Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future

okay yes I'm going to talk today then about some of the main ideas in my new book goes of my life which really in some ways runs parallel to or as the other side of that the kind of ideas that I deal with in in capitalist realism really and if capless realism is about the complete and takeover of capital of not only of culture and economy but also the psyche and then goes to my life deals with what was thwarted by that the traces of the trace of the outside and the persistence is of exteriority in this in this world completely dominated by capital and but what I'm really what I'm going to do today really is bring you the bad news that you already know and which is you know talk about music culture and perhaps UK music culture especially as a symptom of temporal pathology or a temporal malaise and which can be understood at least two levels one is a the level of history itself and the sense of historicity a newly ubiquitous and sense of the waning of historicity to use a phrase from Frederick Jameson you know Jameson's theorization of the postmodern which developed in the eighties I think now look increasingly prophetic and you know what was well James Timothy rising in the 80s still a somewhat marginal phenomenon still an emergent phenomenon is now ubiquitous to the point of almost the point of invisibility I would suggest and gotta come back to that and what is the bad news you've that you already know well that it's that the future is disappeared and the dimension of oh sorry that I meant to go to the second and the second aspect of this temporal malaise is the experience of time itself the phenomenological sense of time in everyday life and I think I guess my big feat is a relationship between these two things the more that our everyday life is taken over by the urgencies of what Jody Dean called communicative capitalism what Franco Berardi be phone calls Samuel capitalism the more that these the rhythms and the dispar dispersed attentional economies of communicative to capitalism take over our life the more that there is this difficulty in grasping a sense of historical moment in which we live and so yeah what's so right there so what it to come back them so what is a what if they're bad news we already know is that the don't the dimension of the future has disappeared and that in some way is that when maroon were trapped in the 20th century still and that what is it to be in a 21st century is to have 24 20th century culture on higher definition screams oh you know 20th century culture distributed by high-speed Internet actually and so there's a strange I mean what ought to be a strange sense of repetition of a cluttered or blocked at the time a timeless and in many respects slowed down or flattened or gone backwards where the sense of a a forward momentum of culture which which isn't the same as a progress I'm not arguing that what has disappeared as a sense of the progressive in culture as if somehow you know 90s jungle was progressed above Robert Johnson I'm not arguing that and what I'm arguing is that the thinnest disappeared is a sense of difference or a sense of specificity the sense of culture belonging to a specific moment that is what has disappeared and in the 21st century and so there's now a feeling that nothing ever really dies but that's not good that means that we are sailed on all sides by kind of zombie forms which persist forever by revivals anything can come back anything you know anything can come back there's there's a kind of what we might say excessive tolerance for the archaic but part of the problem is and we in since the the center of historicity is waned as declined it's difficult to characterize anything as archaic anymore what does it mean to say something like a ik in a situation when practically everything feels old and the phrase that captured this for me and which I use at the start of ghosts of my life from Franco Berardi is the slow cancellation of the future the slow cancellation of the future I think which captures not only that sense of termination but the gradual nature of it of course it's not that the future in culture disappears overnight and you know it it withers it drains away but it's at least in terms of musical truth and in the UK context I think I think we can we can say that this this waning was disappearances cancellation of the future started to become evident about a decade ago and has intensified since then and I think in that time our expectations of music which I'm treating as as I say symptomatic symptomatic and as the most obvious example of this but it's not as if this only applies to music and our expectations have declined and this flatten out of time has become more naturalized I don't I don't think we anymore expect music to sound like a radical break from the past we expect music now and culture more broadly to be a in a quite subtle if it's different it'll be a subtle remodulating a subtle reconfiguration that is available you know that is available and understandable accessible only to initiates and aficionados largely it won't be some gross sensational shift which is it's readily apparent to anybody for variety the slow cancellation of the future clearly is not just a cultural thing it's also a political thing and of course the the the sense of the disappearance of political future the sense of a future which would be radically different in political terms from today is also part of this and but it's also about and the disappearance then of like certain linear sense of time I think a certain narrative of time and with where you know time is marked in the same way that space is marked there's a kind of time marks in the way that there are landmarks and I think this is you know this was how those of us born at a you know in the same period you know from the late 60s 70s onwards you know experienced time as marked by music in certain ways that though there was a strong connection between particular periods