TRASHFUTURE - *Unlocked* Riley's Commie Book Club: Mark Fisher

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

It’s that time again: Riley sat down with a book, and now you have to hear him talk about it for an hour or so. This month, Riley read K-Punk, out now on Repeater Books. K-Punk collects the previously unpublished writing of British left cultural, political, and social critic Mark Fisher, who explored realism and imagination, future and memory, and the freedom to imagine better worlds. If you like this episode, you can access it and dozens like it by subscribing to the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’ll be performing once again at the Star of Kings in Kings Cross (126 York Way, Kings Cross, London N1 0AX) on Thursday, May 30 at 7:30 pm. Get your tickets here and return to the podcasting basement! https://www.tickettext.co.uk/trashfuture-podcast/trashfuture-live-30052019/ *ADDITIONAL LIVE SHOW ALERT* On June 15, we’ll perform at Wolfson College Bar (Wolfson College, Cambridge CB3 9BB) in Cambridge. The show starts at 8:30 pm, so be there and be ready to hear about Gundams. Tickets are £8 for students and £10 for general admission: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/trashfuture-podcast/trashfuture-live-in-cambridge-15062019/ *COMEDY KLAXON*: If you’re in Cambridge, come to Milo’s show tonight, May 14, at 11pm and hear all about Russia. It’s at the ADC Theatre, Park Street, Cambridge CB5 8AS. https://www.adctheatre.com/whats-on/comedy/pindos-an-adventure-in-modern-russia/ Also: you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/, and what’s more, it’s mandatory if you want to be taken seriously. Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

The last line in Mark Fisher's unfinished manuscript, Acid Communism, reflects on the 1970s socialist movement in Bologna, when Utopia seemed at hand but has since been lost. He goes, we must regain the optimism of that moment, just as we must carefully analyze all the machineries that capital deployed to convert confidence into dejection. Understanding how this process of consciousness deflation worked is the first step to reversing it. This has been Mark Fisher's entire lifelong mission. Understanding how the process of consciousness deflation worked and taking the first steps to reverse it.

Fisher was a radical cultural critic, political theorist, academic, whatever you want, probably one of the most significant in Britain in the last couple of decades. Among his sort of more famous work was the book Capitalist Realism, which I hope many of you have read. Interestingly, my mother just read Capitalist Realism and loves it, but found it extraordinarily depressing, which I guess is kind of the right way to read Mark Fisher, because he's not a writer that really pulls a lot of punches. His whole skill set lies in making obvious and sort of stating very coldly exactly what is wrong. Exactly all of these things that feel wrong. When you hear of some initiative to increase

coding skills in disadvantaged populations or whatever, Mark Fisher is one of many voices telling you why it won't work, but why at the same time it's so incredibly necessary for capital to continue convincing you that it will work or that we live in a tolerable scenario. Sorry, I'm already getting distracted. I'm going to get distracted frequently, because Mark Fisher is probably one of my favorite writers. I find when I read him, it's cathartic because it tells me I'm not crazy for seeing what is obviously in front of my eyes and thinking what is obviously the truth. I'm getting slightly distracted. Among his other achievements was he founded Zero Books, which published Capitalist Realism,

then went slightly reactionary. Later, Repeater Books, which published this volume that I have read several times for this series, K-Punk, which is the name of his blog. Additionally, he's written extensively on music, movies, films, books, all within this lens of wondering how they represent the present past and future and how they do it in such a way that either can flatten or broaden the world of possibility, that can diminish your confidence in your own ability to run your own life and build a future that works for you, or just tell you that it was better before, or that it's always been this way, that there is no alternative. He was writing against the culture of there is no alternative.

He is outrightly, I should say before I keep talking about it in the past tense, that he took his own life in 2017. He always dealt with mental illness and he was particularly interested in the relationship between capitalism and mental illness in the ways in which the stress of constantly having to make economically optimizing decisions and constantly having to accept a slightly diminished view of your own future could quite reasonably drive you crazy. But he was a pointed critic whose outright detestation of modern political smarm is ultimately a genuine pleasure to read, if only because it is as long as the gray stupidity of neoliberalism remains the definitional force of our world, timely and penetrating.

