Ontological Indeterminacy

Ontological indeterminacy, as theorized in Fisher's ghosts-of-my-life-writings-on-depression-mark-fisher, names a condition in which the very nature of a fictional world — not merely the reliability of a narrator's account of that world — is put into systematic doubt. Fisher arrives at this concept through a contrast with the more familiar literary device of the unreliable narrator, which generates epistemological problems: the reader cannot trust what they are being told, but the world being described is presumed to have a stable, determinable structure beneath the account's distortions. Ontological indeterminacy goes one level deeper. Here it is not that we lack access to an otherwise coherent fictional world; it is that the fictional world itself lacks ontological consistency — its rules, its ground, its very being are suspended or contradictory. For Fisher, this condition is produced not by randomness or surrealist free-play but by the systematic violation of self-imposed rules, a formal strategy he associates with Nolan's cinema. The "self-imposed" quality is crucial: it is precisely because a set of rules was established that their violation registers as a collapse of the world rather than merely a twist in the plot.

This concept sits within Fisher's broader cultural-critical project of distinguishing genuine formal radicalism from what he calls "easy difficulty." The aesthetic move from epistemological unreliability to ontological indeterminacy marks, for Fisher, a qualitative escalation: it is not that something is hidden or withheld from the viewer/reader, but that the coordinates of reality within the fiction are themselves unstable. This aligns loosely with the Lacanian distinction between imaginary misrecognition (a problem of access, of the subject's distorted perspective) and the Real as that which resists symbolization altogether — ontological indeterminacy evokes not a gap in knowledge but a gap in being, a hole in the fictional Real that no amount of narrative clarification could fill.

Within ghosts-of-my-life-writings-on-depression-mark-fisher, ontological indeterminacy occupies a pivotal argumentative position: it is the positive counterterm to "easy difficulty," the aesthetic achievement that genuine formal radicalism reaches when it refuses the consolation of a hidden-but-stable world. It cross-references Fantasy and Repetition in particularly productive ways. Fantasy, in the Lacanian sense, is precisely the structural frame that gives reality its ontological consistency — it is what holds the world together for the subject. Ontological indeterminacy can then be read as a formal procedure that does to the fictional world what traversal of the fantasy does to the subject's ordinary reality: it exposes the constructed, contingent character of the coordinates that made experience feel solid. Where Fantasy conceals the Real by papering over the void, a work that produces ontological indeterminacy refuses that concealment and lets the void show through the fabric of the fiction itself.

The link to Repetition is equally telling. Repetition in Lacanian theory is animated by the structural impossibility of the missed encounter — the Real is circled but never grasped. Ontological indeterminacy, produced by the systematic violation of self-imposed rules, creates an analogous structure at the level of narrative form: the viewer returns to scenes or sequences expecting the rules to hold (automaton), only to encounter a breakdown that cannot be resolved (tuché). The violated rule functions as the mark that was supposed to reproduce a stable world but instead effaces the very ground it sought to establish. Hauntology, Trauma, and the Sublime are also cross-referenced, and ontological indeterminacy sits naturally among them as a formalization of the way certain aesthetic works refuse to let the past — or the rules — settle into a secure ontological given, keeping both in a state of unresolved, Real-adjacent suspension.

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

There's a shift from the epistemological problems posed by unreliable narrators to a more general ontological indeterminacy, in which the nature of the whole fictional world is put into doubt.

The quote's theoretical weight rests on the precision of its conceptual opposition: "epistemological problems" versus "ontological indeterminacy" marks a move from a question of access (what can we know?) to a question of being (what exists?). The phrase "the whole fictional world is put into doubt" is crucial because it locates the instability not in any character's perspective or any narrator's unreliability, but at the level of the world's own structure — making this a formal, not merely hermeneutic, condition.