and and music and it was no one could periodized music and not only by the year but often by the month and and that's under the sense of a rapid supersession of styles genres techniques methodologies which went along with that the sense that a sense that you know and it was really experience of modernity and through popular culture you know a modernity as theorized by someone like Marshall Burman as their sense of permanence has this sense that you know all the solid melts into air that any particular form will it is temporal evanescent it will be overcome it will be placed it will become obsolete and I think the way in which we experience that not now in culture but in terms of Technology you know we experience of modernity is now in terms of smart phones or iPhones that's where we had the sense of permanent obsolescence in terms of culture we have the almost opposite now nothing isn't there's no criteria for obsolescence in culture there's that as I said before an accommodation towards the what would previously will be characterized as as as the archaic and but you know part of the problem is there's no effective sense of the contemporary by which one could you know to which one could compare the archaic now and that in it that's as I said I think been in place for about a decade so one of the phrases I use as though there are long times as well as non places Marco's a theory is a non place as this you know the space of circulation of late capitalism which are effectively indistinguishable one from another you know airports retail parks etc etc I think years time has become like the non place that you know what is what was the sound of 2005 what is the sound of 2008 these these years seem to go and seem to fade into one another now if I ask you what a sound of 1975 was even if you weren't alive you've probably got you've probably got a sense of what it is actually but I think what's characteristic of the 21st century increasingly especially since around 2003 is that disappearance of that sense of specificity of cultural time um and you know one of the the lack of distinguishing marks that is to say of a particular period in a sense of the futuristic now belongs to the past and it has not been updated since the since the 90s really you know in the 90s with you know genres like jungle you felt radically unprecedented and they felt like that there's nothing you could you'd heard before nor could you have heard it before and there was a feeling that of the future rushing in towards us and we been caught up in that I think that's almost entirely gone now the you know the futuristic when we use the word futuristic with it's almost the same as the word gothic it refers to an already existing and established set of generic protocols it's like a font like gothic font futuristic means it sounds a bit like Kraftwerk or something like that it's not actually futuristic it doesn't refer to an actual future or indeed a virtual future that is impinging on the present refers to a set of a--so all existing associations which you know and now Bennett analyzed the way to establish a lot of I'm saying I think is is a simple kind of time travel experiment which is if you imagine beaming back anything any music produced in a 21st century into nineteen ninety four and I pick 1994 deliberately because it's twenty years ago and it's hard for some of us to accept the nineteen ninety four twenty years ago but if beaming it back to 1994 what would happen if people heard that music in 1994 and would they go my god this is this is inexplicable I've never heard anything like this this isn't even music I don't think anyone's going to do that but anyone would do that actually I think the the results would be the case if you beam back music from 2014 to 1994 people are going to say you serious this is coming from 20 years in the future this doesn't sound that different from what we got today and and if we and I and I think that's of you know thinking of that 20 year period illustrates the kind of slowing down a flattening of time that I'm that I'm referring to because if you think back of 1994 297 T for their vast sonic worlds that had been born and died in that period the enormous kind of series of mutations that are occurred between 74 and 94 or again between 54 and 74 the the speed the rapidity that their fluorescence of different sounds different sensations and that emerged in that period since 1994 I don't think you know I think that that's flattened out it's not that nothing at all has happened but I think it's hard to make the case that almost anything that it that has been produced in his 20 years subsequently was sonically unimaginable in nineteen 94 I think and it's you know it's a whole series of fairly logical extrapolations of propositions of methodologies that were already in place and the pilot that means then the disappearance of retro I think or the disappearance of the concept of retro in the very in a very universalization of retro and I mean there's always been as long as it's been popular music there's always been retro dimension to popular music that's there's nothing new about that and I think what is new about to cut the current moment then is really that the there's not the the the failure of any alternative to what would have previously been considered retro now we can ask the question retro compared to what what is not retro now I think that just that really I guess files from what I've been arguing say for far um I guess this became apparent to me in the mid-2000s and which I refused to call the naughties although in many ways they're a decade which deserves such a horrible name but was in I was honored when I was walking through a walking through a shopping mall and I heard that Amy Winehouse cover of them Valarie by the hot in deep laughter's the Zutons and and when I first had over there a casual listen I thought it I genuinely thought that this that was a 60s record you know I thought that so I reversed the temporality in my mind but