ACFM - ACFM Trip 56: The Mainstream

Episode Date: December 7, 2025

Jem, Nadia and Keir debate the meaning of ‘mainstream’ – something none of them could ever possibly be, of course. Is ‘woke’ the new mainstream? Can there be a mainstream if we don’t all have access to the same culture? Is Tommy Robinson shifting the Overton Window? Why is nonconformity associated with coolness? And who engineers […]

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as usual with my friends Nadia Idol. Hello. and Keir Milbin. Hello. And today we are going to be talking about the concept of the mainstream. So, why are we talking about this today?

Kier, tell the people. It's a classic ACFM topic, isn't it, the mainstream? Do we want to be mainstream? Do we want to be weird? I think it was our second episode where we talked about the weird left, this idea of the weird left versus normy socialism, and we ended up talking about normality and norms, and like norminess is like related to norms.

And it's a long time ago, and I said like five years ago. The sort of conclusion we were coming to is that like norms is like a, it's almost like a disciplinary thing, basically. You know, you must conform to the norm. And in fact, because it's a norm, nobody actually inhabits it. Everybody's a little bit weird in their own way, basically. Mainstream's a bit different, isn't it? It's a different take on that.

It's a different concept. And I think it's a little bit more of an ambiguous concept because people talk, I'm sure we'll talk about this later. You know, when people talk about mainstream media, that is never used in a positive way. It's like, you know, it's meant to be a term of critique, but like there's lots of political discourse about how we need to be mainstream, we need to make these ideas mainstream, etc. So it's just an absolute classic ACFM topic, I think. Yeah, definitely.

I do think this is a classic ACFM topic. I think I'm interested in mainstream, partly because of what's implied in the name, that this idea of a direction of travel. So both in terms of politics and our own lives, but also where, you know, those things meet. So I'm interested in when the term mainstream is used when it's hegemonic, when it's being used as a pejorative, when it is used to describe something good, something bad. I think one of the things that we came across when we were preparing for the show is that there isn't one understood way that this term mainstream is. is used. It is kind of different depending on what sphere you're talking about. And of course, I'm interested in this issue that Keir touched on, which is, does one want to be mainstream?

Do you want our ideas to be mainstream? And also, you know, what is the appeal specifically, and this is the area that I'm fascinated with, what is the appeal of wanting to be fringe or wanting to remain on the fringe with your ideas or also your lifestyle? Like, what are the the socio-psychological dispositions which make one or a group of people or a collective want to live their lives outside the mainstream or in the mainstream. So I think all of these are classic kind of political ACFM tangents or streams in themselves. And I hope we'll have fun going through all of those today. Yeah, I agree. It's a completely seminal topic. It's something that's preoccupied me in some ways, I think since my early teens, really,

the whole question of what it should mean to have a social or cultural or political relationship to the political mainstream or the cultural mainstream. It's obviously a key question for cultural studies really, both the question of, well, is there a cultural mainstream at any given moment in history like this one? And if there is, does it matter? And if there is or isn't, why or why not? And who gets to decide? So it's really important. I think we should also explain Like the idea for this topic really came when we were having a meeting to talk about episode ideas and Keir suggested we should have a series of episodes that would bounce off developments on the British left. So we talked about the concept of the party last time parties and then we talked in the microdose following that

about the specific developments around your party, the new left party. And this time this topic is partly inspired by the name of a new left-wing factor. within the Labour Party, which has been launched, which is called Mainstream, which we will talk about a length in our next microdose. And then the idea is next time we will talk about the concept of ecology and follow that with a microdose about the Green Party. This was a really good idea. And one of the few reasons why I've become reconciled to the name mainstream for this faction. I didn't, a name I wasn't really that happy about to begin with. Anyway, before we get into the meat of the episode, I should remind you all that if you want to,

to, and you should, you can go even weirder and leftier by subscribing to our email newsletter. This is put together by producer chowel every month. The emails only go out once a month. It's always full of interesting content and I can really recommend it. You just go to navarra.com newsletter to sign up to that. It's very low volume. It's like a really great substack. For more music and less chat, you can follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Just search for ACFM on that platform. And of course, please do remember that you can show some appreciation for our work and that of Chao and our other fantastic producer, Matt, by leaving us a five-star rating or whatever platform you're listening on. And remember

that our enemies do not want you to do that. They want you to not to do that. And what our enemies, what the forces of capital, conformity and individualism want you to do even less, to bring some actual material support for our host, Navarra Media, which you can do for as little as £1 a month by going to navara.comedia slash support. Okay, we should play a song called Mainstream. This is from the late 80s. This is from the great Australian Aboriginal rock band Yothu Yindy. This is mainstream.

Bha, bha, bha, bha, bandoah green. Cloud formation in the west today. Fander and rain raging here tonight. Listen to the music of the speigras crying along the rivers and the valleys in the old land. Okay, let's get back to this topic of the mainstream. I mean, what does it even mean, what does it even mean, what do we think it even means as a concept, as a term? The etymology of it is it's like the mainstream as in the main river, the main flow of culture, politics, I suppose.

of living, I suppose, as well. So the idea would be that there's one mainstream and then there are tributaries which feed into the mainstream, something like that. And it can be a noun and an adjective and a verb, can't it? That's an interesting thing to think about. I think because Nadia, you wanted to, you wanted to make sure that we kept in this conversation the idea of mainstreaming as a verb as something that actively can be done. I think it is actually really interesting to think about the etymology and how this term is used. because it's not, you know, like I said in the introduction, it's, it doesn't mean one thing in one sphere. So, you know, there are certain areas in, you know, political spheres or definitely

in, for example, in international development, in a political economy where there's this whole debate about, for example, the importance of mainstreaming gender, okay, or, for example, mainstreaming LGBT rights or whatever, this idea that this should not just sit outside, but it should be normative within the main body of work. And I think that's an interesting launchback to think about things. I think if we're thinking about it from the sense of, do we want our politics to be mainstream, then it kind of the use of that term becomes slightly different.

Because if I'm thinking, you know, do I want left ideas to be mainstream, I think, of course I do. But that's slightly different to talking about, you know, mainstreaming gender or mainstreaming certain rights. So that's interesting to think about how has this term evolved, and it's used in, you know, quite different ways. And of course, we're going to talk about all of this, but something like the mainstream media is just used as a pejorative, right? But I like going back to this kind of like water-based imagery in a way. I was trying to think, you know, what's the most subvertive element that you could possibly be in this mainstream?

and the only thing I could think of is, you know, a salmon because you're going against the water in a sense. I'm trying to think of, are the anarchists the salmon? Like, who's the salmon in this situation who is able to, like, live within the reality of the mainstream, but is very much like going against the grain, effectively, to use a non-water-based metaphor, against the water metaphor. I'm trying to think about if you try to apply some of these things

on ways of living or life, or, you know, again, of course, very importantly, as you mentioned, Jeremy, like subcultures, an area where ACFM is very interested. Like, what is it like to be in or outside the mainstream and what are the repercussions? And I think, you know, the term mainstream is used differently in each one of those spheres. Yeah, that's really interesting.

I think that idea of mainstreaming, as in making a central concern, that's also obviously quite important in a lot of academic work, the idea that you shouldn't just have a chapter of your book or a lecture on your course devoted to issues of gender or sexuality or race, you should somehow try to make it run all the way through your analysis. So I think from a sort of an obvious perspective, one of the big questions that always is going to get asked about this notion of mainstream,

is there such a thing as mainstream, as the mainstream today? Like, is there mainstream culture? And if there is, do you want to be inside it, or do you want to be outside of it? I mean, of course, the concept of mainstream, as you guys have already indicated, it's a sort of topological concept. It's a way of imagining a sort of distribution of norms within culture

and a set and a kind of set of relationships between things which are very popular or very normative and things which are less so. But it's in a way, it's quite a limited model in a way because it does imply this sort of teleology, like everything's flowing in one direction unless you're a salmon. I think antagonistic is a helpful word for us there. Sorry to interrupt you, Jeremy. But like, if we think about, like, can things be antagonistic to the mainstream?

That helps us understand, like, how mainstream is situated within the various different spheres. Yeah, I think that's right. But I think, and I think, and one of the, obviously, like, one of the things that people have really commented on quite a lot over the past few decades, really, kind of repeatedly, is this idea that, well, somehow we're no longer inhabiting a cult. in which there even is a mainstream, really. I just wonder initially what you both think about that. Like, is there such a thing as mainstream culture? And was there ever? In some sort of way, we have to split it up a little bit, don't we?

Because the concept of the mainstream isn't just applied to sort of culture. So it is applied to the way you live and politics, etc. And so there are slightly different concepts that are used around politics. So people talk about the Overton window, which is like concepts or the ideas or the policy which are acceptable to talk about. I think we'll come back to that at the end of the show and we focus on politics a bit more, but it's probably interesting to bring it up now,

is that, like, in terms of politics, we're seeing a real shift. We're seeing a mainstreaming of racism, basically, really racist policies. But we're speaking just after. Shabana Mahmood, the whole secretary, has just announced basically a load of racist immigration policies probably to the right of, like,

the National Front in the 1970s. she'd probably put it that way. Not quite that she's going to be extracting gold fillings from migrants in order to pay for their accommodation, but not far off. And the idea that talking about confiscating jewellery of migrants, for instance, to pay for an accommodation, although she did announce that a wedding ring would be exempt from this. The country believes a sigh of relief that the Overton window hasn't gone that far. Unbelievable.

And Tommy Robinson's tweeted out, you know, yes, the Overton window was shifted. We have one when you saw. that. Congratulations, Patriots. Yes, congratulations. Well, done, Patriots. Well, he did, didn't hear. So, like, that's one concept where you can see, like, that mainstreaming ideas is,

perhaps there's some sort of, like, conscious sort of political project around that, trying to get your ideas to be the mainstream, the mainstream ideas. With culture, I think it's slightly different, you know, that, yeah, there's something, there's something different going on there, you know. I think there probably isn't mainstream culture, to be honest. There probably is some sort of mainstream culture. We're not in it, though. That's the issue.

