No Time | Mark Fisher | Virtual Futures 2011

I can hardly remember a time when there was such a thing as a weekend or when I had a Filofax and I thought about whose name I would add to my address book I suppose I do my job better but my job is my whole life or my whole life is my job when I moved from calendar to address book to email to text messages I feel like a master of the universe everything is so efficient I'm a maximizing machine I'm on my blackberry until 2:00 in the morning I didn't sleep well but I still can't keep up with what is sent to me - then in the elevator to the 62nd floor I just I started to think about the deal I was supposed to be brokering the Abraxas buyouts of m/s MCL Parnassus I hadn't given any thought to it for days but now as soon as I tried to recall any of the specifics the whole subject became a blur I kept hearing the phrase option value pricing model in my head hearing over and over option value pricing model option value pricing model but I had only the vaguest notion anymore what this meant it was like waking up after a dream in which you've been speaking a foreign language I mean to find out he that you don't speak the language at all and barely even understand a word of it 3 in the 1990s prozac culture was intermingled with a new economy hundreds of thousands of operators directors and managers of the Occidental economy took innumerable decisions in a state of chemical euphoria and psycho farmer like pharmacological lightheadedness but in the long term the organism collapsed unable to support indefinitely the chemical euphoria that it sustained competitive enthusiasm and productive fanaticism the acceleration of information exchange is produced and is producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind individuals are not in a position to process the immense and always growing massive information enters their computers their cell phones their television screens their electronic device Diaries and their heads however it seemed indispensable to follow recognize evaluate process all this information if you want to be efficient competitive victorious the necessary time for paying attention to the fluxes of information is lacking the consequence is in front of our eyes political and economic decisions no longer respond to a long-term strategic rationality and simply follow media interests on the other hand we are always less available so giving our attention to others gratuitously our attention is always besieged and therefore we assign it only to our careers to competition and to economic decisions and in any case our temporalities cannot follow the insane speed of the hyper complex digital machine human beings tend to become the rillette ruthless executors of decisions taken without attention for in the instant of realizing he was lost time became Marvis marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto and guessed eternities in the space between one word and the next or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him 5 and network devices encourage a new notion of time because they promised that they can learn more activities on to it because you can text while doing something else texting doesn't seem to take time but to give you time this is modern welcome it's magical 6 the swipe card doesn't work the machine senses anxiety you're sure of it and knows the card is not yours you try the card again nothing same red light the card isn't yours but you should have access to the building you had to borrow someone else's card because it's only possible to get swipe cards between the hours of 9:00 and 1:00 and you are working at these times someone is behind you you feel uncomfortable will they notice that the card does not belong to you you try the card again again nothing red light your phone rings you struggle to get it out of the bag by the time you have it the call has gone through to the answering service you see that the call has come from another of your employers a familiar anxiety grips you what have you done wrong now but you have no time to worry about that at the moment he tried the swipe card again at last the green light comes on you're through the door rushing that down the corridor which floor were you supposed to be on you rifle through your bag until you find the documentation you should be on this floor but at the other end of the corridor you'll walk towards the room number but suddenly your progress is blocked there was a no entry sign an office that cuts the corridor in half and through which there is no access it's the nightmare topology every time you seem to get close another obstacle appears you'll have to go out of the corridor down the stairs and up the next set of stairs facing a number of swipe card access doors on the way by now the five minutes you hope to have before you start is evaporating rapidly but a time you reach the room you are heading for you're already late you log onto the computer or you try to the log on is rejected you try again no luck then you remember you're trying to log in from one of the using a login from one of the other institutions that you work at it's difficult to keep track sometimes you remember the correct login quickly scan one of your email accounts see any email from an administrator have you filled in your bank details form yes you feel that anything weeks ago but of course you can't be sure maybe you only thought you fill it in have they lost it flash of anxiety would you not be paid this month last year when you filled in all the same forms that you have to complete again this year you were not