what I what I know I thought that the Zutons was a cover of this 60s song you know it's a production by Mark Ronson Mark Ronson specializes in those kind of refurbished sound of the sixties of course if you listen to it closely you know you realize that it's not actually it's not 60 sold it couldn't be never less and that that initial response sort of indicates this kind of flattening of cultural time that has occurred if something were to come out forty years later I could sound like you know that could sound sufficiently like something from that earlier period um similar thing happened my first had the Arctic Monkeys who've subsequently become even more boring than they were when they started off which is purchased some achiever money when I first heard the Arctic Monkeys I saw that it's actually the video for that track you know Betty looks good on the dancefloor so when I first saw that I actually did believe that it had come from 1980 and that it was some post-punk group that I hadn't actually heard at the time but had somehow been rediscovered and almost everything about the way the video looked the way of shot the clothes they were wearing and of course the music itself and conspired in that kind of conspired to construct that appearance that that simulation and again I think if we if we if we if we actually imagined it being played in 1980 that record no problem it could it could it could very well have existed then as um there's nothing to prevent it being absorbed into the actual 1918 and I guess the reason I mentioned these things is that for me that they should obviously been classified as retro these offers something which sounds like it could have come out thirty years ago or forty years ago ought to be classified as retro yeah they weren't they were they were posited to us as if they were as if they were in a part of contemporary music borders contemporary music then if they if it can accommodate music which it's not influenced by the past but which sounds like it really could have come from a you know a historical moment of long ago long ago I mean 1980 in you noted in an 2005-2006 that alt have been a very very long time ago um I think part of the reason for this is that we consider 21st century in many ways as a disaster for musicians actually that's a lot of the developments of the key developments in the kind of music culture of the 21st century are not have not been good for musicians ultimately they the key technological shifts you could say are to do with consumption distribution of music rather than the production of music now it's not like again it's not a 20th century was a an ideal situation for musicians it's not that the days of record companies advances etc was was a house game period but in retrospect it's looking better and better actually that they're now and because paradoxically in some ways big record companies and you know insulated some musicians from market pressure action they gave them and you know that the federal record company advances that they could make money from recorded music a fact that recorded music was a commodity that could actually yield remuneration and now this this gave this gave musicians some autonomy and autonomy I think which they increasingly lack in in the current moment and I mean part of the problem is that we could say that some lot of cultural production has been effectively dica modified or has become a commodity effectively priced at zero whereas cultural producers the things that cultural producers rely on have been hyper commodified you could say you know they still need gas electricity and housing and just which I've returned to perhaps the housing is perhaps the principal thing in a city like London which you can explain this this this sense of malaise but I think the other dimension of this in relation to technology is that this new technology doesn't yield sensations you could say in the way that the previous forms of technology were music culture and music culture you know when you've got a a wah-wah pedal whatever you could could obviously hear that you could when you had samplers you could hear the effects of samplers when you had synthesizes you one could hear them and 21st century as I say music technology is certainly mutated music culture but it hasn't mutated it in the level of what you want is actually hearing you can't really hear this community of culture it just facilitates the distribution the circular circulation of music it doesn't change the actual sound of what is produced and so developing this kind of thought then about why this has happened and why were in this kind of temporal malaise why in particular its kind of music culture that that exemplifies this and the first an obvious explanation there will be the emergence of the Internet and that's you know that kind of neatly coincides I think with the time I'm suggesting with when the future definitively disappeared in round about a decade ago the you know when the the internet became ubiquitous what the internet was there before but the the domination of our lives by the Internet really only started a decade ago and this is essentially the argument of Simon Reynolds in in retro mania and and for Simon the key thing is the intent that what the Internet provides is oppressive weight of the past the ex you know the accessibility since the with the with the weight of the past on a so easily available to us this makes it harder for the forth for the new to emerge I think that's partially true that's partially true but it's not it's not enough to explain everything and another of the mark of Simon's I think is is perhaps more more telling which is where he says that what's happened in the last few years is that everyday life is sped up but culture slowed down and and it's this I think it's this dimension of speeding up that speeding up and it hit or we come to what I said at the outset there's this second dimension of this temporal pathology which is you know the experience of time in everyday life