So here's another quote from one of the K-Punk essays. I can't remember which one. I wrote down the essay for most of these because K-Punk is a book of essays. I'll get into that in a sec. This is about Tony Blair. Blair's slogan, education, education, education is the sickest joke of all and not only because he has presided over the dumbest front bench in recorded history, another testament to the wonder of Oxbridge. Maybe he has, quote unquote, pumped more money into education, but that is useless if the extra funds are going on quangos, inept administrators, and facile initiatives that were doomed to fail and pointless even if they succeeded. Tell us what you really think, Mark. So this gets the core

Fisher's criticism. He is unwilling ever to defer to authority because and is completely unwilling to accept simple instrumental smoke screens, so funding for education versus what the funding is spent on and general cynicism. Smart fixes and initiatives that don't deal with underlying power structures and don't deal with underlying problems are unlikely to result in lasting changes. So we know the problem is a lack of resources going to the students. We know that schools don't have books. We know that schools don't have enough teachers. We know that schools are teaching to moronic and mind shrinking tests, and anyone who says that what we're going to do is create a means tested incentive program to put Oxbridge graduates in schools for two years so they can bring some

of their smarts and inspiration to the youth before then going on to banking jobs or whatever is utterly facile in the face of these extremely obvious problems. And what I like about Mark is that he was completely and utterly unwilling to look at to even take seriously the idea that that this tinkering around the edges of our society was anything but a sort of acceptance of defeat for the forces of popular liberty. And so the other thing about Fisher is that he was always a dialectician. He's not interested in looking at single causes and single effects, inputs and outputs, but processes, how things interact and influence each other, and how oppositions between them produce new things. So Fisher is not so facile

that it's not so silly that he's going to write about TV as though if TV became better then capitalism would fall apart. But at the same time, he's not such a sort of reductionist thinker that he doesn't understand the role that like entertainment media plays in, I guess you could say reducing our ability to understand our own situation. Remember that quote from the beginning, understanding how this process of consciousness deflation worked. So that would be the thing that lets us just throw up our arms and say, well, I guess Blair's means tested fucking shit is going to be the thing that fixes education. Maybe that's a consciousness deflated position is the first step to reversing it. So he's interested in looking at the totality and

K-Punk certainly does represent a totality of thinking because Mark wrote across because he was primary cultural critic. He came out of the Cybernetics and Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, which was started by Nick Land and Sadie Plant. And between those three, there was also Steve Goodman, who was code nine. I have the book with me. I only just knew code nine off hand because I like his music. Okay, we get Jake and Dinos Chapman, Matthew Fuller, Ian Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Kadwo Eshun, like tons and tons of people. This it produced this like real kind of flowering of thought. Any case. And the thing about this group is that they were not just interested in one or another thing as nor was Fisher. And this is Fisher's unpublished

writing. So you might find discussions of stuff like Capitalist Realism. You won't find the actual text. It was published on his blog, so he kept this K-Punk blog. And it's like a blog in book form. And I think some of the articles are probably still up online, but the whole process of putting this book together, Darren Ambrose at Repeater did. It's all about finding, he was talking about how he's finding these dead links of these conversations that you can half recover. And as much as Fisher was obsessed with the idea of haunting, it seems quite fitting. I'm also going to try to avoid some of his more famous writing, such as Exiting the Vampire's Castle and focus a little more on the cultural than the overtly political. Because that's the

thing. I've picked the concepts I want to talk about in Fisher for this book club. And there are going to be some of you who by the end of it are shouting at your phone being like, you missed the most important bit. But that's the great thing about Fisher. I could do so many more of these book clubs about this book. And I, spoiler alert, I probably will. Because the breadth is just so intense. And all the essays are so short that many of them are just a few pages. But the ability, Fisher's ability to make a single point so incisively and furiously and coldly is really comes across. So let's outline a couple of key concepts before we carry on. Some of you will, again, probably know this. I think many of you might have probably read Capitalist

Realism before, but let's just quickly go into it. Capitalist Realism, you know, this is from the book Capitalist Realism, and not this book, K-Punk. Capitalist Realism, as I understand it, cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere conditioning not only the production of culture, but also the regulation of work and education and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action. And this is an idea that sort of comes out in Gizek as well, which is sort of the idea that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Well, Capitalist Realism is a way of seeing the future that

defines what's realistic and what's not, and what's even believable. So a lot of people, okay, look at an example. You ever have a conversation with someone, maybe a family member or whatever, and you're saying, actually, I believe that we should be striving for a world where we don't have to work as opposed to a world in which everyone's employed doing media labor or whatever. They'll say, yes, but if no one works, then nothing will get done because they can only imagine a world in which the Capitalist Employment Contract and the profit motive that's held by an individual or a shareholder is the way to get anyone to do anything. Alternative concepts of organization aren't even there to be debated. They're a fantasism.