paid for a whole 50 hour contract until you pointed out the mistake well the same thing happened again but there's no time to worry about this now you have a room of 70 students waiting to be taught such as life in the UK's bloated and over funded public institutions seven then there is this colossal a huge searchable public domain which is now at your fingertips there are methods to track where the eyeballs of the users are going there are intellectual property problems in revenue it interferes with scholarship as much as aids Act there is a practice of a rack picking with digital material of loops track sampling there are search engines which are becoming major intellectual and public political actors there is collective intelligence or if you don't want to dignify it with that term you can just call it internet meme ooze but it's all over the place just termite mounds of poorly organized and extremely potent knowledge quantifiable interchangeable data with newly networked relations we can't get rid of this stuff it was a new burden it was there as a fact on the ground there's a fete accompli okay so I've started with sort of montage of quotations that from a number of texts the first one was from sherry turkle's recent book alone together the second half of which is devoted to a kind of series of reports the phenomenological reports really on people's engagement with the new communications technology and the particular emphasis on young people the second quote is from Alan Glenn's novel the dark fields which was recently adapted into the film limitless I mean it's not a very good novel but it's a timely novel for a time of no time actually and part of the interest of the novel for me lay it lay in its resonance with the third quotation which was from Franco Berardi's book excuse me and precarious rhapsody and it's striking how I'm in fact Glynn's 2001 novel tells practically the same story that variety is now telling that according to variety and a provocative hypothesis that calm crash was caused by a conveyor of psychic infrastructure it's not that you it's not that first of all there's an economic crash then there's there's a depression for variety it's that that the crash happens because of the psychic infrastructure cannot withstand the pressure that was put on it and then another sort of echo between these two texts was a lot of drugs limitless but the the book as it was then called the dark field is really about a new smart drug and which was called MDT and this drug basically allows people to perform at greater speeds to understand things which they couldn't understand and basically to work faster in the main the main thing that designer drug provides is the ability to do more work in less time and now they're interesting I thank that I mean what there's quite a section I quoted you was after he the the the lead character realizes maybe should became this drug quite so much maybe there might be a few downsides of massively speeding up your nervous system and your neurology to this degree you know it's at that point there's suddenly the massive deal that you suddenly found himself working on becomes not only incomprehensible but boring in order to in order to find and high finance interesting you have to be on kind of one drug or another really ok that the next protection came from a novel which came out a similar time as Glen's which is a more celebrated novel which is and Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections which Ferrari argues it's really the one most important of of the early 21st century for capturing really that the American depression a kind of cyber depression the sixth quote was from some idiots not too far from here and the seventh one the last one was from Bruce Sterling's recent and trans drastic transmedia line and called a temper allottee for the creative artist and buddy what it wanted to register today I suppose was a sense of disappointment a sense of disappointment when we think about the expectations of the nineties and the reality of sort of actually existing cyberspace really and when when one thinks back to the mid nineties when a virtual futures conferences were happening in a sense much of what was predicted at those conferences has become as come part of everyday life has become taken for granted but there's a sense of the rich since then everything has changed but nothing has really happened there's a sense in which kind of technological upgrades have taken a place of a kind of cultural development and I would want to suggest really is that there is a correlation between these two things that's the kind of the kind of technological capture that has happened in the last decade is directly responsible or not in itself but is a major part of a kind of cultural slowdown so the number of senses of this phrase no time that I want to bring out the fact but we have no time as a number of those are quotations we're supposed to bring out that we are endlessly harried and when because we're tethered to mobile communication devices at all times and I think we can in terms of what I just talked about in terms of the progression of Technology we can perhaps see four major thresholds the first had already arrived the time the VF conferences which was electronic mail people had that but it still has still a novelty and you still and you know you come into the university to check your email and that time typically and not that many people in the UK at least had it email at home then the next big threshold shift was the arrival of broadband and after that I think the next one I draw