phenomenology of time and you know it's this it for me and this is not so much just the internet but I think cyberspace which is different it's really in the last only in the last few years with smartphones that we're inside cyberspace you could say you know in until smartphones we went to the Internet which we access through computers that already seems like a genteel age of the Jane Austen world love far distant from us now and as soon as you know that if I think it's not vented not shouldn't be thought of as objects which we have but as portals into cyberspace which mean that we are that when we carry them around we're always inside cyberspace and we which induces whole set of habituated reflexive reflexes and which we have to make a deliberate effort to step outside of and but again though we can't we can't just see this this emergence of cyberspace the bigotry of cyberspace on its own we have to see in the context of neoliberals Asian and the combination of neoliberal ization of post borders the local capitalist readers and really them and so what I rather talk about rather than cyberspace is capitalist cyberspace I think what we're inside its capitalist cyberspace and and this in this Deniz coincide in the country like the UK with the final eclipse of and of social democracy and with it I mean what does that mean it means the end of indirect funding I think for something like music culture in a lot of the major developments and music culture in the UK weren't directly funded by the stay it's hard to think of well there are some examples actually that in terms of you know popular music there's no there wasn't it wasn't direct funding by the state that made it possible but it sent but indirect funding was certainly a key factor the example of direct funding by the state would be things like BBC radio phonic workshop etc which were where you know if they were part of a kind of public service public service broadcasting remit and but indirect funding means the machinery of social democracy itself would mean things like you know student grants and unemployment benefits and housing benefits social housing that you know I said earlier probably if you're looking at city like London as a particular as a particularly powerful case study here and the situation with housing is probably sufficient in itself to explain almost everything I've talked about so far the fact that you know it's so expensive to live in the city and deprives deprived the culture of energy I think that private the culture of an unstressed or unprecedented a and that you know the city exists exhausted on lots of levels you know in a fairly literal level but then as a consequence of that exhaustion as a consequence of that perpetual kind of business busyness and that inescapability of the BIC WA T of urgencies and something which you know is intensified via de cyber spatial environment I think that we again we can look back to the Takeda bore period and Geeta bore the 60s a spectacle again it seems like some genteel period you had to put TV on that or you know see an advertising billboard in order to be commanded or have your nervous system assailed by and the urgencies of capitalism now we now we carried in we carry them around at all times with us um and so you know it's important to remember what in errand dollars describes communication communication is a command you know this is one when we open up we look at our smartphones that were essentially being commanded and this is a weight on a nervous system that wasn't previously dieting we're facing these hundreds of commands every day which we may well ignore them obviously we have to ignore them we can't possibly follow them all and never less to strain on our nervous systems you know must be telling some love and but to come back to then to this social democracy and the indirect funding for culture I mean I think one one particularly important example of this in the UK will be art schools and the role of art schools in a lot of major developments of music Sony from the Beatles the who up to post-punk in adult school was a major institution there again it wasn't teaching this stuff directly I wasn't teaching people to be in groups and make music it wasn't about that but the the institution and facilitated a circuit and which was at a particular kind of class dimension to it really it articles in the in that period were zones where you know working-class good guy and it was encounter between and the working class and they kind of established high culture avant-garde or experimental and experimental art scene and you know that culture would that encounter was highly productive for foot for music culture for for popular music culture and really the with the rise of neoliberalism we've seen that dismantling of that of that culture and that it's conditioned really and the Rianne bourgeoisie one of articles I guess is what I'm talking about that yeah you know I guess what you know what would once have happened was if you were a working-class kid and you said to your parents I've got a lot at school they'd say no you know I'm wasting time doing that could do something useful but you know the kid that the student had a full grant had no fees to pay so he's I'm going anyway you know with the introduction of Hart fees and increasingly high fees that that that that space of autonomy is not there and with the result that art schools are now once again as I said dominated by the bourgeoisie in the UK and you know I think result of what I'm talking about or another dimension of what I'm talking about is the the strata free stratification of culture really and the things I'm interested in on that the way I think music culture was significant in the period you know be from there especially from the early 60s up to the end of the 90s and was as a space for what I would call popular modernism then with you know about this art school encounter as a kind of engine of that we're you know experimental techniques and methodologies