. OK. So I can already sense in myself this tone of conservatism, or this danger of conservatism. because whenever we critique these things, there's the advantage again that techno-capital has. Because it occupies the latest point in history by definition, any critique of it can seem to be coming from a past, some prelapsarian past, oh, wasn't it great when we only had rubbish EVHS
and kids played in the parks, this kind of thing. But this is a problem. That we need to be able to critique this from a future which didn't arrive or is yet to come, not from a past, which in lots of ways we're glad to see the back of. And this is the kind of task, I think, is to articulate this or bring into existence this other kind of future. And I think this is to do with time, getting time back. it's kind of paradox about how we think about utopias, I think.
In lots of ways, now we can say, what is dystopia of now is that we have no time. We're endlessly being chivied, harassed, pushed. We feel that there's too many things for us to do. We can't, we don't have time to respond to them. Okay, so we have no time. Yet one of the ways you think about utopia is a sort of timeless space, I suppose. But can't we think of utopia as the space where we would have time? In those ways. Time which we certainly do not have now. Because what's interesting, isn't it, is about... We're busy, but we're not productive, you could say. isn't that the essence of
the essence of late capitalism in that that the amount of effort that goes into really as Ivor Southwood in the title of Ivor Southwood's recent book an excellent book I recommend actually if you like capitalist readers and his book Non-Stop Inertia this captures the quality of life in late capitalism very effectively, I think, this phrase non-stop inertia. Because if you can say that things have sped up, things are speeding up, but speed implies direction. Actually, what we've got is a point of speed of digital communication where it's flipped. But things are so fast that they're going nowhere,
actually, and that they can't even talk about it as fast anymore. This isn't speed if there's no direction to anything. If everything's being held up in this inertial glut at all times. This is no longer a question of speed. Actually, things have massively slowed down. And actually, Simon Reynolds, at the end of his book, Retromania, makes a kind of killer observation, I think, which is that, okay, what has happened recently is the speed of everyday life has gone up, you could say, that rather than periods of longer and boredom that would have been the case in a sort of pre-digital communication era. Now, everyday life is this hyped up, sped up kind of, well, sped up, as I say, to the point of inertia,
kind of phenomenological zone. But culture has slowed down. And I think there's a relation between those two things, actually. That, you know, actually, culturally, we might conjecture. You know, cultural developments, changes, require a certain level of stillness, I think, and concentration or attentional focus that is very difficult for us to muster now. It's very difficult for us to... How do we enjoy things now, even? Well, even when we're enjoying them, we're not really, because we're probably trying to record them or have got a phone there. so that just make sure that the
archives can enjoy it even if we don't at the time and the very fact we're recording it means that we can't enjoy it I'm not sure if it's in I forget which book it was and I read recently Sontag's quote that travelling becomes a way of accumulating photographs and in the same way we could say the whole of life becomes a way of accumulating pictures for Facebook doesn't it oh I'll put this on Facebook Well, why not actually enjoy it? So I think part of what's at stake is how we can avoid conservative moralism here is an argument about enjoyment, actually. That these, rather than delivering enjoyment,
we can say that a lot of these digital communicative practices inhibit it. They offer, as it were, pleasure rather than enjoyment as classic kind of Bikhanian or psychomotetic distinction, in that because it's too quick, because actually it provides us with something which gives us an immediate hit, actually the hit itself is never that intense. It's actually the drive. The drive to click is always more intense than what we click on, you can say. I'll tell you this, Lanny Day, it's absolutely true. A few weeks ago, I was in a situation where it was socially unacceptable for me to check my phone.
Okay, so of course, what do I do? So my hands are twitching, you know. It's twitching like I've got to know. Has a message come in? I've got to know. Well, I don't even have to know it. So I put the phone under the table and have the satisfaction of clicking on the phone. I can't even see the phone. I can't see it. But at least I know that it has been checked. It has been checked, even though I haven't checked it myself. And this is the reversal, I think, that Sherry Terkel points to in her book, L.M. Together, where it's not that we're doing our email, it's our email is doing us in lots of ways. that we've become the servomechanism of the turnover
of communicative capitalism. Like I was saying to you yesterday, how important was communication to you 15 years ago? It just wasn't that big a part of your life. You really didn't care about letters that much. Whereas now you think we have to know. And as I say, I've surely all done this. something which you're enjoying more, which you're enjoying more, which may work. Often for me, I'll be enjoying writing. I'll be enjoying reading. But I still feel that pull to interrupt that enjoyment by the duty, the kind of duty-stroke pleasure of checking my messages or my email. Which, of course, is always a crushing disappointment, no matter what they are.