attention to in this trajectory at least is iPods and which astonished to read and Simon Reynolds new book retro mania that iPods really only only came to the fore in 2005 this really seems such a short time ago but you know that they've arrived they they've changed the they seem to have changed everything but only at the level of consumption and distribution not the level of the content of culture it's almost the opposite that the more things change at the level of consumption the less they change the level of production and the production of content so-called and I mean so that what I want to draw attention to is then to kind of speeds as it were the ever-increasing speed of communicative capitalism as time of call been and the slowing or psychical time of culture and and I think how we can grasp that is by thinking of the very fact this conference happening at all shows you how much cultural time has slowed down as it were in a sense that you know the difference between 15 years 15 years you know is the time between roughly the you know the Beatles first record and punk or between Punk and jungle I said that's a vast time in terms of an a music cultural history but if we look back to to 96 into cultural terms not it not a lot has changed actually I think what the key thing that we found and that the number of those texts are registering one thing I've noticed over the last few months is really a growing sense of a kind of digital communicative malaise a sense that with deep into this stuff and that's we didn't necessarily know what we were getting into and I sense that comes out both in sherry turkle's book and Alan Glenn's novel that it's like of the we are the subjects of an experiment which no one is consciously really conducting and what is this what is the nature of this experiment all I think is to see what a kind of electro lab etanol parasite can do to you what I mean by this electro to be no Paris I mean something nobody cared that much apart from teenagers about communications in you know 10 15 years ago you know you know it's might be nice to get a letter every you know half once a week you know you weren't checking if you've got a letter every 30 seconds and you weren't obstructed from enjoying any other activity and by checking if you know if the latter had arrived I'm trying to oppose this in a difficult here then this is the and the problem at which I think we've got is how we criticize this how do we have any kind of position in relation to this that is not does not is not reactionary and actually that that that posing the question in that way and raises all sort of other issues of why should attacking a certain kind of technological development automatically seem as if it is reactionary you know who has got control of time here and how they got control of it why we so ready to accept the story that and technology delivers kind of modernity when actually that if you want to look at it in terms of that that the question is kind of cultural determinism rather so generally shoot determinism that Jim is talking about if you want to talk about cultural determinism it's pretty clear that from the last decade alone that technology in itself or changing technology aren't enough on their own to deliver new culture and so that this this for me is that is it's the problem now given that you know this this list parasite just this communicational parasite a form of very low-level jouissance in a very low level but nevertheless which is capable of destroying all other forms of enjoyment or tainting it and how do we get rid of this parasite let's figure that's the question and good example from sherry turkle's book of what I mean by the dis she she describes somebody or she says that a number of the people she spoke to and found that they were unable to resist texting while striving you know if if a text comes in and there's a red light flashing on their phone but unable to not know what this message is and come unless we we can't sustain these people as if they're not us I mean even we might not we might not him we might not be checking our text while driving but you know we want to don't we you know you know recent anecdote of mine I often find her I'm sitting there I know it's social I accept or do lock in my phone so but nevertheless I put the phone under the table and feel that you know that and the relief of clicking I don't know what message I've got but you know the least the phone does and this has taken us over and it's quite dramatic why I think and part of them either my strategy then is to dystopian eyes did so real think back to before this this had taken over your brain to this degree well you couldn't enjoy anything I enjoy sexual contact you know you can't enjoy watching a film you could because of this and what does it give you in return you know that's the stay yeah that's the I know the real kind of shock of the of a sherry Turkle I know people have always risked their lives for things that they enjoy but to risk their life a hundred and forty character SMS text which they pretty much know is going to be banal this is this is this is the death Drive Dorothy but it's not as not as Nick land imagine that you know this is this you know this is this the banality of the digit of the inferno which were actually I think but actually she served it well because it becomes it's more difficult to to identify it as the serious sort of this problem that it is and and of course you know that this is a this they're a political issue seder and to say the least and and finally what and that this is partly what it what