Well, I don't think I probably, I'm not in it for lots of them now. So, like, you know, we can talk about mainstream TV, for instance, and there are shows which are mainstream TV at the moment, the traitors, etc. I didn't watch it. Or cooking shows, Great British Bake Off, etc. There's a certain sort of show which are on. Terrestrial TV, BBC One, etc. on a Saturday evening, you know, they're of a particular type and that's where people would point to mainstream TV. But of course, that is very, very different to

the experience of television in, say, the 1960s or 1970s, when they were only a couple of stations, etc. And the whole nation would watch, much more of a portion of the nation would watch. Now, there's lots of streaming channels, people choose their own sort of way, they watch things at different times, et cetera, et cetera. So that's certainly changed. And are there mainstream lifestyles? Well, there are certainly projects to reassert mainstream lifestyles. The far rights, particularly in the US, they've definitely got gay marriage back in their sites, all things which we thought were settled as, you know, oh, well, you can have, perhaps a wide variety of lifestyles could be included in acceptable living, mainstream ways of living,

something like that. So I think you'd have to split that up and use slightly different concepts. And for those, you know, the idea of a mainstream would be more or less useful, I'd put it that way. What about you, Nadia? Are you in the cultural mainstream? I wouldn't say I'm in the cultural mainstream. I would say that I watch some mainstream shows, but that's mostly because I don't watch, I don't stream, I watch telly. So I watch live television because that's how I like to consume my media. I like it to be curated by somebody else. I hate picking myself because I think it's a waste of my intellectual mental energy.

So I like other people to be paid to curate things. I know that I'm in the minority in that case. I think I mostly just watch what is on TV, but I would not say, So I do watch the Great Bridge Bakeoff, I do watch, I did watch part of traitors, but this is where, to answer the question, is there a mainstream culture? I think the fact that I am not predominantly, I'm not ostensibly on social media, I think makes me outside the mainstream culture, actually, because I think the mainstream culture is to watch something if it is a Saturday night show or whatever, in terms of we're just talking about, you know, visual. will, like shows and films and things that are watched on a screen, I think part of the mainstream culture, again, I might be wrong, is to watch something and then engage with it online or comment on it online

or for there to be a political event or something and to then go online and say something about it. And in that sense, I am outside the mainstream because I choose, I very actively choose not to engage with the world in that way. I think what you're getting at, I might be wrong here, Jeremy, but like, do I listen to what I would call mainstream music? I would say that I was raised on mainstream rock and pop, and that continues to be my favorite music. Like, mainstream chart music from the 90s is my favorite music to listen to, definitely. But I wouldn't say, I'd say that I didn't grow up in the

UK anyway. So I existed outside UK. I mostly exist outside mainstream UK culture, also because I've not been to school here as well. So I think all of these things affect whether you're in or if you consider yourself inside or outside culture. Other things I think that would be different. But I was going to ask you the same question, Kea, and then you, Jeremy. But like, as someone who like, you know, goes to football matches, Kea, do you feel that you are inside? the mainstream. I do go to football matches, yeah, that might be quite a mainstream normy element of my life. But I was just going to respond to a couple of things you said, Nadia, then I bring German, which is I think that social media has become much more balkanised than it was like 10 years

ago, perhaps even like five years ago. So Twitter still sort of exists, but, you know, it's much harder to choose your own audience and read and communicate to them, basically. It gets filtered through these algorithms, which means it's really hard to have that conversation about a topic with people that you want to have that conversation with. And so a lot of the discussion I think which goes on around mainstream TV will be on like WhatsApp groups, perhaps even on small Facebook groups, showing on your demographic. That's sort of one thing. And, you know, that's also with sport, actually. I've got like a family WhatsApp group where I, we watch Wales when they play rugby and then discuss or commiserate with each other as the match is going on, etc.

But if I, you know, when I was growing up, what would it be determining whether I was mainstream or alternative to the mainstream and it was very, very important to me that I wasn't mainstreamed and that I was part of the alternative would be a couple of things. One would be political ideas, but perhaps the most important cultural art about would be music, like, you know, that you didn't listen to mainstream music and in fact you had alternative tastes, et cetera, and it would be balkanized more than that, I suppose. So is there a mainstream music now? Well, let's call on our resident musical expert to Jeremy Gilbert to answer that question.

Yeah, well, in a way, there is more than there ever has been. I mean, really, if you want to look at, like, has there been a sort of dominant aesthetic or set of artists and genres in music culture? I think this is something that goes back and forth over time. people still have this sort of folk memory of the moment in like the early 60s where the charts are completely dominated by the Beatles, for example. You can also think about the moment of sort of relatively early MTV, like Michael Jackson and Madonna become these global, global stars,

but in this very sort of remote way, actually. But if you look at the actual charts, which are all based on streaming numbers now, I don't think the top 10 charts have been more conformist than those. are now. I mean, it's a handful of artists. So people everyone will have heard of is, you know, it's like Taylor Swift dominates everything. And after Taylor Swift, it's like, it's people like Chapeau Roan, Duolipa, and Billy Eilish, and then a sort of suite of artists, some sort of hip-pop and a lot of sort of global generic auto-tune pop. It's more sort of generic than it's ever been in a way. But on the other hand, the sense that any of that has any, A, that it has any sort of

wider cultural authority outside just being stuffed people stick on their headphones on their way to work and the sense that it really ties to any set of political dispositions in any meaningful way. That has never been weaker. I mean, something we've talked about on the show before. I mean, it's completely, you know, Zara Zoltana got interviewed on TV the other week and said, you know, she just, she just likes mainstream pop. That's what she likes to listen to. You can't predict a young person's political positions from their musical tastes at all in a way you really could like for our generation. But that is partly because

the political mainstream among young people, as we were always talking about on the show, has become so left-wing compared to what it's been in the past, that it kind of changes the meanings of all these things. Like it's now, it's so completely marginal not to be basically, you know, effectively sort of a socialist. Like if you're

a voter under 30, under 40, that you can't really map cultural trends onto political trends in the way you used to be able to. So, I mean, that's how I would answer that. I think, I mean, Taylor Swift is a sort of fascinating phenomenon with regard to all that. I think my students always groan when I tell them, sorry, you've got to talk about, you've got to have something to say about Taylor Swift.

If you're going to say anything about contemporary culture, but the TLDR short of, short-hand analysis of, you know, what does Tadis Swift mean? I mean, what Tadiswif represents is the global hegemony of liberal feminism in a way that just was historically unprecedented. because what Taylor Swift's core audience had been listening to for the past hundred years before Taylor Swift was basically boy bands, like male artists they were supposed to fantasize about

as potential romantic partners. And instead, they get Taylor Swift, who is, they have a completely different sort of imaginary relationship to. So, you know, that has all kinds of limitations. But it's also a really significant sort of cultural shift. And that says something about, you know, what's changed in broad mainstream culture. You know, the fact that liberal, liberal feminism becomes, like,

properly normative from about the 2010s, I would say, in a way it really had struggled to become before that is pretty significant. Okay, we should hear a track. I can't remember if we played it before. It doesn't matter if we have. This is the seminal British feminist punk stroke post-punk band. Well, the second most seminal. The most seminal is obviously the raincoat. This is the Slits And this is their song about Like feeling distanced from mainstream ideas of femininity This is the classic feminist British anthem really

This is typical girls Typical girls try to be Typical girls very well Typical girls drive to be Typical girls very well So the lyrics So the lyrics So, I'm just felt

Typical girls So the lyrics go, you know, typical girls Bladdy Blah, you know, get you up, upset too quick, etc. Typical girls like to be, typical girls very well. So it's all, you know, this is what a typical girl is. But then they've got this bit when it goes, who invented the typical girl and who's bringing out the new improved model.

So it's like, it has got that aspect that like, you know, that normativity, like typicalness is something that is engineered by the dynamics of capitalism. I wanted to ask a question that we're coming back to TV though, actually. So, I mean, my household, having two teenage daughters and the geeky dad, my household is in a fever pitch of excitement right now, November 18th, 2025, because in a week's time we're going to get, it's the beginning of the final season of Stranger Thing. Is that mainstream culture, do you guys think?

Yeah, I think it probably is. But it's obviously a mainstream culture, which makes real references to a time when, where being nerdy, for instance, was like outside the mainstream. So that's the young kids in the first series of playing Dungeons and Dragons. A very odd hobby to have back then. Really march out as a nerd, basically. But I think that is mainstream culture, I think.

But it's difficult, isn't it? Because it's sort of, it's just very, very popular, basically. But it's on one of the streaming sites, so it's not on a terrestrial TV station. So that puts a whole section of people outside of it, not able to watch it, et cetera. Because the question behind that is like, well, what determines what's mainstream?

And we've already sort of hinted at that. Some of it is like technical, isn't it, basically? Technology. I think what you're bringing up here is that there's something here about access. is that what if that culture is not, in a very literal sense, accessible? And if we are talking about watching stuff, then it's just not accessible to a certain number of people who don't have that streaming service.

And I don't know what the statistics are. Like, I know what Stranger Things is, but I think I know what Stranger Things is because of, I think, am I right that the Cape Bush Wuthering Heights song is in it? Yeah, no spoilers. Joe's still catching up with the first. final series. I literally have never watched it. I have literally never watched it. But is that is the only reason I know what it is, the reason I know what it is is because of that news piece. Because I don't have,

I don't have streaming services. So I don't, unless it's on I player or TV, ITVX or whatever. And I rarely, I don't like to watch things on my laptop and I don't have a smart telly, which is why I'm quite an analog person as people can tell already. I think what I'm trying to say is here that, If you, as you started saying here, like, if access is an issue and you don't have a mainstream of access across everyone, like there's loads of people who now don't have terrestrial TV, there's an access question about the point being that if not everyone has access to the same stuff, then how can there even be a mainstream when we talk about culture, which is slightly different to saying whether certain groups are inclusive or exclusive, which is not tangential. but it's an adjacent issue, right, about what allows you to be, like, I was pretty grungy when I was a teenager, but I feel like Nirvana was pretty mainstream. Like, I was well into Nirvana, but that was mainstream as far as I was concerned. Well, that's a bit of a juicy worm for us to hook onto there, but let's refuse to bite on the Nirvana question for now. But I think you just raised an interesting, or what you said contained an interesting proposition of what the definition of mainstream culture would be now,

is that something, perhaps mainstream TV would be something where even if you don't watch it, you'll know about it. You'll just pick up the general thing that's going on in that sort of ambient way, almost by osmosis. You know what I mean? So I know all about the great pottery throwdown. I have actually watched it once, actually, so that's not a great example. But there's lots of TV shows that I haven't watched, but I've got a general gist of what they consist of, strictly, et cetera.

You know what I mean? I know what goes on there, because it's, because it is part of that, you know, it's like commented on and it becomes part of the culture, even if you don't actually interact with it directly. That might be a definition of like what the mainstream culture might be these days. But then is there something about like ideas versus practice that might help us here? So when we're talking about music, is it something that is experienced individually or is it something that is shared? Right.