Because nothing's ever enough and you want to click again almost immediately. actually probably one of the best messages I've ever got was the one from Martin recently because it's a nice fee and it's nice to come over here or whatever but it doesn't get better than that and if I'd have waited a few hours the offer would still probably have been there so I think Morley Morley described this in advance of actually happening this cruising through I-time, I-space-time, you know, my space-time. And the kind of, the forms of pleasure that are available there, but also the desolation of that pleasure, I think.
A desolation which comes out very powerfully in, well, that's dramatic than it should have been, in this. Do you recognise it, yeah? This, to me, is the ruination of Paul Morley's sitting. This is Inception. Inception, which is, for me, a major symptomatic film, I think, of recent times. Why? Well, this is a film, surrealism, or rather, the unconscious without surrealism. Frederick Jameson talks about postmodernism as surrealism without the unconscious. now we have this further phase of the unconscious without surrealism. The most depressing, the scenes of limbo in Inception,
and the love scenes, the most depressing scenes in cinema history, right? Oh, this wonderful, it's like a love scene as PowerPoint, isn't it? You know, oh look, here's the house where we first lived, let's put it next to some other houses where we lived. the utter miserable existential desolation of those empty arcades where they walked together. It was 50 years down there. No wonder you went mad. You know, like, you know, that... As if that... What was interesting about Inception, fascinating about it, in fact, for me, is the sense that however deep you go, it's still a non-space. Okay, so you start off in hotels, homogenous hotels you know you go down a level
you're in sort of like you know anonymous streets which could be any city in the world you go down further we're into this kind of retail empty retail plaza that's the best they can come up with as an image of happiness now utterly depressing I think But it seems to me that, you know, part of the stake in this imagery of Inception and why it is symptomatic. It is like the dilapidated form of the iTunes or iPod sitting. Actually, that's what we're looking at here. an unconscious which has been superseded
replaced, displaced by this connected consumer non-spaciality non-space time falling into decay and dilapidation I think in lots of ways we can see that the early part of the 21st century is bookended by two of Nolan's films by inception, at the end, and by memento at the beginning. And because, you know, what is at stake here? Problems of memory, I think. Problems of memory are kind of crucial. I'll come back to that shortly when I talk about the caretaker.
But I think part of the reason that there's this debate that's deliberately cultivated by Nolan, who is a master of generating communicative capitalism around his films, right? Like a master of getting people like me to add to the hype of his films by discussing them, you know. But that he is, you know, the key debate about it, which sort of ontologically is pretty banal. Like, ooh, is it a dream or not? The oldest, hokiest kind of, you know, ontological gambit you can have in fiction, really. But, okay, why has this got a particular force at this time? It's because of that sense that... that inescapability of the non-place, I think.
Wherever we are in the film, it has that prefabricated homogeneity about it. Everything feels as if it's a genre construct, including, of course, Dom Cobb's grief itself, which feels just as unconvincing as any of the other things at the apparently embedded level of the fictions. There's a deep sadness in Inception. Inception is a mordant film but that sadness is never at the level of the film itself. It's like the... What is the film about? It's like as if the unconscious itself, as I say, has been removed, there's been its excision,
this traumatic operation of the removal of the unconscious, and then it's as if we and the characters in Inception are circulating in this space where we've lost something very profound, but we don't know what it is, and we just have to keep struggling round and round, endlessly in these charmless spaces, looking for the thing which we've lost and which we can never find anymore. That's the deep sadness of Inception, I think. And also, I think in terms of the non-space time thing, when is inception set? If you look at the technology, it's very low-tech, right?
You don't see it. You don't think you really see a computer in it. It's very interesting. I think that's why it's a parable of the digital, because there's no digital in it. it's a world entirely inside the digital but it doesn't represent the digital as such I think ok now back to hauntology this is a different sense of time crisis here this is a still from a BBC television play which is an adaptation of the short story by M.R. James the British horror writer well I say horror stories belong
to a very specific genre on the edge of the weird really and this is from a story called Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad which is a quote from a poem, I think. I forget who the poem is. this was made in 1968 by Jonathan Miller, who had recently made probably one of the best adaptations of Alice in Wonderland sort of a year or so before that. So what happens in O'Whistle and I'll Come to You
is this antiquarian scholar, probably closely based on James himself, who was an Oxford antiquarian himself, travels up to the east coast of England, where I live now, and in fact to the town where I live now, the very town where the container ports are at the moment and he discovers this ancient whistle he digs it up in the ground, this ancient whistle he's a sort of bluff logical positivist type person dismisses the belief in the supernatural etc. We all know what happens to people in films
or stories of dismiss belief in the supernatural, of course. He blows the whistle and then he is afflicted by these traumatic events which seem to be of a supernatural origin. What's interesting about this, in this context for me, is that we get a sense here of the not-anthropological place or the non-place of Auger, but of a hauntological place where a particular place is stained with time in a particular way. What is haunt?