went at what is behind my book capless realism which is really the you know in a way the the disappointed story of someone who had been hyped up by the sort of Landy and sort of the euphoria of dissolution that we experienced in the 90s and particularly at the Warwick and and then you sort of crashed back down into the kind of shocking banality of the of the the first decade of the 21st century yeah you know we're offered up the Arctic Monkeys Amy Winehouse Duffey Adele you know these this is a temporary in a most banal way this is this is music that could have been made 3040 years ago there's always been retro but what's what's unique about our period it's no longer even an issue that these things are retro they're presented to us as if they were contemporary because well partly because unlike in the 90s when we saw all kinds of horrible conservative cultural development starting to coalesce you know labs mags and the horrible alliance with you can with kind of Britpop and the like and at that time there's a clear kind of there's a clear kind of opposition a clear alternative between that kind of restoration culture and the kind of contemporary futurism that has those alternatives have faded the cultural level I think in the subsequent period um and you know capitalist realism comes out of that really yes saying that state they're kind of exciting albeit dark capitalism evokes in that then in a sort of Texas of neck land is nowhere to be seen at least not in the West instead we have this banal capitalism dominated not by a kind of ever mutating digital dancefloor culture but by sort of the new rata sizing mechanisms of social media or social networks and actually is that if you read sherry turkle's book these you can see the kind of a storm astonishing levels of sort of pain and anxiety but in particular adolescents teenagers under er because of the ubiquity of of social networks the performance anxiety involved in non real-time activities and the that the painful planked of one of them they're teenagers whose sherry teracle speaks through saying yeah maybe one day I'll be able to have a conversation but not now because real time causes too much anxiety and Terkel reports that are is typical for teenagers to spend you know up to an hour composing an SMS text message of hundred and forty characters just to ensure they get the right level of nonchalance yeah but I just briefly talk about the political damage but I didn't really elaborate on that and of course the that I think the broader backgrounds all this is the something it comes out well in France's novel The Corrections you know the switch from Fordism to post for to them something that really happened at the end of the 70s beginning the 80s you know the switch away from that is to say workforce dominated by men largely working manufacturing expecting to be able to work in a stable job for 40 years of their working life the dissolution of that world into a world of what and variety and others have called precarity post Fordism short term contracts no guarantees and also the disappearance have a kind of social welfare net to protect you and and the digital media or digital communication media have clearly played a major part in intensifying the pressures of precarity in making in creating a situation whether it's archaic to even talk about a workplace now you know as soon as you're in you're you you have email then you no longer have working hours as soon as you have a smartphone than the whole world including now including soon anyway even when you're on a plane that the whole world is your workplace and this is what I mean by the kind of banal Inferno of communicative capitalism really now Sterling's recent talk and I temporality and wait he's talking about really the end of the future something that William Gibson has also been talking about so spelling invokes a kind of opposition between what he calls collapsing gothic castles and for veía chic you know picking through the ruins he talks of his sense of a temper ality as being beyond the end of history and also beyond being beyond post modernity but it strikes me actually that if you if you compare Sterling's recent texts to Jameson what Jo Jameson was writing in the mid 80s or indeed what leotardo in the late 70s or Beaudry are Beaudry are really the unacknowledged prophet of our time I think in many ways and while they are writing it's actually very similar to what they were writing back then sterling supposedly new vision of a temporality seems to me just a restatement bearers of post-modernism and I guess the difference between post-modernism and Sterling's a temporality is that sense that there's no novelty to this anymore they know when and Jameson was talking about post-modernism the features of post-modernism which including strikingly for jameson retrospection and pastiche and as manger kind of stylistic trades when he was talking about that he still had a sense of a modernist culture which you could contrast with post-modernism and I think Sterling's a temporalities in some sense comes out after post-modernism but only as a kind of exaggeration and intensification of the features of of post-modernism now as I just mentioned there one of the things that Jameson talks about and if you go back to his work one of things there's most preaching about it is the emphasis on pastiche and a retrospection um well he calls the nostalgia mode which isn't a psychological nostalgia but a kind of formal nostalgia example he gives us the Forgotten film now body heat which was set in the you know setting the then 80s that