And this is a theme that we've come back to again and again. If it is something that people are only listening to in their headphones, then is there a point of even having this discussion about whether it's mainstream or not? If it is an artist which people are talking about and there are fans and there's a subculture and there is live music and people go to their shows and see it, then it becomes something that is practiced, that's acted out in a sense. And so, I mean, there might be something there that might help us with the question of culture, Whereas on the level of ideas where we're talking about politics, the mainstream is used quite

differently, right? Because it's not so much about practice we're talking about because I think a practice is different, whether people are choosing to live their lives outside the mainstream. But you can live quite a quote-unquote mainstream lives, but have unorthodox ideas, which are perhaps outside the mainstream. Perhaps it might be useful to get into this idea of the mainstream a bit more and whether it's actually a useful concept or how useful it is and what its limitations are. Because I want to just go back to the water-based metaphor of the mainstream. Because there is a concept of hegemony, which I don't want to mill explain your own concept

to you, Jeremy, but I've heard you describe hegemony using this idea, which is that in a way, you have sort of institutions that you interact with, they have a certain logic to them, there are sort of dominant ideas, etc. And so the effect of like of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of hegemony is it creates a path of resistance through which a life flows, if you want to think about it that way. So, for instance, you know, there are, you know, how are universities governed? What's the institutional logic of universities? Well, it's about competition, isn't it?

Competition. You're in competition with every other academic, etc. So you can, you can resist that and try to not go along with that. You could be the salmon to come back to. Nadia is a concept. You could be the salmon swimming up river, but what does farmers do when they swim up river? They get to the top, lay their eggs, and then they die,

and they never go back again. They end up in a cul-de-sacpe, perhaps something like that. Okay, I'm not sure if that concept works. But I quite like that idea of, like, you know, basically, if you don't consciously think about things and understand how these institutions are moulding you and decide to act in a contrary way, then your life will follow a sort of vague path, basically.

And that perhaps is a conception of the mainstream. But then again, you know, as we've just, when we talked about this idea of a mainstream with the tributaries going in them, what it doesn't handle is how the mainstream changes. That's a concept that doesn't quite fit into this water-based, flowing down hills sort of metaphor. There's something else there, isn't there? Where does the river flow to?

Large bodies of water, the lakes and the sea. see, I don't know what they represent in that metaphor. The totality of human existence, perhaps, I don't know. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I think it's good to introduce the idea of hegemony. And I think it's good to acknowledge at this point. Well, we can see that to some extent the concept of the mainstream is useful, but it's also very limited. And we're a little bit talking ourselves around in circles, trying to answer certain questions just with reference to that idea. And that is precisely the reason why in a field like cultural studies, like people will sometimes use more technical sounding jargon. Like it's not just because we like

it is because actually you need a slightly more technical sounding jargon to try to start talking about some of these issues in a more systematic way and in a more, ultimately more helpful way. So yeah, so the content of hegemony is really central within the sort of tradition of cultural studies that goes back to Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams and it's still, you know, animating the work of people like myself today. And, yeah, indeed. Hegemony, I mean, the simplest explanation I usually give of what hegemony means. It's the means by which certain social groups manage to establish some degree of control over

the direction of travel for the whole social formation they're part of, the whole society they're part of. And obviously, that does link up with this notion of the mainstream. It's about the direction that things are flowing in. And that means, and that does have exactly the effect you describe here, how that is lived by most people is most people find themselves in a situation where whether or not they really agree with it, whether or not they really ideologically or theoretically like it, they understand that there's a certain way of doing things which is enabled by institutions and they go along

with it to the extent that they have to go along with it to survive and to the extent that to not go along with it would be like swimming up the stream. It would be very, very difficult and very challenging and have all kinds of costs for them and their families. There's a couple of other concepts, especially from Raymond Williams' work in the 70s, which I think are really useful for thinking about all this, the wonderful concept of the structure of feeling, the idea that at any one time, there isn't just one in society, but there are various social networks, social groups, sets of cultural practices which express or reproduce a kind of a set of ways of feeling about the world and relating to the world. and sometimes there will be a sort of hegemonic structure of feelings and there's a new book out actually by Ben Anderson and Anne Seckle called The Politics of Feeling which deals with a lot of this in an interesting way with reference to contemporary British politics and Williams also has this notion of these three terms

the dominant the emergent and the residual or you can just say the hedonic sometimes in the emergent and the residual or the mainstream the emergent and the residual what about that. Yeah, you can say that. So at any one time, there might be a set of ideas, institutions, material interests, structures of feeling, which are sort of hegemonic, means that they're in this sort of, they're in this sort of leading position in society. Everybody knows about them. Everybody has to sort of defer to them, even if they don't necessarily like or agree with them. And then there are new things which are coming up, which might develop into something that can challenge them eventually in the future, but at the moment, I'll just experience a sort of new,

and those are the emergent phenomena, and then there are residual phenomena and institutions, etc. I mean, the classic example that Williams gives in the 70s, which you could still use, would be something like the Church of England, which still has a certain kind of cultural authority, although it's waning and has been declining for decades, arguably for more than a century. And Williams also makes this distinction when he's classifying different types of like non-hegemonic or counter-hegemonic or non-mainstream, cultural forms. He makes this distinction between what he calls the alternative and the oppositional. And the alternative is people, as he puts it, people who are just trying to find a different way of life. So it would be a way of life

outside the mainstream, self-consciously outside the mainstream, but which doesn't challenge in any meaningful way the social relations which produce the mainstream and which the mainstream helps to reproduce. And the oppositional, and that means something which is like directly opposed to the mainstream and really opposed to hegemonic social relations. Can I ask in that situation, like the oppositional, like when you say it challenges norm, Is it challenging norms or is it challenging the operational mechanisms in society? So like an example, what I'm thinking about here is women having children. So over history, the vast majority of women have had one child.

But the current statistics are in England and Wales, like 20%, one in five women in their mid-40s, like myself, do not have children. That is a huge challenge to the way society is potentially organized, but is not a not a direct threat to any one system as it stands. Do you see what I mean? So would that be oppositional? I think it would only be oppositional to the extent that it became bound up with a set of material and political demands for something quite different, whether, you know, maybe just for recognition of like non-parenting, non-motherhood

as a deliberate social and political choice, which should be honoured and valued, which is something I've always been sort of sympathetic to. But if it's a withdrawal from, I'm trying to understand, to think about mainstream in relation to while you're introducing these ideas, Jeremy, about whether like the withdrawal of participation, which is effectively, you know, what kind of is one way of understanding, like, women not having children, like the withdrawal of participation of something that is hegemonic, like whether that creates that kind of, whether that's understood as oppositional within that definition. Could I interject with a water-based metaphor? I seem to be channeling the spirit of the salmon of wisdom at the moment. It was mine, the salmon. Yeah, I know you developed the salmon, but the salmon was originally my anarchic idea. It's the people salmon, Nadia.

The fisheries are a commons. Well, basically, as the mainstream flows downhill, every now and then you'll get the development of what's known as an Oxbow Lake, basically, which is where the river takes the sort of... Oh, hello. A river takes a sort of a massive loop, etc. And gradually that gets detached into its own sort of like separated sphere in which new forms of life will develop,

ones which don't need flowing water, perhaps. I can do that in terms of the sort of water-based mainstream metaphor. Opposition, though, is basically it doesn't work, does it? What would that be, like building a dam or something? Because that involves more conscious action, perhaps. that's the thing that the idea of a mainstream of water-based sort of flowing natural sort of...

The beaver versus the salmon. The beaver versus the salmon, yes. Yeah, I think you can't really conceptualise opposition properly in terms of the meta of the mainstream. That's one of the problems with it. And Williams is coming out of a Marxian tradition and he thinks history is driven by class struggle. And class struggle is about antagonistic forces opposing each other

and outcomes coming out of that. So you can't really conceptualise that in terms of the linearity of a mainstream metaphor. And that's why you kind of want to get away from that sometimes. I still think, I think in answer to Nadia's question, I think deciding not to have children only become, it might or might not become oppositional, depending whether there's a political movement, like making that in making it, defining it as such. That's why, you know, this is what I always say about like boycotts. Like, well, boycotting something is only becomes politically meaning.

for when there's a mass movement, and so a wider set of people understand why you're doing it, and what it means, and what the effect is happening. I mean, arguably, it's a limited distinction, alternative, oppositional. I did spend an entire chapter of my PhD trying to deconstruct it, and eventually coming to the conclusion, actually, it works quite well. You don't need to deconstruct it. It's quite useful. And I think, just for the sake of illustration, actually, before we move on past that, I thought, I should say, come back to the question of stranger things in terms of whether it's mainstream, and just illustrate, well, how we would understand that in terms of this logic of the emergent, the hegemonic, etc.

I think you could certainly say, is stranger, you could answer the question by reframing it, is Stranger Things part of hegemonic culture. Yes, it definitely is part of hegemonic culture. I mean, it is definitely part of hegemonic culture because Netflix, I mean, the majority of households in Britain and the US definitely do have access to Netflix, and even if they are the ones that don't are conscious of not doing, because it's become a kind of norm, you know, the platform capitalists who include Netflix are, you know, arguably the hegemonic, the leading fraction of the global capitalist class. And in fact, you know, strange things just

as a story and as an aesthetic as a thing, it definitely emerges in the space of their hegemony. I mean, the fact of having been a kid who is in the D&D in the 80s is now kind of not something to be embarrassed by, if anything, it's something to brag about. If you're like a middle class or upper middle class person, it's because geek culture has become normalized because it was the culture of Silicon Valley, because it became the culture of Silicon Valley. and, you know, Stranger Things kind of alludes to and self-consciously draws on a kind of canon of TV shows like The X-Files and Twin Peaks, which, you know, have become part of the canon of a certain kind of culture, which is associated with a set of social groups, which would include not just like people working in Silicon Valley, it would also include, you know, the kind of person who goes on to become a university professor for the most part in places like Britain and America. And in all those senses, it, it constitutes part of this kind of it doesn't constitute an element of hegemonic culture, arguably an

element of emergent culture. It's obviously not really oppositional to anything and it does serve to reproduce a set of a particular set of liberal norms which you might see as quite clearly opposed to the more sort of conservative norms of a sort of

Trumpian culture, but that's partly why that Trumpian culture sees itself as insurgent and in a sense oppositional. So that that's how you would understand, you would sort of answer all that with reference to Stranger Things is bad, because it's kind of, it's better to be liberal and kind of pro genre fiction and pro imagination. It's better to be that than to just be, to just promote the sort of, you know, say the kind of macho nationalism, which would have been typical of, say,