preoccupations and were disseminated extended and furthered and popularized you know via by music getting that's why but what's this probably reason music was important because music wasn't music wasn't just music music was a a threshold a portal into a whole other set of cultural resources really and that that circuit has closed down the possibility of popular modernism has closed down and instead we have a return ready to a kind of Kitsch high culture which is its Kitsch in the sense that it's still there it persists but it's no longer capable of generating novelty producing the new and a return to a kind of a lump and mass culture and and in that space where these two fields were were disarticulated and no lot no longer exists in any significant way and you know so with the with the decline of they were the final decline a final tax on social democracy and you know it's bad enough under new labor in the UK but a you know in the UK we fell into the fell into the illusion of thinking nothing can be worse than new labour until we had the old conservatives come back and we found here something can be worse than new labour and what's happened with the the coalition government since 2010 is the the picking off almost systematic picking up of the last remaining elements of social democracy that in a tax on social housing a tax on squatting as well as squatting and the possibility of squatting and set like London was very important to something like punk it wouldn't it would have been possible for punk is unimaginable in London today because of the housing situation really so I think there was all of all this then is there's a battle sense of time that for the everyday level but a key thing was we went down I think the key thing of something that's called experiment at that time was that you know that people were there's a space in the culture where people are freed up from the pressures of work where they could pursue projects and where they were going to lead but whether we're the immanent logic and led them not which which was which was radically open um you know those those those kind of spaces in culture those those those times that kind of space-time as radically a terrified now you know the experience of what is the best student in the UK is to be you know as elsewhere massively indebted and and you know often working lots of jobs working more than one job so that you know that's effectively closed out then this space of freedom from work and freedom from the immediate pressured time and I think what this also meant is the end of border I think it's perhaps significant like the we might look at back up on boredom as some our utopian proposition now in many ways that the dialectics of boredom coming out Situationists and going into punk you know what are the politics of boredom the idea of boredom has a kind of existential challenge the boredom presents us with the blindness of death the nested necessity for us to actually do something it's a kind of existential injunction that that's that's been eliminated now that's boredom boredom 1.0 no longer exists and i i'd say we're now in a period my slogan for this would be no one is bored everything is boring but um why does not what do i mean by that well no one is bored because we're all in undated by micro stimulus and which seamless micro stimuli so the point of where the bus stop where you previously would have been bored wait now what is the first thing we do which for a sign to cover over that the kind of terror of boredom but doesn't really get rid of that doesn't it gets rid of our experience of boredom but it doesn't stop things being boring and you know I think the particular layer of a lot of 21st century culture is this mixture of curiosity and boredom at the same time we're sort of bored even as we're curious about things actually I kind of engine of them you know as we as we're kind of insomniac me drifting through social media at night we're kind of with some level we're bored even while we're kind of curious and the sense there's that since there's no reprieve from the the the agencies of cyberspace that's what I mean by no one is bored we don't have the freedom to be bored anymore because an another level where we're tethered in we're kind of with fascinated even as we are bored and we're distracted from our own boredom from distracted from the boring nature of things by the fact that were always kind of were subject to these kind of idiotic compulsion and again I think that there's a lot be foes work on this is fine for the inundation of the nervous system by stimuli the producing this insomniac state of weather where it's no longer possible to dream anymore and actually is a quite an interesting post on there the Plan C website from this anonymous group called the Institute precarious consciousness or something like that well they argue we've really shifted from an age of boredom you know to an age of anxiety that with for ism that the previous regime dominant regime in capitalism presented the problem of boredom and you know you're in a factory for 40 years that's boring you don't wanna do it capitalism solve that problem it's solved it in a way to always solves everything by the by a kind of the fairy tale genie solution which is okay don't to be bored and make sure you're not bored you'll be anxious forever and this is the kind of um that's the you know that's this sense of kind of universal anxiety and I think it's another thing which prevents us from from experiencing boredom anymore which doesn't stop culture being boring code was boring but there's no one who isn't preoccupied all the time who can access this border and so I think what this this cause for then is you know a politics of time and understanding you know these different qualitative experiences of time and how they are and how do you know this is that the attack on unprecedent stressed that time free of agencies is part of the it is part of the domination of capitalism over over culture at the moment I'm