The verb haunt in English carries this double sense, I think, both of spectrality and of a particular place. he can use the phrase my old haunts meaning places that I used to go to and here we come to one of the key phrases of in Derrida's conception of hauntology as outlined in Spectres of Marx which is the phrase which he takes from Hamlet the time is out of joint time is broken it can't be made to fit together again but hauntological time is different to the non-time that I've been pointing to well you know the non-time is characterized by a kind of
flattening out, hauntological time I think is more characterized by trauma, by a wound and an absence and that's why I think something like Inception is on the boundaries of the two actually, that beyond this beyond the non-time is an unspoken hauntology, actually. A wound, a trauma, which it can't face, in which the loss of his wife in a film codes for this other trauma, which we don't see, in which the whole of the film depends upon this absence, I think. and and ontology particularly as it's come
to the fore in the last few years in relation to music is about mourning of course in Derrida's writing spectres of Marx fairly soon after the Berlin Wall came down, and he's engaging with something which we talked about yesterday, Francis Fukuyama's thesis that we've reached the end of history, that everything has come to an end, for Fukuyama in an ambivalently good way. I say ambivalently good because Fukuyama thinks like Hegel that history has direction and a point of termination.
and for Fukuyama unlike for Marx this will be the end of history is liberal democracy and capitalism but I say ambivalent Fukuyama is ambivalent about it because the title of his book is The End of History and The Last Man The Last Man a concept from Nietzsche The Last Man is in a way the obverse figure to the superman the Ubermensch so whilst the superman the overman can affirm the contingency of being can affirm the meaninglessness of life and impose its own meaning on it the last man is unable to do that
the last man for Nietzsche engages in what he calls cosmopolitan fingering fantastic phrase what does that mean It means that all of history is available for the last man to look at and sort of finger and put down again. Whilst for the overman, the übermensch, the disintegration of all previous beliefs is the precondition for this new kind of production of belief and value coming from the Übermensch himself, and it usually is, and for Nietzsche, of course, it is a man.
The last man can't believe in that anymore. Nietzsche's earliest work, and some of his best work, really, is about the dangers of history. he argues that actually the great civilizations of the world were those which were productively ignorant the Greeks or the Romans had very little sense of what had come before them it's not that they couldn't find out, they just didn't care either because they thought they were at the center of things whereas Nietzsche thinks that Germany of the 19th century was increasingly hidebound by history.
History, if you know too much history, it produces nihilism. That's the claim of Nietzsche. Why? Because you become too aware of things. You know, you become like a depressive. You think, oh, look, yeah, there was a great civilization there, did great stuff. Look, there's pyramids and all that. Yeah, that fell into decadence and collapse. You know, the mighty Roman Empire collapsed eventually, lasted a few hundred years, maybe. You know, nothing lasts forever, you know, what's the point? Let's put another DVD on. You know, this is the kind of, this is what, Nietzsche, I think, very acutely grasps our subjectivity in lots of ways, or the subjectivity of late capitalism. I think he grasps it very early on what that will be like.
when belief is stripped away and we kind of have multi-channel access to everything. You know, so that we're in this spectatorial mode. We have this kind of ironic detachment from things because we're too aware. We're too aware to actually commit ourselves to a belief in anything. So we step back. That's another dimension of this atemporality. We are not in ourselves in history. We look back upon history as a series of entertainments for ourselves. Entertainments which sort of reassure us that there's really no point getting up off the sofa.
Everything collapses in the end. And this figure of the last man then, of the individual who can no longer believe, who's kind of bored, resigned, and cynical, is what haunts Fukuyama's achieved utopia, the utopia end of history. That's why he thought that the dangers to capitalist, the inevitable capitalist terminal beach of history would not come from Marxism, he thought, but from the Nietzschean direction.
He thought that capitalism... Why is capitalism at the end of history, as it were? Because it's almost the same argument that Deleuze and Guattari were in a different direction. Because capitalism depends upon this radical decoding of all previous belief systems because capitalism, that is to say, is inherently desacralizing. So it replaces religious fervor with this kind of last man disenchantment. And the thing about the last man, since they don't really believe in anything that fervently, they're not, to use Alberto Toscano's word, fanatic.
