Mark Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie

A weird object or entity is so strange that it makes us think that it should not exist. But by the very fact that it does exist means that it is us who are wrong, and that all of the personal rules we have previously used to make sense of the world are mistaken.


The feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird. The simplest way to get to this difference is by thinking about the (highly metaphysically freighted) opposition — perhaps it is the most fundamental opposition of all — between presence and absence. As we have seen, the weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases of the weird (those with which Lovecraft was obsessed) the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something.


We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature's products into hideous new forms.


Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps the most famous example of a science fiction film which bucks this trend, resisting the positivistic pressure to bring the aliens out into the open. The enigma of alien agency is posed by the film’s totem, the monolith, which is something like the paradigm case of an eerie object. (Throughout the film, the feeling of the eerie is reinforced by the association of the monolith with Ligeti’s music, with its sense of awe and alterity.) The monolith’s “unnatural” qualities — its rectilinearity, its flatness, its opaque gloss — force the inference that it must have been produced by a higher intelligence of some kind. The logic here resembles a secular version of the so-called argument from design, which maintained that the functionality, purposiveness and systematicity of many aspects of the natural world compel us to posit a supernatural designer. There is little trace of the theological in Kubrick’s handling of these themes, and no attempt to positively characterise what kind of entity might have produced the monolith. The nature of the intelligence which has intervened in human history, and the purposes of this intervention, remain undisclosed. The film leaves us only some quite minimal resources on the basis of which we might speculate. In addition to the monoliths themselves, there is the simulated hotel room — unnerving in its very banality — in which, at the end of the film, astronaut David Bowman is prepared for his ambivalent transformation into the so-called Star Child. The hotel room might suggest that the intelligence wants Bowman to feel at home, though even if this is the case, its ultimate motives remain obscure: is it care for this human creature, so far from anything familiar, that motivates the construction of this dwelling place, or have these inscrutable intelligences calculated that this would be a better space in which to experimentally observe him?


We are now in a position to answer the question of why it is important to think about the eerie. Since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the forces that govern our lives and the world. It should be especially clear to those of us in a globally-connected capitalist world that those forces are not fully available to our sensory apprehension. A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect.

Sven A. Kirsten: Tiki Style

Sven A. Kirsten: Tiki Pop: America Imagines its own Polynesian Paradise

Tiki is the manifestation of exotic visions of island culture borrowed from tales told by American soldiers stationed in the South Pacific during World War II: trees loaded with exotic fruits, sleepy lagoons, white-sand beaches, and gorgeous people wearing grass feathers as they danced half-naked during all-night orgies of food and music. Americans seized these visions and incorporated fantasy into reality: mid-century fashion, popular music, eating and drinking, and even architecture were influenced by the Tiki trend.

Stuart Jeffries: Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

"Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth."

"Every work of art is an uncommitted crime."

"Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar."

"The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings."

"Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices."

"Life has become the ideology of its own absence."

- Theodor Adorno

Fumiko Enchi: Masks

A woman's love is quick to turn into a passion for revenge--an obsession that becomes an endless river of blood, flowing on from generation to generation.


Even the sadistic misogyny of Buddha and Christ was nothing but an attempt to gain the better of a vastly superior opponent.


“I admit to the unreasonable fastidiousness of the Japanese male, to whom the blood of mensturation is of all blood the dirtiest.”

John Gray: The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom

Alone among the animals, humans seek meaning in their lives by killing and dying for the sake of nonsensical dreams.


Today’s Darwinists will tell you that the task of humanity is to take charge of evolution. But ‘humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. By destabilizing the climate, it is making the planet less hospitable to human life. By developing new technologies of mass communication and warfare, it has set in motion processes of evolution that may end up displacing it.


Few societies have been stable enough and resilient enough to renew themselves in recognizable forms over long stretches of time. History is littered with civilizations that have been utterly destroyed. Everywhere, the self-assured confidence of priests, scribes and intellectuals has been mocked by unexpected events, leaving all their prayers, records and treatises wholly forgotten unless they are retrieved from oblivion by future archaeologists and historians.


