To Reconise the Ghost: Blog by George Forster

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama announced The End of History. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and it looked as though the long arc of human socio-economic philosophy had reached its terminus at Liberal Capitalist Democracy. Mission accomplished. But a decade and change later, cultural theorist Mark Fisher offered a different diagnosis - that capitalism had become so pervasive that it no longer appeared as a system at all, but a fully naturalised part of the world. 

This was the crux of his 2009 work, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? But Fisher’s readings of capitalism therein describe not just of the system’s pervasive grip, but its deeply gothic roots. 

‘Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.’

Capitalism, in his telling, is less an economic system than a malevolent force - invisible, ubiquitous, and unknowable. In classic gothic fiction, characters often find themselves trapped in systems they barely understand with unseen powers, ancient laws and secretive groups. Fisher suggests there is something similar about the way we participate in modern life and its manifold rituals - work, bureaucracy, digital culture - that feels both entirely ordinary and faintly unreal. The system persists not because it convinces us, but because it encloses us. There is no outside from which to view it clearly. It is taken as a given that most of the time you spend awake must be put towards creating monetary value; that water, housing and food must be paid for; that the gulf in living standards between people is natural, logical and good.

The gothic has always been concerned with hidden control, possession, manipulation, and the sense that one’s actions are not entirely one’s own. Capitalism recreates this mind control perfectly. The profit motive forces us to act in ways that are unnatural, that are inhuman. We are able to excuse a tremendous amount of the harm we do to others, directly or indirectly, by washing our hands of fault and appealing to our place in the system. Conversely, the pressures of late capitalism are often internalised, experienced as personal failure. The mind itself becomes the haunted house. Our collective subconscious teems with the ghosts of undead ideas, speaking through us as their conduit.

Fisher’s use of Hauntology, a term borrowed and adapted from Jacques Derrida, describes the persistence of “lost futures”: the sense that earlier generations imagined worlds that never arrived. This is the temporal gothic - the horizon of the future vanishes and the past refuses to fade away. Culture becomes a kind of séance, endlessly summoning fragments of what was and what might have been. Instead of innovation, we get repetition. Instead of new forms, we recycle of old ones. The result is a peculiar kind of stasis: everything changes; everything stays the same.

Fisher had a keen interest in music, especially the afterlives of post-punk and electronic genres in Britain. He noticed how often contemporary culture seemed caught in a loop, returning to the sounds and styles of previous decades. This same phenomenon can be seen across all facets of culture, be it in the constant slew of film remakes and sequels, the stagnation of architecture or in the constant recycling of past fashion trends. In this sense, our cultural landscape resembles a gothic ruin. We live amongst visions from the past, but these visions are hollow facsimiles. 

How, then, do we create art in a haunted culture? If the logic of capitalism is rooted in the gothic, then it requires, first, recognising the ghost. To call the demon by its name, and to see the system as contingent rather than inevitable. Gothic stories often hinge on revelation: the moment when the hidden truth is brought to light, when the threat is identified, when the curse is understood. Only then can anything change. 

Whether such a moment is possible in our present remains an open question, but Fisher’s writing endures because it gives shape to a feeling many struggle to articulate. This is what we wanted to do with Monster Capital: to articulate these feelings. To recognise the ghost.