disowned contemporary period but which felt like a film from the 40s and this strange disjunct where effectively you that all of the formal elements of the had no time left that's interesting but quickly there are all of the formal elements screened out a different period but this but the fact they came from this different period was not acknowledged this seems to me typical now of the whole range of come from deed of practically everything and but one thing that Jameson never he talks about which is widest why retrospection or pastiche becomes such features and I think we can sort of hazard two gases based on this one is a psychological motivation you know at a time when all certainties collapse an economic and political level venues going to reach for older forms of culture - as a form of reassurance and but they're also cognitive difficulties and James are suggesting as a word of that modernism first of all confronts the unwrapped ability of the of the contemporary world via the the capitalist city can't really be conceived of in terms of the categories of ordinary phenomenological experience and this cognitive problem only intensifies and it sort of hyper digitalized world and again nothing that would link back into this previous thing at the psychological motivation for forms of culture which are which are reassuring okay so what is the way out of this I saw that really quickly that well I don't think that one thing is going back is is is is always a strategy of to fade a part of what underlying right at mind would have seen here is really that who is it that owns the sense of time which we lived was neoliberalism or neoliberalism didn't until 2008 neoliberalism could say like we own the direction of time when you talk about modernization of talking about movement towards neoliberal ization after 2008 that claim is is it's now somewhat ludicrous um sterling noticed he thinks there's there's no new ideology about to come in to take over to get us out of this situation of a temper on T about which he writes with such ambivalence and that probably is about one of the striking features at the moment in which we live but that then collapses of ideological systems before of course many times in history but usually another ideology could be helicoptered in to take up to take over and of course that's what happened near ableism itself when social democracy collapsed it was on hand having prepared the way for 30 two years it was on hand to take over there's nothing like that now even though neoliberalism has collapsed as a credible political sort of force with ongoing forward momentum it's still got a lot of a national energy both non energy or whatever but it can still carry on even though it's dead we watched enough zombie films to note that and but that that's what's striking at the ideological vacuum isn't that there's nothing there ready that's convincing and but I think with it's a challenge for us to I think at this time it is to is to come up with this alternative but I think it would have to be via precut via precarity who wants to go back to work in a factory for 40 years who wants to go back to a situation in which one the conservative front thanks quite clearly might want to go back to a situation in which women are not in the workforce as they made clear the other day which the week is woman's fault a fan into the workforce then none of this would have happened and that's it we don't wanna go back to that okay precarity yet says variety and others have pointed out was originally a positive term okay we'll go to well when we want to go know when you make us go and you know that seems to me the challenge how do we get the precariousness though we wanted in the first place and finally that's practical measures I think instead of being able to pay for a you know an hour of time do people should have to pay for half a day and if I have to go in to teach somewhere for half an hour it doesn't only take me off and I did speech for now it's and then we take me now to do it quite plainly and it has a broader problem of winning back time I think and that's and this might involve a sort of quasi Foucault Dean ethics of the self and discipline about that how do we win back time for for projects how do we actually escape into trances again because I think one of these tech that these technology to actually transcend hibbett us the way that we thought about some cyberspace in the 90s maybe was as a kind of space of immersion and trance but this isn't the smartphone cyberspace emphasized before it's the opposite actually that with communicational parasites well they stop us every time and how many times have you done this that you're actually enjoying something more you might be reading a book you're totally immersed in why not talk not quite totally now because mr. parasite is there to grab you out and say check me check me and so it's a question I think that how do we and how do we articulate this in a way that is not technologically reactionary and because there are other uses of digital technology available apart from communicative uses and you know maybe we can look to towards a kind of digital psychedelia in a way which would involve a dilation of time instead of this constantly harried sense of time in which we seem to be required to live in a moment and since I've gone over the height I'll stop there you

Channel: Virtual Futures

Views: 80,427

Keywords: virtual, futures, mark, fisher, 2011, conference, university, warwick

Id: 8Bk0kkRPmjE

Length: 36min 15sec (2175 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 20 2012