So this is why I think when you say you're a socialist, people don't take you seriously because they're like, well, they'll say, oh, yeah, well, how would anyone get motivated to work if they didn't have to own? It's like, ah, yeah, damn, I've never thought of that. You really owned me, Uncle fucking Hardmaster. I didn't think of that one basic question because I noticed that when they ask you that question, they never seem interested in the answer. They're asking it to you as a symbolic rejection of what it is that you think they're not trying to get at what it is that you think because whatever you think is ridiculous. It's their way of telling you you're ridiculous. And that is Capitalist Realism in action,

socially, that you've probably all experienced. And the term was actually originally used by a German painter called Gerhard Richter, who included the phrase in the name for one of his shows. That was talking about how capitalism has its own forms of propaganda and that drew inspiration from mass culture. And so what Fisher did was he sort of extended this and made it a whole, almost an epistemology, not just of cultural production, but of work as well when adding markets to the NHS to make it more efficient, for example. That's capitalist realist thinking because you're like, well, the only way something can run is as a market. And everything that isn't a market is stuff that the market is supporting because nothing could

support a market because markets are the foundation of all life. And so that's like for one of Fisher's big concepts, probably the thing for which he's most famous. But here's the other thing. It's the future. Fisher is obsessed with the future and the ways in which our ability to imagine alternative worlds to our own and different futures to the gray doom we seem inexorably drawn towards are maintained or diminished. So the future for Fisher is this realm of possibility that is always under threat of foreclosure, but it's also the only place where we can possibly win. So here is a quote from Fisher on the future. I think it is an imaginative task for us to think, what is the future of the public? If we can accept that the neoliberal story that

the public is just over, that that story is now over, if the public isn't going to be just old style nationalized state industries, state centralization, all of that, what is it going to be like in the future? We don't know, we have to invent it. So the neoliberal story, what he means is that the neoliberal story that the public has done is itself done. And we can't just go back to how it was in the 70s. We have to invent something new. And if we look at those two concepts together, capitalism, realism, and the future, then we're going to see how he sort of puts them together to understand culture and to understand how Fisher sees culture as having this role in forming our imaginations of what's possible.

So the first, and I'm going to do that by talking about a couple of tensions in Fisher's work. So the first that I want to talk about is popular modernism versus postmodernism. These are ways of seeing the world. And Fisher's project is essentially to resurrect modernism as a way of understanding. So this is from, you can hear the pages turning, I imagine. This is an essay I quite enjoy. One of my favorites. This is in fact my favorite essay of Fisher's. It's called from an essay called For Now Our Desire is Nameless. Ahem. The demise of communism was also the disappearance of modernism's Promethean dream of a total transformation of human society. Michael Hart has argued that,

the positive content of communism, which corresponds to the abolition of private property, is the autonomous production of humanity, a new seeing, a new hearing, a new thinking, a new loving. And this is the combination of the present and the future, and the past indeed, that the job of the present is to create works, not just of culture, but of politics that reject the past. And that modernism was about seizing the forces under our control to build the future that we wanted as opposed to repeating the past. To think about sort of modernism in any kind of real sense, think about Frank Lloyd Wright, who built houses like Fallingwater, or Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists.

And these were people who were deeply concerned with breaking with the past, to create something new that was somehow more perfect and more ideal. However, modernism had its own problems with elitism. So theodora Dorneau, my much beloved of me, of the Frankfurt School, consider he is a super modernist theorist, and he hated popular culture as something stupefying versus the potential transcendental power of something like a modernist symphony. And it's a good example of how a left thinker can end up being almost reactionary. Because even as they detest the ways in which capital uses totalitarian stupefaction to dominate all before it, they end up detesting that which is

potentially, you know, like could be loved by by workers in some other way. I mean, we can't get everyone loving symphonies and to detest all things that aren't symphonies. I mean, that's pretty, I don't know. I mean, a lot, that's to say, it's, there are a lot of alright guys that just listen to probably the same Beethoven symphony on repeat because they love how it makes them and it makes them feel and they're the greatness of the West or whatever. But there are a lot of people who come to that same conclusion of hating pop culture because it's stupid. I mean, we'll get to this, there are two ways of doing of hating on pop culture, one that's progressive and one that's not. But ultimately,

remember I mentioned Jackson Pollock, it's no surprise the CIA funded the abstract expressionist who most exemplified high modernism because it could be seen as something that was so individualist and that made the like the Soviet painting style at the time of socialist realism seem sort of hidebound and boring. And people have told me that my love of German techno in particular, given how technical complex spare and to be honest, physically inaccessible, most of the clubs are, to most people, is kind of a high modernist opinion. Fair. So, let's go back to for now our desire is nameless and let's think about postmodernism and capitalism. So this is what something Fisher takes primarily from Frederick

