The Weird and the Eerie

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Gothic criticism, of which there is a vast boiling vat these days, has been rendering down the ectoplasmic energy of “spectrality” into sound bites for 25 years, while critics seem to arrive pre-loaded with cookie-cutter cribs from Freud’s “The Uncanny,” in which they laboriously explain yet again that the term unheimlich means rather more literally the unhomely in German, but that the “homely” is housed inside the “unhomely,” the outside in the inside, the strange in the familiar. 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.

If you have any interest in the state of the world, you must read Fisher's 'Capitalist Realism' - the best book on its subject and in its class. 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? The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report.Marx, after all, reached for the language of the supernatural to grasp at the spectral substance of surplus value or commodity fetishism. But this book feels like part of its treatise is to encourage an appreciation and the value of perhaps never quite being resolved, at least in our minds, and to appreciate the sensation that is the essence of the weird and the eerie.

Some of the other reviews here cover the book as a whole, and I won't try to comment or add to them. 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. The ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’ are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Because it rises up from the outside, and remains there, it resists simple hermeneutic interpretation. Philosophers such as Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker have proposed a “weird realism” — a rival term to “object-oriented ontology” — that replaces Husserl or Heidegger with Horror.What motivates the birds to flock together in such implacable malignancy in Daphne du Maurier’s short story, or in Hitchcock’s re-Oedipalized adaptation? As a long-time reader of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, I found Fisher's ideas and examples very, very interesting. The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. It is an important critical intervention, because it intends to carefully delineate a spectrum of sensibilities, the nuances of feeling that span the uneasy or unnerving: that feeling of being off-kilter, of wrongness or free-floating angst. The eerie is more subtle – characterized by a feeling of not knowing if something is there, contrasting presence with absence (‘the failure of presence’) OR something is present when there should be nothing (‘the failure of absence’).