80s action TV in the States, which things like Twin Peaks and X-Files and Buffy eventually sort of displaced, resulting in the mass popularity of Stranger Things. So it's not like it's bad, but it's also clearly the case that Stranger Things is not like super radical, it's not super revolutionary, it's not really, it's not really making some great critique of American society in a way which would generate revolutionary consciousness. And arguably it's kind of domesticating some of the weird, more avant-garde edges of some of its sources like David Lynch's Twin Peaks, for example. So in all those, that's how you would kind of answer that question. in those terms. I was going to say, what's coming up for me with what you're saying, Jeremy, is like if kind of weird or alternative ideas are not being, you know,

are not being promoted, I guess, through some of this culture, then I guess the question that I'm asking is, well, then what mainstream culture is it reinforcing to be able to, therefore, in a tautological way, call itself mainstream? If you see what I mean. So if we take the example of, you know, machismo in film and the certain cultural production that reinforced that in society and to be able to look at a piece of film or a series historically

and say, yeah, okay, this is quote-unquote of the moment. Like you can tell that this is of the moment because it is reinforcing certain cultural norms or ideology effectively of the time. So I guess maybe that's what I'm trying to think of about more contemporary examples as we speak, whether it's music or whether it's, you know, the music. videos. Mostly I'm thinking visually, I suppose, in terms of film and series, like what or what is implicit in here, which is reinforcing something. So in the way that I will make the argument that the Great British Bake Off in a way, I think, is quite subversive because

you see very different kinds of people on it, which are not represented in other kind of programs or series, as far as I can see. So I think like it's actually subversive in that sense, but of course it also reinforces other things about like, you know, Britishness and whatever. So that I think is an interesting question to put to any cultural peace and say, you know, what's it reinforcing or what is it? Maybe oppositional is the wrong word.

Now, that's really useful. And I mean, I would say you can certainly answer that with reference to Stranger Things. And this refers back to what I said about Taylor Swift. I mean, the key norm it's reinforcing is liberal feminism. Because Stranger Things is, it's a lot of things, but it's also, it's what commentators on kind of anime and geek culture

will call a magical girl story basically. It's a story about a girl like with superpowers saving the world like Buffy was. And stories about girls saving the world

with their superpowers are kind of a key element of the broader kind of liberal feminist structure of feeling. And the fact that and the fact that Buffy is kind of

was beloved and is kind of very well remembered and had loads written about but was a much less of a massive deal in terms of mainstream culture than Stranger Things

has become, you know, is an indicator of how that particular liberal feminist structure of feeling to which Taylor Swift herself is also so central has become and kind of remains hegemonic. So that's how I would answer. I think you're right. And I think you can illustrate that with reference to those examples. So the question of what is this reinforcing, what is it not reinforcing, is sort of the critical question to ask of a phenomenon like that. Well, one of the ways in which you will hear the term mainstream, most often in contemporary political discourse is with a reference to the idea of the mainstream media and a really interesting piece of music which lyrically reflects on the relationship

people have to the mainstream media today is a song called Follow the News by Strange Boy and Strange Boy happens to include our own producer Matt Huxley so we should hear a bit of Strange Boy, follow the news. move oh so confused and yet I choose till I choose to follow the news what is the mainstream defined against or perhaps it's the other way around

what defines itself against mainstream because well one thing you've raised one concept which is used these days to define off against mainstream culture is woke, right, you know, or anti-woke discourse, basically, which is sort of like, you know, anti-liberal feminism, anti-liberal intersectionality, you know, basically, or proto-fascism, and we could raise the question there, is that something which is residual, is that a residual structure of feeling, or is that an emergent structure of feeling? That's something that can only really determine through a process of political struggle,

And, you know, week to week, I would change my mind on whether that, you know, the rise of the far right is a structure of feeling which is emergent or residual. I'm not quite sure it's to be determined. But there are other concepts which have got more of a longer history, which we could raise as the antonym of mainstream, some of which no longer makes sense. So you could talk about, like people would talk about not just alternative, but like the end of ground, etc. like that doesn't seem to work now. The idea of an underground in opposition to or as an alternative to mainstream, partly because of the light of media basically and the access to the archive. So basically, you know, we can have access to all sorts of culture

as long as you're prepared to search them out or pay for them. I mean, I still have students telling me that they're part of underground music. what they mean is they're in these kind of music scenes which might have some in-person manifestation but they're mostly organised around YouTube and SoundCloud rather than being

rather than involving artists who get lots of streams on Spotify that's what they mean so they have a conception of it but I would say I wouldn't say this to them because it would upset them too much I would say it's actually a sort of residual

in that William's term it's because it's been part of the jargon of like a hip-hop culture since the 80s, an idea of an underground versus a mainstream, and it's their way of conceptualising it. I mean, when I say to them, what does it mean to be underground, it used to mean, like,

you had to know where these clubs were that weren't widely advertised, and advertised by word and mouth, and mostly you're talking about stuff anyone can find with a Google search, then, you know, then it becomes much more complicated. Yeah, it's definitely sort of like a visual metaphor, isn't it? Can it be seen?

it easily, and that sort of, that sort of idea. And once again, we're coming to, like, you know, one of the things that determining all of this, whether these concepts are useful and whether the mainstream is useful and what determines the mainstream. There are sort of like technical elements of that as in, you know, the affordances of current technology and particularly the platforms, etc. There's a political struggle around that, which we come to with concepts such as woke, etc., which is anti-woke discourse, is a conscious, consciously decide his strategy to try to militate against any form of egalitarian

politics, basically, or even just an egalitarian worldview. Although, structures of feeling is something before that, isn't it, basically? We can't, like, gloss structures of feeling and that idea of a dominant emergent and a residual to something

like worldviews. Like, structures of feeling is something that comes before that sort of conscious. It's much more linked to sort of like, you know, raw experience, perhaps. I don't know if I can defend that, but, you know, mean, it's something that comes before something like an ideology or a worldview, et cetera. There are other sorts of concepts that we could talk about as antonyms to the mainstream. We did an episode about cool, for instance, where we also talked about hip.

Hip is like this idea that, like, are you hip to this? It's like, do you have access to occult knowledge? You have access to knowledge, which isn't in the mainstream. I don't think that works these days either, basically. because of that sort of increased visibility in the access to the archive, the access to old past music, etc. If you've got the money to pay for it, basically, or if you're prepared to search and pirate it.

Yeah, I think that's true. My observation, this is from having teenage kids and mostly teaching in their early 20s, is there is still some idea of things being fashionable, being cool. And what I was going to say was, it's really something they grow out of by the late teens. to some extent the whole concept that some things are cool or not cool is like it's become it's a bit like the way in which you know people still really experience intense homophobia in schools like in their

early teens but it tends to be really seen as completely socially unacceptable by the by the time people are in their mid to late teens and there's something's there's some sense in which I mean maybe this is you know another example of the way residual phenomena work I mean maybe they work and they retain quite a degree of power and kind of shaping people's psyches in that they are they persist amongst like young kids and kids at these very traumatic age of their early teens in a way even when they've been sort of driven out of the mainstream of adult culture so there is this definitely the idea of some things are cool some things are crinned but then you know my daughter my older daughter who's

near the 18 would already see that that that kind of dichotomy in itself has been kind of a bit embarrassing a bit childish and and then there indeed there is this sense that people have that they're living in a world in which culture is much more widely distributed. And like amongst my students, like I'm always, I know I'm always commenting on this. I mean, they'll just, they're, each of them has quite a strong sense of like what kinds of music they're interested in at the moment, what they're listening to, what is influencing the music they're making. But it has almost no reference to any sense of like what's the contemporary. Like it's just as likely to be stuff that like I was listening to in the early 90s or

their dad were listening to in the 80s or something that has just come out last week that came out on a stream. It's also people do have a sense of things being more or less commercial than others, I have to say. There is a sense and I can see my own, my older daughter like acquiring that sense as she gets a bit older. There is a sense that there's a massive global media hype machine behind someone like Taylor Swift that there isn't necessarily behind other artists and those other artists might have a degree of authenticity because they're not being driven by that global hype machine. But obviously what there isn't is the sense that, well, for artists to emerge who are not

being enabled by the global hype machine, that what you need is this whole sort of cultural movement and a community and a kind of network of fanzines and local clubs and record shops, which was the case when we were growing up, because somebody can just make a record in their bedroom and go viral and acquire a massive following online. and then a year later they'll be asked to play at big commercial music festivals and that mean that can and does happen quite routinely so the sense that there has to be some sort of a social project involved in enabling like culture to emerge has all sort of gone and the concept of the underground the concept of the cool the concept of things being

hip i think i mean often they often manifested themselves in these very individualistic forms as kind of ways of people separating themselves from others and acquiring a degree of social status. But they did also always sort of imply an understanding that there was a sort of deliberate social cultural project involved in enabling anything to emerge outside the mainstream. And that has gone. And it has gone largely because the affordance of the technology are such

that you don't really need, you don't really need, you don't even need a load of friends to come to your gig if you manage to put something on YouTube that loads of people hear and listen to. You know when you mentioned cringe, I thought, oh, we should do an episode on cringe. And there's this thing, the ick, everyone talking about the ick these days.

Yeah, it's good. That's as a side, sorry, a little Oxbow Lake of my own term. Let's put it on the list of ideas. We should play mainstream by the American hip-hop Jew outcast, which came out in 1996. So that is mainstream,

by Outcast But can you blame To act The only way your brother Can survive the gas To fly hard To get by Don't deal it

Failed killings And fair time To write and rhyme It ain't just The police We kill each other Just like another Brother

Fast living Or get your took Thinking it can't Happen to you And then they do On crooked schemes That's a dream Floating face down

In the mainstream In the mainstream Black in heels When it ain't all Pitches and Cream That's why That's why I throw his face down What I want to go to that next was this idea of the mainstream being valorised,

of watching mainstream TV, etc. And if you reject mainstream TV, you don't want to watch it and you want to watch like Fellini films instead, you're being elitist, right? So there is some sort of antonym with like being elitist in some sort of way. I hate that personally because, well, it's just part of my. formation, basically. Part of my formation was that you would be interested in

avant-garde stuff, basically, to be interested in ideas and interested in, like, finding out what's out there sort of idea, which I do think is different to, like, basically brain off mainstream Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening telly. I think both things have

to be true. Like, I don't like it that culturally, like, I think that the left culturally is a very disciplinarian kind of space, and you are not supposed to admit to liking mainstream stuff, you know, and there's lots of mainstream stuff that I like, and I feel kind of... I don't know if that's true anymore on the left. I don't know. I mean, I remember this thing in Plan C where, like, there was two camps of

people, some people who loved Christmas and people hated Christmas, and unlike the libertarian communist left, there was a whole thing. Like, you know, there were people who strongly believed you were meant to hate Christmas. I think this is a ridiculous argument, you know what I mean? The Grinch faction, they were called, weren't they? The Grinch faction. That would have been good. But do you see what I mean? Like I think, I don't know.

