The Weird and the Eerie

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Mark Fisher (1968-2017) was a Visiting Fellow in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London. The "time-shifts" that enable all this, it's hinted, originate in the traveler's present (the year 2020, which was Aldiss's future as the book was published in 1973), but near the end of the book, having followed the Creature into the far North (as Victor Frankenstein did in Shelley's novel), he encounters a setting that seems to negate a difference between past and future and that suggests the questions of "agency" and emptiness/presence that Fisher sees as intrinsic to "the eerie. In several essays, Mark Fisher argues that a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of transitory concepts such as the weird and the eerie. One of the early signs of this shift was Mark Fisher’s own symposium on Lovecraft and Theory at Goldsmiths College in London in 2007.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In film, David Lynch was always “wild at heart and weird on top,” from his early animated short films up to Inland Empire. Instead, I think of The Weird and the Eerie as one of those broken columns seen in Victorian graveyards, the emblem of a life and work suddenly and prematurely broken off.

This wonderfully provocative dismissal sets Fisher up to articulate an alternative set of terms outside ossified Gothic criticism and dictates the wholly new conceptual structure of his book. This kind of symptomatic cultural criticism can sometimes feel instrumental — how many times have you heard a version of the complaint that Žižek is simply incapable of grasping the basic syntax of a film, mangling it to rip out its political organs?

On TV, True Detective was pretty weird, with its echoes of Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow and dark nihilistic mutterings lifted from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet: The Horror of Philosophy Volume 1. As the nights are drawing in and Halloween is just around the corner, it feels like time for a review of The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher. 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. The text famously leaves the solution to the disappearance of the schoolgirls in the Australian outback unresolved, and perhaps unsolvable because — maybe — they have stepped through a crack in reality itself, folded themselves or been folded into an elsewhere. Lovecraft’s fictions, at their evocative best, are about a steady dethronement of anthropocentric models.Numerous times as I read, I remembered Brian Aldiss's novel "Frankenstein Unbound" as an example of various parts of Fisher's thesis. Both have often been associated with Horror, but this genre alone does not fully encapsulate the pull of the outside and the unknown.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This is just what Lynch does in his late films, when the celluloid itself seems to almost judder out of the gate and the immersive illusion of cinema is continually challenged by gaps and holes, the jarring discords of un-synced sound and image. The book displays his signature knack for reading popular culture (principally music, fiction, and film) in an expressive, demotic way that is still vigorously political and philosophical.

Mark Fisher is/was/will long be loved, missed and appreciated as a first genius of the 21st century.