reach a zone of maximum freedom, but it is also the path of suicide.
17 August 2020