Like maybe it's no longer the case. I mean, I think part of this conversation is also requires us to, you know, I'll be honest about the fact that, you know, we are not teenagers or people in our early 20s. And there's maybe all sorts of trends that we're not aware of. You guys might be, will be more aware of it than me because you have children of that, you know, of that age. But I still, you know, but I still think there is an idea in terms of how it intersects with cool about whether mainstream culturally can or cannot be cool and what are the spaces in which that is the case, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure that's true. There's something going from my head about like a lack of criticality in the mainstream. I've suddenly decided am I really against the mainstream again. I want to defend being interested in things which are more difficult to engage with, basically. and like require a bit of patience or because that's that that's the mainstream as in you know the sort of like flowing downhill in it basically is that part of what's going on is that base people work hard and then they get home and they just want to switch their brain off and like have things which are unchallenging and like you know in terms of culture perhaps that's what the mainstream is it's like unchallenging culture but I also think I think it's also to do with like identity and oppression like I find life really difficult. full stop. I'm not able, like it's also a capability thing. I am not able to challenge. I don't want a challenge. So I hate challenges. I don't think it's a good thing for me because I feel like life is

challenging enough. And because life is challenging enough, I therefore don't always want to engage with things that engage with my brain on a certain level. Even though I'm interested in ideas, I don't always want, you know, challenging media. You know, I think a lot of people, it's not just about Like, whether you have a really tough job and, you know, you're working five jobs or whatever, even though I do have five jobs and I am working really hard. I think it's also to do with your psychological disposition and, you know, your subjectivity. Yeah, because I definitely have times when I want to have brain off media, but I basically watch sport when I do that. Because that's my brain off time, basically. Whereas on last Saturday I went for a three and a half hour film about the Algerian revolution.

It's fucking really boring. It's great. I had a little nap halfway food. It made no fucking difference. Yeah, but I mean, for example, I'll give you another area where that is a case, is often it also relates to values. So in my case, I have arguments with people all the time. I don't know why people feel like they can tell me what I can watch or not watch.

But I have a thing called the Nadia test and I will not, and I will watch media, has to fulfill certain things. And one of them is I absolutely will not. watch anything which has any violence against women at all. I don't care if it's part of the plot. I don't care of it's gratuitous because it stops me being able to live my life because it is a reality of what happens to women when they leave their front door and it makes me scared and I don't want to live life that way, right? And that is a lot of media. That is a lot of things which have just even a little bit of violence against women, right? So that is mainstream, right? It's mainstream that

it's okay to have that. Like, I wrote a whole blog piece about what happened when I accidentally watched one episode of the very good riot women, which is all about, you know, menopausal women, like getting into a band. And there were two scenes where, you know, where one where a woman was punched and another really terrible scene, and it's stuck in my head. And every single scene of violence against women, which I've seen in my entire life, is stuck in my head. I can see that scene. So, The reason I'm bringing this up is to say that there are certain things, which, you know, and this might come and go based on certain trends, but there's stuff that has a certain

effect on certain people. And this will be like racialized. It will be like, you know, there'll be, you know, class aspects to that. It's definitely, definitely gendered. And these things affect people differently, right? And I feel the same way about watching things where, you know, Palestinians are being tortured or olive trees are being uprooted. Like, I will not watch that stuff because it doesn't make.

me a better person or an activist. I remember a similar discussion actually when we did that the episode about horror, because so much horror film has got like violence against women in it. I think that's really interesting and it partly raises the issue of the relationship between the concept of the mainstream and another concept, which we didn't put on our list when we were preparing these notes, which is the concept of the popular.

Obviously, in the tradition of cultural studies, there's a big, there was a big debate over what does it mean to study popular culture? Why do you study popular culture? There was the moment of so-called cultural populism in the 1980s when some scholars seem to be saying that basically anything that's popular is good because it's popular and what it means to have a pro working class or a democratic politics is to accept that position and then of course there was like like 50 hundred times more written in opposition to that position than was ever written in favour of it by people defending the idea that, well, you've got to be critical sometimes, you can't just accept, you know, ideological norms being

presented as entertainment, which is what it would mean just to accept that whatever's popular is good because it's popular. That does raise all these questions about that. What, you know, what do we want from culture generally, actually? To what extent do we want culture to, as you say, you know, challenge or not challenge or comfort or not comfort? And I think it's, I think it's complicated. I think it's something I thought about for years and something I'm always thinking about. I think I sort of arrived at a position where, well, you do have to sort of, you have to understand all these things as being true at the same time, that on the one hand, like a culture which is totally dominated by basically capitalist forces and the culture that they produce,

which will reproduce their own norms, like cannot just be accepted and tolerated. And so we have to support, and in whatever way we can, anyone who's trying to go against, that whether they're producing stuff which is just really fun or whether they're producing stuff which is actually quite challenging and and we also have to accept that even after the revolution you know people will you know we'll watch crap and like I'm on just like you know people will still want romantic comedies I think I'm fine with that I'm fine with that in that in our socialist utopia like that is not the thing I'm going to be you know having an argument Not in my commune.

It'll be compulsory Algerian revolution films on a Saturday morning. And anyone who nods off during the really boring bits are going to get an electric shock. I had a phase quite, you know, in my late teens, when I really felt like I ought to be engaging almost entirely with avant-garde culture. So I ought to listen to like free-improvised music and avant-garde composition and avant-gall music and experimental film and that it would do something good to my brain. It would raise my consciousness to do that and that was what I should be doing. And eventually I kind of reacted against that. No, but that's really good what you just think. I said that's really helpful about whether it raises consciousness or not. Because if it doesn't, from a political, from an activist

perspective, I think that question about whether it raises consciousness is a helpful one. Because I would be saying, yes, I do want people to engage with things. And I want to engage with things that raise consciousness. But if it just makes me feel sad or depressed or scared or lonely and doesn't raise my conscience around something that I'm not willing to engage with it because either I know about it already or it doesn't weigh up for me. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, what I would say is one conclusion I take from that. And this does go back to some core themes of our podcast right back from the start. And, you know, the stuff Mark wrote about in the acid communism essay is that, well, there's a particular value to be placed.

on cultural forms which managed to do all of those things at the same time. And historically, you know, historically, you can look at the examples like soul and funk music during their great emergent periods. And, you know, examples, people like me and Mark historically would point here, would be various forms of electronic dance music at the moment, moments when they are emergent and experimental. You can look at hip-hop in the golden age of the late 80s. And in all these contexts, you've got cultural forms.

forms, which are massively popular. People do engage with them in a way which they find viscerally fun and entertaining and enlivening, but they are also experimental, they're novel, they are sort of consciousness raising, consciousness expanding. And that is the kind of ideal for a radical cultural form. It is emergent, it is oppositional, but it is also popular, and it also has a capacity for cultivating collective joy. But it's quite hard to find those things. is a sort of sweet spot and we have to sort of accept that to get those things emerging at all you need a culture which has capacity and room in it for kind of the dumb romantic comedies or you know obviously ideologically suspect reality TV shows or kind of soap operas and which also

has room in it for you know like all for like four hour you know experimental films that don't go anywhere and don't mean anything so it has to have room for all those things for for those things that we really should treasure to emerge. The thing about all of those cultural forms which really managed to hit that sweet spot is they affect the mainstream. They permanently change the mainstream. Yeah, they both, and they change it sort of on their own terms.

Yeah, they change what is mainstream. And I think that is a kind of historic ideal, which is always worth keeping in mind. But as I say, the conditions for it, they depend upon a whole bunch of social, institutional and political conditions. And those conditions, I mean, they definitely don't include, like, scolding people for not liking certain things or for liking certain things. But they also include people being willing to have a degree of criticality. I mean, I would say, you know, it seems to me like

the more prevalent tendency over the past or decade or so on if we can talk about the left. You know, certainly in Britain, for me it seems like the more prevalent tendency is for is there just to really not be any clear sense for them in most people's minds of well what would make culture kind of progressive or radical and why may i mean my what may be like reality tv shows that just completely dramatize and reproduce the most hideous neoliberal norms like might not be a cool thing to be really invested in so to me it seems like there's been a sort of decline in any sort of any real kind of systematic interest in sort of cultural criticality. But then as I'm saying that, I'm thinking, well, what, you know,

no, that's not really true because that's not, that's how, that's literally our job. That's literally the job of this show. And literally, like one of, one of the things that people who like, like about this show is that it is a sort of project of cultural criticism, which is trying to, like, constantly work through these questions that I've just raised. But I think, you know, all that is, is, is very interesting. But if we move out of, the realm of, you know, culture and more into, I mean, obviously lived experience and culture are related and they're not exclusive categories. But if we think about something like public space, so I would say that public space as a concept and as a like experienced and

enforced reality in terms of people engaging with congregating in public space, holding public space is now radical in the UK. It becomes something that we would say politically, I think I'm speaking for everyone, should be mainstream. And until very recently on an ideological level was accepted as mainstream, and we still have a lot of remnants of that, of course, in our lives, is quickly, you know, in the UK, in our lived experience, is being chipped away, if not, you know, destroyed, and it becomes radical to hold that space or to try and create that space. Whereas, and I think this is where if we start talking about some of these issues and, you know, moving into the realm of politics, like I would say, like, I want those ideas to be mainstream.

Like, I don't want it to be radical to try and be holding onto some kind of public space. I want that to be mainstream. That is where I can start us to see us using the term mainstream in a way, which is slightly different to how we've been talking about around culture. We should play common people by Pulp from 1995. Pulp are an interesting band. They formed in 1978 and they didn't like, they didn't become a big band until the mid-90s, early to mid-90s. I can't remember what year Jarvis Cocker got on stage when Michael Jackson was playing at the Brits and flapped his bum at them. I remember that as their crossover moment when they went huge

and the song Common People was a massive hit I think you might probably like their biggest hit you never live like common people you never do whatever common people never fail like common people

you'll never watch your lives straight out of field and then dance and drink and screw because there's nothing else to do Jeremy, I think you've got a rant about Pulp, haven't you? It's a rant about this particular record. Even better.