Jamison. The arrival of what I have called capitalist realism, the widespread acceptance that there is no alternative to capitalism, therefore meant the end to these new productive perceptual cognitive and libidinal possibilities. It meant that we would be reduced to the same old seeing, hearing, thinking, loving forever. Frederick Jamison long ago argued that postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism and the features that Jamison claimed were characteristic of the postmodern, pastiche, the collapse of historicity are now ubiquitous. The only feature that capital can reliably deliver is technological. We count historical time, not in cultural shifts, but in technological upgrades, watching the same old things on high

definition screens. So Damian Hearst is has a quite literal statement to make that's relatively a historical about skulls and it hires people to make it for him. Modernism has a singular clarity of vision that sometimes ends up in a rejection of all but its own vision, which is kind of niche and inverges on fashion and gets hired by the CIA. But postmodernism is pure relativism, which leads us to capitalist realism because everything is just what everyone wants and who are you to criticize or agitate for any change? Who are you to make anything difficult? Postmodernism is what leads us to the cultural logic of postmodernism is what leads us to live in a world of endless repeats and remakes and shit. You know, thank God we don't have to hear a new story

because we already know what people want and we can just make pastiches of it. We don't have to have any kind of vision of the future because we accept that no vision of the future is possible. And so where does that leave us? Does that leave us between high modernism, which is vulnerable to CIA funding or postmodernism, which gives us Jurassic Park 12, the search for Spock? This is where popular modernism comes in and this is what Fisher is doing. Desire, and this is Mark Fisher again, is not some vitalistic energy which will spontaneously emerge once bodies are freed from institutions. Rather, desire is always the result of processes of libidinal engineering and at the moment our desire is manipulated by Capital's army of PR,

branding and advertising specialists. The left needs to produce its own machineries of desire. It's true that at first sight we seem to be at something of a disadvantage here when we consider the vast resources that Capital has at its disposal aimed at capturing our desire. Yet there is no desire for capitalism as such, just as culture is composed from libidinal materials that have no essential relation to Capital, which is why Capital has to distract, depress and addict us in order to keep us captured and subordinated. So popular modernism, this is back to me again, that was also from, for now our desire is nameless. Popular modernism retains the Promethean desire of modernism but locates it in the popular rather than the elite. At the production of culture,

art, visions of society or of the future that are positive, whether literally or by implication through criticism and demonstrating the weird or the new. At this point Fisher could, you could potentially use Fisher to claim that just making something new and strange is itself a radical act because it's not based on making whatever has been proven to be successful before. Now, I don't want to get too hung up on the idea of what seems almost like a liberal premise that if you make enough new music then people will politically come round. Maybe you're maybe not, but if you see Capital operating everywhere then you can probably resist it wherever you can find it. And if making something weird, even if it's commercially successful like doesn't matter,

you're just, you're still doing something new, you're creating a world that doesn't have to be entirely remakes, which can be a reprieve because it's not so depressing. I don't know if I can keep watching the same fucking movie. Anyway, and this bursts through to politics, even though he's a lot writing about culture. Hang on. Anyway, so that's a whirlwind tour through popular versus postmodernism. So let's go on to ontology versus nostalgia. And this is actually a lot of the psychological and cultural terrain where you could say the battle between popular modernism and postmodernism get played out. So this passage is not actually from K-Punk, but from an essay called The Metaphysics of Crackle, Afrofuturism and Hontology by Fisher.

And many listening will be familiar with the concept of Afrofuturism because we spoke about it with techno DJ Aloysio Wilmoth a while ago as the animating impulse of techno music, where in context, it's asking us to see what kinds of worlds and what kind of culture would have been created had Africa been in the world, uncolonized, what it could do in the future. It's about potentiality and drawing those things forward. I think I invite myself to be corrected. If you haven't listened to that episode, by the way, go back and listen to it. It's one of my favorites that I've done, I guess. So here is Fisher. At a time of political reaction restoration, when cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards, when power operates

predictively as much as retrospectively. So predictively basically means that it doesn't just get to force us to do what it wants us to do. It gets to build the future of what's possible. It gets to color what's even imaginable. So I'll go back to Fisher. One function of Hontology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond post-modernity terminal time. When the present is given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future and the unactivated potentials of the past. What Fisher is talking about in this essay is blues music. The Metaphysics of Crackle refers to the record scratches, the technology that was being used to record Robert Johnson or whatever. He contrasts this love of the real conditions of

