The eerie is often tied up with an idea of agency. We don’t find the eerie in enclosed, everyday spaces. On the other hand, says Fisher, we tend to find the eerie in landscapes, which have been partially emptied of the human. 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.

This sometimes exciting or pleasurable feeling is similar to what Lacan called jouissance.Ī weird object or entity is so strange that it makes us think that it should not exist. Modernist works of art/culture can often seem weird because we are in the presence of the new so the shock of the new signals that concepts and frameworks that we’ve previously used are now obsolete. The form that is most appropriate to the weird is the montage hence the preference within surrealism for the weird combinations. This mode brings something to the everyday which does not belong there and cannot be reconciled with it.

Well, he says that the weird is that which does not belong. Both allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside. Both are fascinated with what lies outside ordinary experience in terms of perception, thought and experience - they both suggest a fascination that causes apprehension and dread. Obviously the weird and the eerie are both preoccupied with the strange. It's instructive as a music journalist to study these terms closely, as to be a music journalist means - 9 times out of 10 - to misuse language. a rich seam of cultural production that is undeniably part of the mainstream but easily retains its weirdness and eeriness, undimmed by repetitive viewing, reading or listening. It's the power and familiarity of the source material that gives the book some of its immediacy.

As befits a new work by the author of the essential Capitalist Realism it's a great read and sets out its stall clearly by dealing with some of the most unnerving, discombobulating and transcendent fiction, film and music of the 20th Century.

Now it's 2017 and renowned author, political theorist and cultural critic Mark Fisher is asking us (in his new book for Repeater, The Weird And The Eerie) to consider the two similar but distinct modes: that of the 'weird' and the 'eerie'. Then we just about survived the 'unheimlich' versus 'uncanny' wars with nothing to show for it bar PTSD and a gnawing sense that something wasn't quite right. When tQ started nearly nine years ago it were all 'liminal' round these parts.

The weird and the eerie by mark fisher