There is nothing uniquely human in the flicker of sentience that is commonly called consciousness. Dolphins delight in watching themselves in mirrors when they are having sex, while chimps react to the death of those they care for in much the same ways that humans do. It will be objected that these animals have no clear understanding of the kind of creature they are or what it means to die. In this regard too, however, they are no different from humans.


Modern humanity insists violence is inhuman. Everyone says nothing is dearer to them than life – except perhaps freedom, for which some assert they would willingly die.


For Leopardi the human animal was a thinking machine. This is the true lesson of materialism, and he embraced it. Humans are part of the flux of matter. Aware that they are trapped in the material world, they cannot escape from this confinement except in death. The good life begins when they accept this fact.


Matter was itself intelligent, constantly mutating and producing new forms, some of them self-aware. As a child Leopardi had written an essay on ‘the souls of beasts’, and he is clear that consciousness is not confined to humans. The difference between beasts and human beings is not that humans are self-aware while beasts are not. Both are conscious machines. The difference lies in the greater frailty of the human soul, which produces illusions of which beasts have no need.


The idea that evil is a veil covering the good is an old one. But it leaves unresolved the questions, why and from where did the veil appear? If it originated in some divine mind, the world must have been made by a creator that is itself partly evil. This creator may be only a lesser god, one of many. But how did this ambiguous demi-god come into being, if the true God is all good?


Even in the latter case nature exhibits a kind of intelligence, and there is no reason to rule out the possibility that machines will do so too. If nature in the form of the human species could bring forth intelligent machines, the process of evolution would continue among the machines.


Wiener and Neumann envisaged situations arising when thinking machines could cease to be either controllable or comprehensible by their makers. Implicitly, they recognized that machines would develop by natural selection – a process without purpose or direction. Eventually humans could find themselves displaced by thinking machines they had originally created.


If these replacements for human labour are not yet feasible, it is likely that they soon will be. Self-driving cars and telephones that interact with human voices are the front line of a rapidly advancing trend. Occupations that seemed safe because they required a level of skill or education are no longer secure.


The Aztecs and the Elizabethans looked into their mirrors to discern danger. Today those who peer into the future want only relief from anxiety. Unable to face the prospect that the cycles of war will continue, they are desperate to find a pattern of improvement in history. It is only natural that believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt, should turn to the sorcery of numbers. Happily there are some who are ready to assist them. Just as the Elizabethan magus transcribed tables shown to him by angels, the modern scientific scryer deciphers numerical auguries of angels hidden in ourselves.


A feature of reality shows is that the inmates have nothing to do. Aside from overcoming cleverly staged challenges and interacting emotionally with one another, they are completely idle. It may not be too far-fetched to see in their condition an intimation of the future for the majority of people. If the advance of smart machines leaves most human beings an economic role only as consumers, this may be how they will be expected to pass their time.


This may be the era of the Anthropocene – the geological epoch in which human action is transforming the planet. But it is also one in which the human animal is less than ever in charge. Global warming seems to be in large part the result of the human impact on the planet, but this is not to say humans can stop the process. Whatever is done now, human expansion has triggered a shift that will persist for thousands of years.

Jack Cox: Dodge Rose

She stretched the red elastic between her fingers… Her voice faltered. Something obvious appeared to be beginning to dawn on her and she frowned until the elastic had slowed to a stop and her thought come home.


Dodge had spoken about them but always in the past tense and her sister had seemed to flicker so dimly through the rooms of her memory.


The train wound up the rusted arteries to Central Station.


Her words came and went as a revelation, everything in the wake of that great property expanding into so many impalpable and inadequate dividers, being at first just a vague tergiversation and then as if the same abstract shades that had clabbered every particle in the flat turned for a moment as full as fleeting as a rush as a rush of oxygen into a spumous surplus, leaving me floating in their airy mould, surprised. I have never made plans, being by nurture far from pleonectic.