recording of that actual place in time and the potential of the future that it represented with rockism as opposed to bluesism. Rockism, he says, could be defined as the quest to eliminate surface noise to, quote unquote, return to a presence which, needless to say, was never there in the first place. The perfect, authentic, real, irreplaceable moment of musical creation that is so slick and smooth and wonderful. Hontology is a coming to terms with the permanence of our dispossession and the inevitability of discronia. We are haunted by the record crackles, in other words, which become a part of the music. So Hontology exists all around us. It's not nostalgia, which is the yearning for an imaginary past through the understanding of lost futures,

whether musical, political, architectural. The metaphor of the ghost that Fisher uses is not accidental. It's about these visions of the future from the perspective of the past that have become foreclosed upon by power. So if we go back to the beginning to the quote from acid communism, he says, we must regain the optimism of that moment, just as we must carefully analyze all the machineries that capital deployed to convert confidence into dejection. The loss of that moment in the 1970s, that was, that is Hontology. Walking around Britain's formerly nationalized pubs is Hontology. Seeing the society we were building that we got diverted from is Hontology. Even the reading about signing on to get non-means tested benefits because you

weren't employed, Hontology is haunting not just of what it was, but what it could have been developing into. So this is from acid communism again. The principal agent involved in the exorcism of the specter of a world which could be free is the project that has been called neoliberalism, best understood as a project aimed at destroying to the point of making them unthinkable global experiments in, among other things, democratic socialism. So this is Hontology politically. Fisher is interested in it as a cultural phenomenon, which we might think of as nostalgia for modernisms. This is from a section of an essay called nostalgia for modernism. Hontology is the counterpart to the nostalgia mode. The preoccupation with the past in

ontological music could easily be construed as nostalgic, but it is the very foregrounding of temporality that makes Hontology differ from the typical products of the nostalgia mode, which bracket out history altogether. In order to present themselves as new, Indy being the equivalent of Mach Tudor. So he really, really, really does not care for what you might refer to as Indy landfill style Indy rock. Who boy does he not like it? Because it's so anodyne and what it does is it looks back to something else and tries to copy the energy of something that was really inventive. And this is the essence of sort of postmodern, affirmative kinds of culture. It papers over the temporality, the cracks, the difficulty,

the faults, the crackles in the recording. It doesn't allow for roughness. We're nostalgic, we like Indy rock, because we're culturally nostalgic for how we felt when rock was new. So the new rock imitates the aesthetics of the old rock, but co-opted. So this is where you get cold play. The independent group remembers when labor was an electoral force under Blair, even if many of them were probably too young to come in under Blair. They have nostalgia for when the labor was an electoral force under Blair, and they were cool and young. And all of the journalists that hate Jeremy Corbyn, they remember fawning over Blair and everyone loving Blair and him saying,

no labor is cool again. We are going to make you feel good because you're as left-wing and more or less as it's possible to be without being a member of like a CLP. But don't worry, we're neoliberal and fun and not stodgy and modern and we're okay with people getting rich and we're global and outward looking and cool. Imagine seeing that fail. Imagine seeing that whole project not just be responsible for one of the greatest crimes against humanity, certainly the greatest in this century and one of the greatest in the last hundred years. I always say this century, I mean the 21st century and certainly one of the greatest of the last hundred years. To see it do that must have been, well, I don't know, I'm going to give them a

little credit. It must have been kind of traumatizing. And a lot of them, rather than accepting that they're Bay Tony Blair fucked up or was actually just evil the whole time, they're like, no, it was, I believe we should have gone into Iraq. Or, oh, don't blame it for Iraq. Iraq, Iraq, you're always bringing up Iraq. What about the good things Blair did, etc. This is nostalgia. Whereas when we, this young socialist tendency in Britain, is agitating for just agitating for change and citing the legacy of just publicly owning stuff, I'd say like that's, that's, that's ontology. Because we know that we're living in the ghost of that future. We know that we could have it better. Whereas the Blairite politicians,

the independent group people, they just want to feel good again. They want to feel like, they want to feel like they felt in the 1990s. We want to be able to get around on trains and feel like we have, you know, a right to the wealth that's produced by our society. And that's the real difference is that they want to go back to the past, where we understand that there was an opportunity for a better future. Because nostalgia can never look forward. Nostalgia is inherently about not just remembering, but imagining, imagining within the lines that are set for you by capital, imagining back when we had a reasonable labor leader who understood them, that we had to be nice to the markets or whatever. That's just capitalist realism.

You know, and that's just postmodernism. That's just nostalgia. All these, these three things line up. And that's one of the Fisher's sort of great, great contributions is to set so clearly how these cultural, psychological, and ultimately political processes work. Like, you know, that's why the independent group says they have new policies. When they have new policies from the 1990s, that's what they mean. Capital N, capital P, new policies. Not new policies that are actually inventive, but ones that are the new policies. And we came up with them in the 90s and those are the new policies forever. Everything else is backward looking. I think they might be projecting. Anyway, modernism is about what's real, experimental, and new.