I've always hated. I hate it. Because it's so contrived. The song describes this scene, which apparently really did take place or something like it, when the story is Jarvis Cocker has almost given up trying to be a pop star. So he's gone to art school on a grant, which is a thing you could still do in those days. and he's hanging out with this rich Greek girl, who apparently was the future wife of Janis Varifakis,

according to the story. And she makes some kind of comments about wanting to live like common people. Now, this was a feature of, like, student culture in Britain in the 1980s. There was a kind of shared culture of people kind of learning to get by on their student grants. So there was this fashion for buying clothes from charity shops. And I mean, it wasn't completely ubiquitous at all within that university student culture, but it was seeing a sort of hegemonic and normative. I mean, I know all this.

I didn't go to university then. I went to university quite a bit later, but I had a lot of friends who were. I sort of, and, you know, I made a practice of dressing like a university student so that people would think I was five years older than I was, which was quite successful for several years of my teens. But anyway, that was a thing then, and it was part, but it was also part of the, the reason. sedial leftism of university student culture in Britain in the 80s when it was understood to be in fierce opposition to thatterism. But by the mid-90s, when this became an anthem, this had all completely gone. It had all completely disappeared and that had been replaced by the emergence of this

highly aspirational consumer culture among young people and in the wider culture. And so what the song is doing is inviting the audience, like to imagine a person they're going to get really annoyed by, which is like a pretentious poser who's a rich person pretending not to be rich but there were no rich people pretending not to be rich in Britain in the mid-90s anymore that you know it was the other way around

and so you know it's a song that invents a character to get angry at who would be annoying if they existed but they absolutely don't exist and the fact that they don't exist is one of the key symptoms of the ways in which things are changing culturally and politically

so it was really sort of contrived And I'm going to say this as well, they never really did a good record again after this. The album that it came out on wasn't as good as the one that came before. They never really did a good record again. And I think they knew, I think somehow, in their hearts, Paul New, they had created this cheap anthem, which was not really authentic to contemporary social experience. And there's also something distasteful about it from a contemporary vantage point. Because what is the scene, the scene is O Jarvis Cocker's like going on,

lecturing this rich student about how she doesn't understand how poor people really live. But he's at art school on a grant, which in historical terms is like a privilege which hardly any people in history have ever been able to enjoy and which people haven't been able to enjoy even since I was a student. So I'm not that sympathetic. It's a great song though. Yeah, I like the song as well. This whole discussion has made me, it's done a bit of time travel thing and made me go back to my, to my youth. basically in that sort of like post-punk sort of milieu moving into sort of early dance music in which there was this real valorisation of like engaging with stuff which are more difficult

and more complex and more challenging you were expected like to cultivate a disposition in which you would be able to go and engage with and eventually come to enjoy more challenging stuff like industrial music or stuff. like that, that you might not necessarily, you know, like on first listen, or perhaps you would, perhaps you wouldn't. I remember I went for this thing of, like, I decided I was going to go and like jazz. And I did it by watching a documentary about the history of jazz. So you get an understanding of that. And then like trying to listen to, you know, listen to jazz and then move my way towards free jazz, etc. You know, I think it was worth doing, basically.

I think that is a good disposition because you basically open yourself up to more complex. aspects of life. I don't know where that fits into the whole upstream, downstream, mainstream sort of thing, but it was part of, like, the way that you were supposed to be, basically, in certain milliers, you know, in the late 1980s into the early 1990s, that sort of idea. Well, it wasn't just from then, was it? I mean, that was inheriting an idea of avant-gardeism, which goes right back to the 1920. Well, absolutely, yeah, but that's how I experienced, basically. Yeah, but I also, I mean, well, I did, but I also, I was very committed to that idea, And I experienced it. I was inheriting that.

So, I mean, part of that was you were supposed to read Ulysses, which I did, and I really enjoyed it. I agree that stuff is healthy. Like, we should still do that. People should still engage with difficult stuff because it's good for your brain, even though you have to sort of, it's okay. It's okay to not enjoy it at all the time and it's okay to do other stuff. You have to have the resources to be able to do that. You have to have the mental resources and the space to be. able to do that. I'm not, by any way, I'm not going to be following on what I'm saying by

basically making the elitist argument, because I think, you know, you're right. I think it's wrong to attribute class to like, you know, cultural experimentation. I think it's highly problematic, you know, and very political when people do that. But I do think you have to have the, at least psychological resources to be able to do that. And I would argue that at this late stage of capitalism, a lot of people find that difficult. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be an endeavour, but I would argue that it should be more of a collective endeavor, like that I would like to see the sort of events,

events where people are able to engage with, quote, unquote, difficult or, you know, outside mainstream or, you know, especially with art, like the sort of things where are not necessarily accessible without the time and resources of reading or watching around it, like going to watch a documentary about jazz or whatever. But yeah, I'm interested in how that interacts with late capitalism, I suppose. Yeah, no, you're totally right, of course. And I mean, this is something we've talked about many times before,

but we can't talk about enough, is that the material conditions that made it possible for people like me and Keir to see that as a norm, I've gone now, and they really have to be understood for what they were, if we're ever going to have any chance of bringing them back. I mean, I would go further and say, actually, if you want to do a sort of analysis of what was going on there, which isn't just informed by a sort of radical or revolutionary politics, if you were to bring to bear the

sociological ideas of somebody like Pierre Bordeur, which I said, I just said we weren't going to do if I'm going to do momentarily, they would see Pierre Baudier, the great French sociologist of culture, would say, well, part of what's going on with Jem and Keir when they're teenagers in the 80s is they sort of know that there's a potentially a big reward. for getting good at understanding difficult ideas, because that carries with it a degree of cachet. It carries with it the possibility of access to more elite social and cultural networks,

and it might mean you end up getting jobs in universities, which eventually each of us actually did. And impressing girls? Surely that's part of it. It was a few. There was a few, let me tell you, I had a few years of girls not being at all impressed that I was interested in avant-garde culture.

that I called myself a feminist before they started to be impressed by it, eventually. I'm not saying it was successful. I did my time. And, you know, girls in West Lancashire, girls in West Lancashire were not at all impressed with that until I was, you know, almost at the end of my teens. But that's also changed. I mean, now, I mean, this is a real problem. It's a real problem which is being experienced, I think, by people teaching across the university sector, even in the elite sector, actually. that students sort of know, there's no gain for them.

They're not going to get rewarded by anybody for kind of engaging with difficult ideas and getting really good at doing a kind of sophisticated analysis of things. They can get chat CBD to do that for them. And the only jobs available out there in the graduate sector seem like they're going to be jobs that just require them to sort of reproduce the ideological norms of marketing and management culture. And in that sense, yeah, the mainstream has changed

And the mainstream has changed because of the changing class relations, which have meant that the significant gains that were made by the working class, including those sections for the working class, who ended up with jobs as teachers or as artists or as public service broadcasters in the post-war period, those gains have all been rolled back to the point where, no, we are in now in the situation in which basically engaging with that any sort of real avant-garde culture, yet it is a luxury. it's a luxury for people, you know, who are very, very, very privileged. And I mean, obviously there are people who do it as well. Obviously, there will be lots of people listening to this who, you know, don't necessarily have a lot of money or don't have jobs and are still really engaged with various kinds of avant-garde culture, which in some ways is, you know, in some ways has been made more available by like YouTube and things that it used to be if you're really interested in it.

Could I just push back against Bodhi, Ethan? boring bastard, because, you know, I grew up in the South Wales Valleys, and, you know, there was a prehistory to, like, working class people, men and women, men in particular, actually, really, really valorising being engaged with, like, art and, like, ideas and stuff like that, and that was, like, the sort of culture around South Wales miners. Do you know what I mean? In the town, I grew up in Pontodawi, there was a miners institute, which had a big library in it. I mainly went there to play snook, I must admit, but, like, You know, there was that thing of, like, people would, and that was not seen as like,

this will be a route to personal advancement at all. It would be like, this is like what life's about. Do you know what I mean? This is how you engage with the world. This is how you expand your horizons. It was part of like a collective. And it was part of class consciousness. It was part of class consciousness.

Yes, totally, absolutely, yeah. Nothing's too good for the working class. You know, that was the thing. But this is the point. This is central to what we are said. This is, in fact, is the point. Yes. Is that if that is seen as central, as in its mainstream within that culture, in a sense, that this is what life is about, is about engaging with ideas and it is part of, as you said, class consciousness or just even, you know, outside class politics, like being a quote unquote learned citizen or whatever, you know, within that liberal framework, like that is a thing that I'm wondering, like, is that, you know, mainstream in terms of like if we're speaking about specifically engaging with quote unquote difficult ideas or ideas that live outside the kind of.

the direct lived experience. Yeah, well, this is really important, okay. This is a, there's a reference, I'm sure we made before on the show. There's this classic essay of kind of historical cultural criticism written by Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson called the peculiarities of the English. And they're trying to answer the question, really. Like, why does, has England in particular, has seemed not to have generated the kind of philosophical culture which produces like a Gramsci or a or a Hegel and a Marx. And they make this

argument that in particular English elite culture historically, for specific historical reasons, is very anti-intellectual. It's very focused on the here and now. It's focused on the short term. This manifests itself philosophically as the sort of belief in empiricism, the belief that all knowledge comes from immediate sense experience and any kind of speculative reflection is sort of nonsensical. And it manifests itself within broader elite culture as this sort of Philistinism, kind of anti-intellectualism, a suspicion of any kind of difficult cultural ideas, which is quite different. It's different from the French culture, Bordeaux is writing about in the 60s, it's different from historical German culture. And the way I always illustrate that difference is, I'm sure, I've referred to this

before on the show. I remember Mark Fisher and I talking, years ago, we were sort of joking about like what it was like to be a PhD student in the late 90s. And Mark said, he was quoting some friend of his, I don't know if you meet someone at a party and you're trying to impress them, talking about impressing girls, you know, you'd sooner admit to being a drug other than admit to being a PhD student. And that was an attitude which has always been really shocking to people from other countries. It's shocking even to Americans, because there's just a kind of expectation in most of those societies, even in the United States, and in Scotland and Wales, compared to England, that, well, there's some kind of

value attached to kind of mastering difficult ideas and understanding difficult culture, and that kind of, that value will be, like, recognised by elite groups, and elite groups will sort of concede that there's a certain kind of value to it. And historically, in English culture, their argument made by, and Antam, which I think is really right, you don't get that. You get just this kind of elite Philistinism, which is really kind of against those ideas. And I've always said that my own experience is I've always encountered kind of anti-intellectualism and Philistinism much more amongst the middle classes, including like elite middle class people in England, including people who've been to Oxbridge. I mean, really, I mean, Oxford is a kind of

world capital of philosophical, kind of anti-philosophical, philistinism in a way. And you encounter it among sections of, historically among sections of the working class who were the most deferential to the elite. And so, actually, you find at least among sections of the working class who were not deferential to that kind of elite culture. And yeah, I encountered growing up loads, like in the kind of socialist culture of trade unionism in the northwest. And also, when I first got to university, actually, I had loads of Irish friends. Those were the kind of working class, there was a huge working class Irish community at the university. And it was really striking that there was just, there just wasn't this kind of, there wasn't this kind of ingrained Philistinism,

which is historically typical of English elite culture and of middle class and working class cultures that are deferential to it. So I think that that is really important. And from that point, yeah, that is true. And so from that point of view, you know, engaging with a wide range of culture and ideas in an expansive way and in the way that is not anti-intellectual, that is, you know, it does become a part of, you know, class consciousness, as I said. That's why I've never really had much truck with that, like, anti-intellectual, you know, the left needs to be normie and mainstream, an anti-intellectual and, like, not engage with difficult stuff and all that sort of stuff.

