Entropy

In Fisher's usage within Ghosts of My Life, entropy names a specific aesthetic-temporal quality that certain experimental and electronic artists — here exemplified by Position Normal — embody in their work. Rather than the thermodynamic sense of heat-death or the information-theoretic sense of signal degradation, entropy here designates a hauntological condition: the slow, irreversible dispersal of cultural coherence, modernist ambition, and futurity into a residue of fragmented, decaying memory-traces. The entropic work does not progress toward a destination; it circles, degrades, and dissolves, registering time not as linear development but as the grinding-down of accumulated forms. Fisher's additional qualifier — "a very English kind of entropy" — is theoretically significant, because it localises this process within a specific national-cultural horizon of disappointment, decline, and class-inflected melancholia, distinguishing it from a merely universal thermodynamic metaphor.

This entropy is inseparable from Fisher's hauntological framework: if hauntology names the condition in which the present is haunted by lost futures that never arrived, then entropy is the phenomenal texture of that haunting as it registers in sound and image. It is what hauntology sounds and feels like — the crackle of degraded recordings, the slippage of collaged voices, the failure of a style or an ambition to fully cohere. Entropic aesthetics thus do not merely represent decay; they enact the temporal dislocation that hauntology theorises, making the listener or viewer feel time running backwards or sideways, away from any telos.

Within ghosts-of-my-life-writings-on-depression-mark-fisher, entropy operates as a subsidiary but precise descriptive-analytical concept nested inside the master-framework of Hauntology. Hauntology supplies the structural account — time is out of joint, lost futures haunt the present — while entropy supplies the immanent aesthetic register in which that structure becomes perceptible as texture, mood, and sonic materiality. The concept therefore functions as a specification of hauntology rather than an alternative to it.

The cross-reference to Repetition and Automaton is especially illuminating: entropic art repeats, but its repetition is degraded rather than mechanically exact — it enacts the automaton's compulsive return while simultaneously eroding it, so that what circles back is always already worn thinner. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that the automaton circles what it cannot reach, but Fisher adds a materialist-temporal dimension: the medium itself (tape, vinyl, photograph) participates in entropy, so the missed encounter with the Real leaves a physical scar in the recording. The cross-references to Memory, Nostalgia, and Gaze also resonate: entropic works do not restore memory but present it in its degraded, spectral form — the "stain" in the visual or sonic field that the gaze cannot quite locate, analogous to the way Lacanian gaze disrupts the neutrality of the visual field. Fisher's "very English" qualifier further links entropy to Nostalgia, but distinguishes it from mere sentimental nostalgia by insisting on its quality of irreversibility and dispersal — what is lost is not merely missed but structurally unrecoverable.

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost FuturesMark Fisher · 2014 (page unknown)

Entropy is everywhere in the work of Position Normal... it is a very English kind of entropy.

The phrase "a very English kind of entropy" is theoretically loaded because it refuses to let entropy remain a neutral, universal-scientific term: the qualifier "very English" re-embeds thermodynamic or informational decay within a specific cultural-historical situation, implying that the collapse of modernist futurity, working-class ambition, and avant-garde possibility is not generic but nationally and class-inflected — entropy becomes the felt texture of a particular geopolitical melancholia, which is precisely what hauntology, in Fisher's hands, names.