And it's not memetic, even though it might be stylized and imaginative. It doesn't live in an idealized past. One of the passages that I actually remember from the book, I tried to find it. It's so long. It's like, it's like, like a thousand pages. Yeah, it's like 800 pages or something. It's like 800 pages. I look, I pretend I don't know. It's about 800 pages. But I remember there was this one passage where Fisher was talking about just randomly, just something he said, because it's about these things that set him off. It's not about, here is my essay on this. I saw this thing today. It made me think of this. He was talking about criticism that a Vogue campaign got because it featured a bunch of almost alien looking models walking through an extremely

stylized runway airport, one with a TSA guard or whatever, and how it received criticism from being like, oh, that's not what real TSA agents look like. That's more interesting. That's more stylized. That's more creative than money like actual creative endeavors that just imitate what's out there or what comes before them. And this is the tension that exists in popular modernism is between inventing new worlds and denying the complexities of our own, because it's not inventive to make a fashion campaign that's sort of supposed to be weird and unusual and imaginative and strange and have it left the normal looking people in it. That's very odd. And then these things that are like, think of the sitcom modern family.

It's like, they're just like us. They're just like normal people, et cetera, because they have all of the acceptable aesthetics and what have you. But it's much more real looking superficially. But equally, it papers over the actual hard to watch difficulties of family life. So I mean, in that sense, it's a kind of almost a reaction to kitsch as well. But I digress slightly. So let's go back to ontology and nostalgia, because by the way, ontology and nostalgia lives as modernism, as lives in a distinction, lives in the tension between portraying the real and inventing something new. So too does ontology and nostalgia live in a tension between understanding

the futures of the past and pushing forward into the future. And again, Fisher is not interested in these things in a single point. He's interested in his tensions. He's interested in emotion. He's interested in the libidinal energy that comes from the difficulty of tangling with these things. So the end of the of the ontology section, not the end of the ontology section. I mean, this thing's really all a big ontology section. But the end of this particular section, Fisher says that Blairism has consolidated and outstripped the ideological gains of thatcherism by ensuring the apparently total victory of PR over punk, a politeness over antagonism, of middle-class utility over proletarian art. In a word, not

in a word, my, this is now back to me, in a sense, it's the artistic hegemony of cold play and the social political hegemony of the types of people who listen to cold play. So is pop undead is the next essay I'll be talking about? The subtitle to this section, I guess, could be called Why It's Not Necessarily Classes to Hate on Love Island, but it might be okay. So there's this concept of nihilation. What pop lacks now, Fisher writes, is the capacity for nihilation for producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists. Just because something is current doesn't mean it's new. Saying that pop was better 25 years ago is not to be nostalgic. On the contrary, it is to resist the ambient airtight total nostalgia that can not only

that can not only tolerate but delight in the latest regurgitations on the indie retreadmill. God, he really fucking hates indie rock. I mean, I'm not a big fan of it either. And that's mostly yeah, they're like, oh, Riley, why do you like techno and PC music so much? And like, this is different and challenging. And it's not just they say, oh, it sounds the same all the time, as though fucking like best deal doesn't sound exactly like the other, you know, fucking middle brow and arena rock acts or all that yacht rock shit doesn't sound exactly the same as one another. You just like it because it has melody and words and stuff. I might actually link that Afrofuturism and crackle a bit in it, because it talks about how like privileging melody and words

over other forms of music is again, really just sort of denying that there are other legitimate forms of musical communication. But let's go back to how people criticize and engage with pop culture generally. Do they hate it because it's not intellectual, i.e. because it doesn't have class signifiers? Or do they hate it because it's anti intellectual? Because it shuts down the possibility of new things. It forecloses upon innovation, not innovation, sorry, invention. And it's just, and it's just sort of marketable products churned out over on the basis of accurate customer data. So is pop challenging or joyful? Or does it shut down the critical faculty entirely? Is it challenging and newer to just recapitulate something else? I don't know

enough about Love Island to know if it's annihilating. So if it's engaging in creation through negation or affirmative, modern or postmodern, I actually genuinely don't know. It's fun to make fun of, but I haven't watched enough of it to really understand. But in this Fisher, in this chapter, Fisher was talking about music. So mainly the arctic monkeys Jack Johnson and other harmless, but critically acclaimed music with a plastic relationship to the rest of the world itself and one another. And one thing that this music has a strong connection to is performative intellectualism, like reporting life as it really is, rather than imagining something new, looking forward, or even being difficult, rather than facing up to the challenge of