You're saying that's not anti-elitist. You're just embracing the norms of the British elite, basically, because we never fully got rid of the aristocracy, basically, which is the Nairn Anderson thesis. There is another side to that, though, right? So the critique of that would be, well, look, the problem with that is, you know, if you look at like that post-punk thing in the 80s and, you know, as it moved into the 90s, et cetera, like that's just like self-marginalization. Do you know what I mean?

There's like you can fetishize marginality, basically, which can be a political dead end. And the way it might affect and express itself in politics is that you just constantly adopt what seems to be the most militant or radical position with no regard to its political efficacy, basically, that you want to make it that sort of argument, I think. Yeah, I mean, that was an argument that was made at the time, actually. We'll have to play some music by Hugh and Cry or Scriti Politic. I mean, friend of the show, Pat Kane,

who is now like a really prominent public intellectual in Scotland. He was the singer in a group with his brother called Hugh and Cry in the mid-80s. And they were part of a wave of groups. They included people like the Pet Shop. boys actually, whose own, whose politics was, was really radical and sort of self-consciously left wing, but they themselves had this critique of the avant-gardism of post-punk and its elitism. And their idea was, what you should do is you should do like really catchy pop songs with socialist lyrics. And that's how you would raise people's consciousness. And it's really

interesting to think about that. But I think I've always thought it's kind of debatable whether that was successful. Because like, you know, as a kid a bit, young, younger than them. I had no idea that Human Cry was supposed to be the socialist project. I thought they were just yuppie pop. And it was only when I read, it was only later when I read books about them that I realized, oh, they were supposed to be socialist. Whereas I perfectly well understood that Kras were doing something ideologically anti-capitalist when I heard the music, like even even if I couldn't understand what the lyrics were. And that would be a sort of counter argument in a way to that idea that you can just embrace kind of mainstream forms and somehow

smuggling like radical content. But it is really interesting that those were really live debates. And a lot of people don't realize this historically. There was a lot of that like early 80s synth pop in Britain was being produced by people who were more trained in this sort of cultural theory than any any kind of wave of musicians ever in Britain. And they were really, they had a really self-conscious critique of what they saw as the political failure of like punk and post-punk and the counterculture of the 16th and 70s to really achieve sort of mass popularity. And the thing they really wanted to avoid, the thing they were against was becoming deliberately marginal, like fetishizing their own marginality. And they were really, they really had a

critique of the whole idea that what you should do is you should try, you should deliberately try to be outside the mainstream. Their idea was that you should actually try to kind of win people over to your political perspective by, in a Gramscian sense, you know, kind of meeting them where they are, kind of producing stuff they're going to like. And that does, I think that does lead us into thinking about, like, the political question in which you were going to raise earlier an idea, the question of, well, what does all this mean when it comes to politics? Like, what does it mean to want to be made, to make your main, your ideas mainstream politically or your practices? Yeah, totally. I just think it's an interesting question to,

to try and look at, like, what are the social conditions that would make a political grouping or a cultural grouping, like, want to have their political ideas mainstreamed or have them, for lack of a better word, on the fringe. You know, and so I think that's just interesting to kind of explore, because I think experientially, on the left, I've seen it both ways. You know, I've seen a concerted effort of people thinking ideologically, like, we want these ideas to become hegemonic and other people operating or other groups operating that they, you know, they had the monopoly over the truth, but not operating as if like one of the

main parts of the project was to get these, to spread these ideas. What are the social conditions which kind of lead to either one or the other? Like, I want left-wing ideas to be mainstream, because I don't think they're that radical. Like, I don't think the premise of my values are radical at all. I think it actually speaks to the, the, what I would say, what I would call the, like, the core of, like, natural humanity, you know? I think it's right, I think it's right-wing ideology, which is, like, super constructed and problematic. But that's not necessarily, I think, operationally, like how, how some actors on the left behave, I would say. Yeah, and leads us back again, doesn't it, a black, like, how, who and how, who defines what the mainstream

is and how is it defined? Technical affordances play a role in this, etc. There's like concerted political struggle or projects in order to promote certain ideas and certain practices and try to make them popular. We're not quite sure if we want to make them mainstream. But there's also like, you know, running right through from like music to TV to politics, there is also like, you know, the media, the structure of the media and who owns it and who controls it, basically. So it's really quite interesting, I think, about other concepts which go along with this idea of mainstream politics or mainstream media. So, for instance, like concepts such as centrism, because centrist ideas are definitely mainstream, they form the focus upon which, like the over-to-window sort

of moves. They're not popular, right? They haven't got very big constituency that believes them. Do you know what I mean? If you ask, like do attitudinal surveys or even like policy surveys, they're just not popular centrist ideas and centrist policies. They're just not, basically. There's a difference between them being popular and being mainstream or the focus of political debate. You know, there's an operation that happens there that turns unpopular ideas into the mainstream. As soon as you've mentioned, Hugh and Cry, we should play a song by them and we should play Labor of Love, which is probably their biggest hit from 1987. It's got lyrics like this, I'm going to withdraw my labour of love, going to strike for the right to get into your heart,

yeah, withdraw my labour of love. You can see the socialist lyrics being made popular through the connection with the popular topic of love in that lyric. Let's hear a bit of that. But now, too much pain for too little game. And I feel like I'm going to fight back right now. Gonna whip, drop my labor of love Gonna strike For the rain To get into your heart

Yeah Whip drop my labor The love Going to strike To drive To get into your cold heart Ain't gonna work for you No more

Ain't gonna worry You no more Ha ha easy I know that you said It's never wise gonna be easy Nadia was talking about people who you could describe as being on the political left who don't want to see their ideas become mainstream and I'm imagining like a lot of younger listeners are going to really not know

what we're talking about here because it's kind of hard to imagine. I'm not sure it's that conscious. No, it was quite. No, I'm going to talk about when it was totally conscious. Okay. Because there was a whole set of like political mood tendencies. I mean, really you're talking about the radical fringe. You're talking about sections of the anti-capitalist, anti-globalization movement, things coming out of anarchism, things that were really connected more to various kind of art, micro scenes, into any real political or social movement.

But when we were preparing the show, we were talking about this. And I was really, I really got into a rant about what it was like in the 90s. Because it was really widespread, this idea that ideas like hegemony are really old-fashioned. like power doesn't work like that in society anymore everything is so fragmented in fact there is no consensus there is no mainstream either culturally or politically so actually what you need to do is you just need to sort of escape from power by creating your own niche and like your own enclave somewhere out out there in the whether it's in the squats of hackney or whether it's out in the wilderness in oregon or whatever and people who wanted to do things like have mass movements and get all the

normies to agree with them, like, we're just part of the problem. Like, they just didn't really understand, like, how things should work now. And it's, it seems kind of ridiculous. It's a huge advance on where we were then that it seemed so ridiculous. But that was, that was how people thought, and there was a whole set of theoretical reference points. There was a particular reading of Deleuze and Guittari, people drew on for this, particular readings of certain text from the anarchist tradition. There were people like, Michelle, del de Serto, the kind of French cultural and social theorist, he really had this whole thing that like strategy is just about, you know, states and power

and the weak deploy their tactics to evade the strategic operations of power. And that's the most radical thing you can possibly do. Temporary autonomous zones, remember them. Oh, my God. Oh, my, well remembered, well remembered and well, well calculated to trigger me. Because, oh my God, I hate that. hated it at the time. Hacking Bay, the pen name of a fairly well-known American anarchist writer, published this little book called The Temporary Autonomous Zone. The whole idea was the radical thing

you could do was construct so-called temporary autonomous zones. And a temporary autonomous zone could be anything, could be a rave, could be a dinner party, could be you and your dog walking down the street, as long as at that moment you regard yourself as autonomous from state and capitalist operations. Of course, I mean, it's a totally ludicrous concept. from anything else, like, what do you think the state and capital wants you to be doing if you are not willing to actively participate in reproducing its institutions and norms? It wants you to be sitting around with your friends, tending yourselves, you've got a temporary autonomous zone,

rather than knocking on doors in your community, trying to get the normies to come out on the streets and challenge its power. Of course, that's what it wants. And, God, it was so, it became like the dominant way, both in the academic discourse and political discourse, of talking about the potential politics of rave. Oh, a rave is a temporary autonomous zone. Brilliant.

I hated it so much. Peter Lambon Wilson was hacking. Peter Lambon Wilson. I hated it from day one. And I think it is a real advance. Like it does represent a real advance in political consciousness. And now all that stuff seems so dated. Now all that stuff seems dated.

And it's widely understood that even if what you want to be is like a radical artist in a squatted art space, actually, like what you're doing won't be that meaningful. if it doesn't have some orientation to some kind of a collective political project that has some aspiration to become part of a mass project that will eventually indeed transform the political mainstream. And as Graham, she says, will actually try to change the common sense of the masses, rather than just running away from it.

We should position that, though, that whole tendency within the historical circumstances of which it had some purchase, which was the high point of neoliberalism, where it was much harder, pre the crisis of 2007, 2008, it was much harder to think through how you would, you know, how these ideas would become, how these sort of left-wing ideas would become hegemonic, basically.