looking almost positive this a metaphysical level struggled as either there's one the set of forces that want us to be permanently anxious permanently have our attention permanently fragmented apparently dispersed and and that that is definitely winning that is that that's the that's the dominant force of the moment against another kind of sense of time another kind of a attractor which is you know we're towards this impression expansive and more open sense of time which is now we're kind of radically fugitive a thing it's very very hard to get hold of that in particular in a city like in a city like London which I think London is it kind of doubling that like everything's block clotted from anyway by the fact that everything's so difficult overcrowded expensive and it's like you know it's like cyberspace in physical form in lots of way and then on top of that you've got the Acura experience of cyberspace and everyone and tethered and transpire that by their phones as a means to escape it but also to kind of perpetuate it and so you know and one of the things that I sort of posit then in the book then is what a whatever was this what is leaders ways in sense in a situation where it seems that nothing new can ever really happen anymore what what do we do where the future is terminated what do we do an important thing to stress here is then is not to take is not to adopt a to easing to easily nostalgic perspective and where we say well yes everything was great 70s 80s 90s now things are really bad although I think you know mustachios easily criticized it and when the opposite is far less criticized which is you know a credulous I send credulous nuts about the present actually it seems to me more of a problem then nostalgia actually is that is that and you know given the immense weight of the kind of that PR industry branding etc and and their role in in deliberately producing this waning of historicity I think can't be underestimated and you know they they're this Force which gets us to you know the problem with nostalgia of the köppen thousand a culpable sense will be that makes us overwrite the past but I think that it's a problem we've got is overwriting the present in lots of ways and underwriting our own dissatisfaction with it which were invited to do which would pressurize the D in lots of different ways them so what rather than invoking actually existent past and comparing it with the present I think it's a go I think the point of a week from which we can criticize that the current moment the point of which it can be found wanting is mind if it is in terms of the futures that were projected from the twentieth century not the actual existing past you know that it's the the shocking difference between what we thought might have happened and and what actually has happened which can be revealed by that experiment I suggested what we beam back something in time and and in a face of that I think we're almost off but it's an opposition between a certain kind of politicized melancholia and depression actually it's not not necessary and not that nice a choice of the moment but I mean okay what I mean by politicize melancholia politicize melancholia would be a refusal to adjust to the present line refuser to adjust that is to say I can accept us and that's fundamentally what I feel when I turned the radio actually the turn and I saw quite like this you know whatever track it is so quite like it but it's not acceptable you know this this this I can't adjust to the fact that this sounds like it could have come up 20 years ago it isn't just boring rock music now dance music as well whatever that I kind of just do it and even if it's going to carry on forever I think I'm gonna refuse to adjust to a refuse to adjust to a time when it's when it's acceptable for for things to be so anachronistic the alternative to that I think is is a kind of just depression is a kind of naturalize depression where we just accept that nothing is ever going to happen but it's not a problem anymore and you know and often this logic of depression takes over where none even people say well you know nothing new is going to happen now so wha yeah I did anything you ever happen in the past anyway you know it's kind of overrated these things don't worry buddy that new ever before we start bargaining ourselves down not only about the present but about anything that's ever happened before but I don't know I suggest that this is you know that then that's part of the overwriting of the present actually internment certain ways is that those tendencies and so one of the things I explore in the book then is these strains of melancholic man adjustment and as one strategy for this refusal of a present which is not really a present and refusal of the failure of the future and you know the one of the threads that I try and pull on is this is this longing this yearning for a future in conditions where a future can't be delivered and I know and what I guess so I think that is that as the authentic articulation in the present is not the one can't buy force of will alone correct sense of the future we have to accept the conditions which allowed a sense of Futurity you know have really been attacked and it's voluntarist ik action can't put that right I've really been attacked a really radically deteriorates it yet you know if we're not to accede if we're not to completely submit to this this present where the future was disappeared and you know what remains is a certain set of longings yearnings etc and it's the kind of fidelity to those yearnings and longings that is one of the things that I track in the book really um okay we'll leave it there seems a point for point to end that's okay okay

Channel: pmilat

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Length: 46min 14sec (2774 seconds)

Published: Thu May 22 2014

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[u/PeteWenzel]

Mark Fisher was always great. I think the best there is of him on YouTube is this lecture series.