making something groundbreaking that can be understood in a visceral level by most people. The cold plays of the world retreated into the purely symbolic memetic forms of meaning that are meant to resonate with other middle class people looking to reassure their own middle classness. In effect, Fisher is hating on pops captured by the boring smarm of the middle brow. Can anyone listening to this really think of anything fucking worse than middle brow entertainment and middle brow cultural production? I really think actually, if you want the ultimate in middle brow culture, you really have to look no further than Sherlock. Sherlock is a series that has Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman and various other

grab the great and good of the British television industry. And what it does is it recapitulates the Sherlock stories in a sort of slick and modern way, but it does so while basically just bowing down in worship of its main characters, incredible genius and imagining that the world is largely controlled by a bunch of mega geniuses who are playing an inscrutable game of chess with one another. It's references and it's full of references that it's making quite on purpose to its mainly middle class guardian reading style audience that it knows it's mainly middle class guardian reading style audience is going to get so they can congratulate themselves and being middle class guardian readers.

The whole thing is kind of it's just there for you to talk about. It's not experiment. It's not pushing ahead with a form. It's not making something new. It's certainly not a working class piece of art. And the difference is between a working class piece of art and a piece of art working class people like is that it's not it's just it's it's performative. It's just for something to be performatively middle class is for something to be, I think, is so anodyne as to be unchallenging. It's for people for whom the system largely works and who basically don't really have problems. Who just want to sort of it to engage in self-congratulation to have no consequence to have no blood and guts and nothing real. And this is what I mean.

You sure lock into TV shows and have blood and guts. It's just there for entertainment. Sure. But you know, you learn a lot more about the world, especially as a kid, from stories and you do from the fucking news. I mean, it's there to color, not necessarily to color, but it's there and it colors your ex air thinking about what's possible. And that whole show is about the worship of intelligence as a concept. It's not saying you're intelligent because it doesn't present these the shows at the mysteries as puzzles that it's possible for you to solve. Like they don't go through the process of making an actual puzzle. It's just there. And then Sherlock solves it with his genius

and everyone gobs at Sherlock. I couldn't imagine a show that exists more to reaffirm a world in which like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates own half of all the wealth each than Sherlock, because it talks about the like natural power of just intelligence in general as a basically good thing that is the organizing force of more or less everything. And what could be more middle brow than that and cold playing all that shit. So here's an example of something I actually do like. I'm not going to talk about techno again. I'm actually going to finally talk about PC music in depth, in some depth. I still love it. It's been around since 2013 and had its moment where it was all over the

newspapers like 2014, 2015. I've been listening to it basically the whole time since I found it on SoundCloud many years ago. And I've just never really gotten over it. And I think that's because it is trashy, pop, gleefully stupid, overwhelmingly sort of plastic and sort of faux corporatized. But it is most certainly not middle brow because all of this is done very, very much on purpose. And it is something completely new. So we'll cut in a piece from sample of PC music here. So I actually am going to also take a quote on PC music, a great summary of what it is in The Guardian from Sam Wolfson in 2015 about how it is. And you can see, I think,

think about Fisher's ideas about modernism in PC music and this paragraph. Part intellectual response, the prevalence of marketing in popular culture, part antagonistic refreshing of the most critically ridiculed music from the past decade and packaging it as the future. This label launched less than two years ago with a five track EP that sounded like a malfunctioning boppet by the artist Easy Fun, whose weird EasyJet Aping logo came covered in low resolution watermarks, the sort of that photo libraries used to stop you stealing their images. And critics have been trying to understand it ever since.

I love it. But also, I think one of the things to think about is that, is to ask the question, is something like PC music? Maybe I'll cut in one more track here. Is it pastiche or is it inventive? Is it parody or is it something new? I mean, actually, Sophie is one of the main sort of breakout stars of PC music, is a friend of a friend. And my friend was telling me about how what she used to do was create these entirely new sorts of, the only way you could describe them is these round, bouncy synth sounds by tying pieces of string around a very old, very particular and very hard to find synthesizer and using that as the way to turn all of the dials at once as the song

would be playing to apply this new effect in this new way. And I think that modernist art isn't always completely weird, inventive and new, although it is certainly always inventive and new, but it doesn't mean it can't bring old things with it. We talk about annihilation as a dialectical process. It's the negating of what's there by the creation of something new. And if we think of something like PC music, like Wolfson says, as a way of taking marketing in popular culture and turning it into something that's so weird and off-putting to most people as to be unmarketable. And at the same time, take these aesthetics that were dismissed as trashy by the same kinds of people who probably loved Blairism and Coldplay and presenting it as something

