Police: the weird and the eerie (original) (raw)

There is a saying, the police are never around when you need them, but always around when you don't. Though we aren't sure from where it came, this adage returned to us as we read the late Mark Fisher's final work, The Weird and the Eerie.1 In his most basic phrasing, Fisher describes the weird as the out of place-the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together-a sense of wrongness, the not quite right.2 By its very nature, the weird manifests as unease, but it may also signal a shock of the new, the outmoding or radical departure from our existing frameworks of understanding. To encounter the weird in this regard, is to stand with bewilderment in the presence of that which exists outside typical boundaries of thought and sight. Alongside the unwelcomed intrusions of the weird, Fisher positions the eerie, denoting an equally untoward sense of presence or absence. It is here that we might ask ourselves, "Why is there something here where there should be nothing? Or, why is there nothing here when there should be something?"3 Fisher's efforts of course should not be confused with an imaginative attempt to revive late 19th century spiritualism. Rather, as an extension of his earlier work on hauntology,4 The Weird and The Eerie continues the search for ways to grasp the "agency of the virtual", of those things which act upon the realms of the living without actually existing. By way of example, he notes that "capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity."5 Borne of, inseparable from and necessitated by capital, the police power is also at every level eerie. In fact, so interwoven...