Yeah, and pre-internet as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was very difficult, it's true. It was very, very difficult. And it was, it was basically, you know, the financial crisis of 2007, 2008, and the collapse of that, like, high neoliberalism and, you know, the sort of the,

the decline and stagnation we've had since then that opens up the prospect that, you know, the answer to the world is actually not going to be neoliberalism. That was, that was the, you know, in the early 2000, I remember, you know, I remember teaching the class on globalization theory and the mainstream theories you were arguing against were that neoliberalism was going to solve global end of history, and neoliberalism was going to solve global poverty. It's like, fucking insane. It seems so insane now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody could possibly argue that. unless you just call the Chinese Communist Party neoliberalism.

But let's put that to one side. Once again, I've engineered an Oxbow Lake for myself. I'm going to use that concept from now. Okay, let's put it, put it this way. Okay. Do we, are we main, do we want to be mainstream, you know, politically, I think. Because in a way, I think I don't want to be mainstream. And let me set it up this way, right?

And one of these sort of like images I've been using quite a lot recently, I've been doing these radical abundance book tours. One of the images I've been using is that there's like this gap between what's necessary to do and what's seen politically possible to do. So there's always like a constrained sense of what is socially and politically possible. You know, that's to do with like, you know, what are the ideas and the policies that are mainstream. You can just take climate change, for instance.

We are heading towards 2.6 degrees of global warming at a minimum, basically. That seems where we're heading. and the consequences are just huge. But changing that, you know, doing the sorts of changes that are necessary to prevent that, just seem politically impossible. And so the political task is to move that mainstream, move that sense of political possibility,

you know, almost iteratively, to expand that space of possibility, almost iteratively until it crosses that gap between the possible and the necessary, and then we can address the absolute crises facing us. Do you know what I mean? But that means our position should be to the left of the mainstream,

and constantly trying to pull it across towards our ideas. That's how I would think about the political position to be in terms of the mainstream, rather than just saying, I want to be in the mainstream and be in the mainstream and then act within that. I think that's the position to have. I think there's two different spheres. If we're talking about politics, I think trying, like, the project of mainstreaming our ideas is an important one. I think my politics comes from my values. Like that is what, you know, it's built on values and ideology.

And regardless of what happens externally in the world, like that really hasn't shifted, whether that is read as radical or red as mainstream. Like, I'm quite clear on what I want, you know, what I think is a better world where people are more able to live, you know, with nature in a more healthful, a joyful environment, you know, and that's what I want. So I want to be part of a project which mainstreams that idea. and also, you know, as we talked about, exposes me as well to, you know, new potentialities for activating that, right? So I'm not saying that I have all the operational answers, but I think

like it's important for me to engage outside my own mainstream, but also like be engaging in those ideas. I think that's politically. I think on a personal psychological level, I would fucking love to be mainstream. I would love to be mainstream. I would love to be somebody who it felt natural and normal to get married and have kids, etc. And that is just completely not me. It is completely not who I am. So I think it depends what's fear that we're talking about. I find it very difficult to live in. And this is going to sound like, you know, really trite, but to live inauthentically. So because of that, probably I have like less money and less status that I could have, potentially.

But would you like the mainstream to adapt in such a way that you could live the way you do now and that that be seen as mainstream? No, so it's not about what other people think. It's, I think it's just about, I think it's like it's psychologically difficult for me. But I can't answer the question of why it's not just about capitalism. It's about, it's about a complicated set of things. but would I like society to adapt so I can live a better life? Yes, but that's by killing capitalism because then I, you know,

then I could work, but I wouldn't have to have a wage, right? That's the whole point. You know, good engage in all of the rest of the things that I wanted, but that's not about the personal choices that I make. The personal choices I make are outside the mainstream because I'm partly born like that. It's part nature and part nurture, right? That is another aspect of like of the mainstream that it is easy for some

people to be interpreted as not weird in some sort of way. As in, you know, I'm a middle-aged man. You know, I dress fairly normie, I think, you know, quite stylish, obviously, but the stylish end of normie. Not with those turn-up jeans. Those turn-up jeans are pretty, pretty stylish. But I definitely have noticed, as I've got older, that like, people just treat you, I don't know if it's with more respect. I don't know if it's what it is. But basically, you know, it feels as though People treat me as though I fit into society. Well, that is not available to... You get a degree of deference.

It is deference, probably, yeah. It is deference, and it is all about power. Yeah. You know, I always remember becoming conscious, like, sometime my early 40s. If I passed a group of, like, especially if I passed, like, a group of young black guys on the street, the way they would look at me would become, became fearful. And I know what that fear is. That fear is, well, I just have to pick up the phone.

Cops are going to come beat them. because I said they looked at me wrong. That's what it is, basically. That is something to do with being mainstream, being hegemonic, being normative. Yeah, I mean, it is, but it's also not, right? Because there's nothing, that's about identity and about where you fit in in terms of like a grouping that has a lot of social power, about being white, middle-aged and male, right?

So it's regardless of your ideas, which are obviously not mainstream. Like, that experience which you've both articulated is completely not at all. Like, I've, on a daily basis of I'm fighting as a middle-aged woman to be taken seriously, like all of the time. Maybe if I was blonde and white, it would be different. I don't know to what extent it's gender and to what extent it's like being slightly, slightly quote-unquote foreign, but I'm constantly fighting to being taken seriously. Unless I'm given a platform, that's different because I can hold my own.

if I don't have a platform, I'm constantly. Yeah, it's a battle on daily life, I would say, and it is for a lot of women. We've talked on this show about the idea of the underground. So we should hear some music from one of the most self-consciously underground acts ever to release music. Underground resistance, these are the Detroit techno pioneers who always self-consciously identified themselves with some kind of a revolutionary politics. Well, the actual nature of their politics was never wholly clear. It was more of a vibe. But it was a strongly anti-capitalist, anti-industry, anti-corporate, revolutionary vibe.

And their music is often marvellous. This is a track from 1990 by Underground Resistance, and it has the fantastically ACFM title of The Theory. I think it's interesting to think it's interesting to think about this question of how it's interesting to think about this question of how what feels in relation to to an idea of mainstream because since we asked the question I keep thinking back to the episode but we talked about revolution actually

and we talked about what it meant to feel like someone who's sort of objectively a revolutionary even if I'm not really engaged in revolutionary praxis that much. I mean the ways in which I feel really outside of a mainstream are really to do with my sense that the

normative culture of the professional classes of my generation is really apolitical and really is mostly made up with people who don't understand what's going on, even if they're not very happy about it. You know, it is the centrist, moms and dads.

And that's the extent to which I really feel outside the mainstream. I feel like I can't, like it's quite hard for me to have a chat with my kids, friends, parents, because apart from a couple of people I know really well, like mostly I know their outlook on life is completely shaped by a set of norms according to which everything is focused on this aspirational idea

that every sine you must be bent towards the task of getting your kid into an elite university and I hate that so much I hate it on so many levels that I just feel like I can't even talk to most of them most of the time really and in that sense I feel really outside the mainstream but I'm also really conscious

I mean maybe this is partly phantomatic I'm sort of conscious of how much like it's much more normal for people like a generation and two generations younger than me to sort of feel that way now and feel disenfranchised and alienated by all that stuff. So in another sense, I feel aligned to something which seems to be emergent in a way which makes me feel a lot less alienated from the whole social formation than I felt when I was when I was younger. Yes. Me and Jeremy were the dissident part of our generation, but history has redeemed us and we've been proven to be right.

No, it is like that. It is a bit like that. That is a bit like that. It is also, I think Nadi's raised an important point. It is easier for us to feel that way because we've got mortgages, heterosexual partnerships and kids. And that is all, and that is easier for us to feel that way because in a lot of kind of material ways, like we don't really, we don't stick out. And it means we can pass because that's what it feels like. It sort of feels like when I'm walking, down the street and the cops are nice to me and you know young guys are scared of me because the cops are nice to me it feels like it's passing isn't it's what used to be called in like queer culture passing it's passing for straight it's super easy for us to pass for straight

that is what's meant by privilege like we're all really critical of the concept of privilege because I don't think privilege gives you any power and this is a good illustration like I don't have any power in that situation like if I start giving lip to the cops because they're hassling the black guys on the streets, they will clock me immediately for an interfering lefty and they'll fucking kick my head in too. So I do not have any power, but I do have the privilege of being able to pass in that sense, which makes it quite easy to feel like actually it's okay that we're just, we've just been sitting here comfortably waiting for history to vindicate us. Partly what we're doing as the weird left, part of the project for me is

to reclaim weirdness for the left actually. We talked about stranger things, range of things is partly about weird culture becoming totally mainstream and this is also what I feel about things like psychedelic culture they've become really mainstream but they've become mainstream within the frame of reference offered by hegemonial liberalism and part of what I want to do with the show a lot of the time is I want to reclaim weirdness for the left it's not that I want to demand the left must be weird because I think it's fine if the weird I mean it's fine if the left is is also normie, it's also about beer and football and even if needs must, like people liking Oasis.

The left has to include all that as well. But I want to claim like the radical, the innovative, the future imagining potential of the weird, of the non-mainstream, like for the broad project of the left. That was why I was always completely at odds with like weird culture in the 90s because weird culture in the 90s

was about valorising the weird for the sake of the weird and if something that seemed to be associated with like Marxism or historical socialism happen to be weird and avant-garde, then it could become part of that package. And I never really, that was never how I liked to be. Like, for me, I want the left to be able to make use of the weird, like to have fun with it and to help us imagine the future. And that's partly because I want even the weird and the things that are outside the mainstream. I want them to be tools and resources we can draw on to help translate.

transform the mainstream, politically and culturally, in ways that we want to. So we want to be engaging with the mainstream. We want to be in the mainstream. But we want to do that in a way which isn't confined by the limits of what the mainstream means like now at any one moment. Totally. And we're interested in that being the provocative, that if the alternative, if there is space for us on the left to be provocative but also visionary and like you said, forward facing and then involves something with joy, then that's kind of important to me. You know, right at the beginning when we started talking about these concepts when we did an episode on the weird left. I think the conclusion we came to was, look, no, you know,

the mainstream, nobody's normal. Everybody's a bit weird, basically. You know, and because weirdness is like open us to the complexity of the world. You know, we're all complex human beings of all sorts of potentials, all sorts of like contradictory ideas, etc. We need to be open to that, do you know what I mean? I think that concept of like being able to pass and the privilege of that is really useful actually, but you know, perhaps we want a world in which, you know, that privilege of passing, passing is mainstream in order to, you know, being able to embrace the weirdness and complexity of life, you know, should be open to everybody. Wow, that's too far out.