far more intellectually interesting and forward-looking than any of them could even understand. I mean, if that's not a modernist project, I don't know what is. And I think we can also take that as our moment to step back even to Love Island for a second and look at the most common criticism. It's stupid and it makes people that watch it stupid. More people apply to Love Island than apply to Oxbridge, etc. This criticism of Love Island, in this case, is that it's not a cultural product intended for the upper classes. What is this but a ritual pouring on of derision onto something? At the same time, abandoning any kind of critical faculty altogether amounts to what you might call or what Fisher calls deflationary hedonistic relativism. So if there's no accounting

for taste, then what's the point of even trying to make culture or trying to use cultural criticism as a way to move people out of complacency? I think the best way to think about it is, again, the way that Fisher does. Does it have a vision of the future even if it's an implicit one based on the shortcomings of the present? Is Love Island challenging or is it just a way to laugh at a bunch of working class people? Again, I don't know. I haven't really watched it, but it seems to be the cultural touchstone that exists for us of where the popular culture is and where the derision is ritually poured on. Because all of those people that pour on that derision to Love Island, they're not doing it because they think that maybe everyone deserves a better class of

entertainment or that they're not doing it because they think, oh, well, this is propaganda, this is maybe patriarchal or white supremacist. It's like, I'm going to signal myself as middle class. I'm going to do that by sort of heaping scorn. I'm going to be this kind of useful idiot. We seem to have come quite a ways out of capitalist realism, but let's zoom back up again. Let's keep ourselves rooted in our first paragraph. We must regain the optimism of that moment, just as we must carefully analyze all the machineries that capital deployed to convert confidence into dejection. Understanding how this process of consciousness deflation worked is the first step to reversing it. Asking what we might think of Love Island when it probably is

the most commonly consumed by many of the young working class that we're trying to bring over to socialism, understanding how that works, where its libidinal energies are coming from, is crucial. Hell, it might even have fucking revolutionary potential. I have no idea, but my way into this has been PC music, which is taking annihilating this kind of boring marketed plastic pop music and representing the marketing in plastic as something radically weird and new. We can then take that picture, that question, does it have a vision of the future, even if it's an implicit one based on the shortcomings of the present, and then we can use that as our lens through which we can view most culture because

we can ask ourselves, is it deflationary or inflationary? Is there something here that we can use as a radical wedge? Is there something radical about it? I doubt there's anything radical about Love Island, but at the same time, we can understand the way that the ritual pouring on of scorn does nothing but rubbish the working class, reinforce a middle brow aesthetic that does nothing but in itself reinforce the greatest of capitalist realism because quite often you'll hear, ah, it was better before we had Love Island because it's nostalgia. And that's what I mean, all of these concepts are interconnected with one another. Because Fisher is a good dialectician, he's not a positivist or empiricist,

interested in static causal relationships, he's interested in processes, dynamics, and the world in motion. Capitalist realism is, as I've been talking about, as much of an economic as a cultural phenomenon, and breaks in the gray flatness are important to find. You can find a piece of music that helps penetrate that curtain, a modernist work that doesn't shy away from the cruel absurdity of postmodern neoliberalism that reminds you that you're not imagining things that you can bring catharsis to fight a little harder campaigning that may support you in the fight against your boss or anything. I mean, in fact, we're taking every little helps back from Tesco's.

Ah, jeez. This one has taken a lot out of me, folks. Anyway, I want to go back now to the last paragraph of the essay for now, our desire is nameless. But if we are no longer to define ourselves negatively by our opposition to capital, what will be the name of our positive project? I don't believe the old signifier communism can be revived for this purpose. It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations forever tied to the nightmares of the 20th century. At the moment, our desire is nameless, but it is real. Our desire is for the future, for an escape from the endless impasses of the flat lands

of capital's endless repetitions. And it comes from the future, from the very future in which new perceptions, desires, and cognitions are once again possible. At some point, the name for our new desire will appear and we will recognize it. Yeah, it's true. I think if we take that passage, and then if you look at John McDonald's poll quote from the back of economics for the many, which Verso have kindly sent me, you'll see that what he has written is, we are seeking nothing less than to build a society that is radically fairer, more democratic, and more sustainable, in which the wealth of society is shared by all. And again, I don't know if we have a name for it, but I'm pretty sure that that

is more or less our desire. And I can only imagine that whoever John McDonald's office wrote that was probably familiar with Mark Fisher. Anyway, it's through culture that we eventually unlock our imaginations and that this thing might find a name. Anyway, I'm going to go to dinner with Milo, Olga, and Alex now. Bye, everybody.