I think Alberto discusses Fukuyama's book in his recent book, Fanaticism, for good reason because then, you know, the last man is by definition not a fanatic he's the opposite of a fanatic he's someone who in some ways looks jealously upon fanatics because they can believe, they have the possibility for belief where he doesn't have that possibility he knows too much or he thinks he knows too much as Nietzsche says that this is the danger of knowledge in lots of ways, once you have it you can't get rid of it and this is what Fukuyama thought that this level of disaffection discontent and not being satisfied with this kind of existential aloofness
that was where the danger to capitalism would come from okay so but derrida was engaging with this question of the the the end of history um the triumph of capitalism um and this notion of the death of communism which he talks about um but one of the questions he poses is well can we really say that communism had arrived um would we really want to make that claim that the the soviet system was communism well almost nobody would really think that that was an achieved communism. So we're talking about the death of something which had not actually happened yet, which is strange. And so rather than mourning the disappearance of what was then actually existing socialism,
what Derrida opens up to us is the possibility of mourning for the future which didn't arrive. You know, the communist horizon itself, you could say, to use the title of the forthcoming book by Jody Dean. Should we take... Okay, yes, yes, yes, a good point to take a break actually. Yeah. I know someone switched their thing down. Is it just, is it that one? How do I get the sound back up?
I'm sorry. Okay, that's a track called Emptiness, which is by the artist James Kirby going under the name of the caretaker. The caretaker is basically a conceptual project, I think, by Kirby, which
started up from a simple conceit, which was, what if you produced a whole album's worth of material, such as you might have heard in the Overlook Hotel and The Shining? OK, so in The Shining, Kubrick's film from 1979, 80. I think it's probably made and finished in 79, released in 80, I think. We hear some music. Some of the most powerful scenes in the film feature music. They feature the pre-war South African crooner Al Boli, who came to fame in the Lyceum Ballroom, particularly in London,
whose songs also featured in the television plays, famously of Dennis Potter as a singing detective and Pennies from Heaven. And so Kirby's idea was, OK, that stuff is kind of compellingly spectral. Why don't we just produce a whole album of stuff like that? So what he got was lots of pop music from the 30s and 40s and subjected it to various processes of kind of artificial decay, you might say. I mean, in addition to the actual decay, which is also undergone, it has come off vinyl records, then subject to massive levels of reverb or echo, etc.
And OK, so from something which seems in a way a semi-humorous conceit, I think Kirby's intervention becomes a kind of major work of kind of sonic art diagnostics, actually. That, you know, if Kirby had done this under the aegis of sound art rather than of music, he'd probably be a lot better known and a lot wealthier than he is today. And if only much sound art was as interesting as the Caretaker Project turned out to be. that I think becomes a major work of diagnostics. So he starts off as this work of veiling and nostalgia. You could say that veiling is inherent to nostalgia.
That the passage of time, the ellipses and memory that such a passage inevitably produces, is the precondition for nostalgia. Things which were in the background of attention at the time suddenly come to the foreground. They are often the things which will trigger this reversion into the past. And this ache, this ache, the jouissance, jouissance of nostalgia, which is to do with an enjoyment of ache, an enjoyment of pain, alger, pain. And nostos, which originally was to do with place, not time, actually. So again, we've got this notion of place-time being tied up. Home, I guess. Yes, home. Yeah, home, which is even more ambivalent about,
in respect of time and place. Because home, I think, also connotes a time as well as a place. so it starts off as a kind of interrogation investigation of nostalgia and one of the material traces of this is the sound of vinyl crackle itself vinyl crackle itself becomes a feature of lots of the music that got classified as hauntological in the last decade and And interestingly, the musicians who started to foreground this final crackle didn't influence each other.
So we had this James Kirby project. We had Barry Roy played yesterday, and I'll play again today, shortly. We have people like William Bosinski, who's worked with Disintegration Loops. It's really incredible work of symptom and diagnosis. If you don't know this work, Buzinski was transferring off old tapes, old analog tapes, onto digital, his tape experiments that he made in the early 80s. What happened when he tried to transfer some of them is that the tape actually disintegrated in the act of the transfer. And so what you can hear on the disintegration loops is the literal disintegration of the analog medium.
a major moment I think what we can hear is this shift into a medium where there is apparently no loss of course there is loss in digital but with this promise of complete capture and replicability the shift into digital where we lose nothing or seem to lose nothing in fact we lose a lot especially if we listen to MP3s what we lose is exactly the dimension of the the unheard but the felt and in particular sub bass the whole dimension of subsound which you definitely feel if you go out to a club to hear music played in a collective environment and that's a lot of the appeal of dubstep
I think in many ways a very limited form of music but it has an appeal because if you go there as the physical force of the sub bass the enveloping quality of the sub-bass is something which you simply can have no equivalent of listening on headphones at all. Because it's a whole body experience, not something just confined to the ears. But to come back to this question of the shift man along to digital, that the promise of infinite replicability, with digital we're no longer in the realm of the copy at all there's no such thing as a digital copy really because
what is a digital file? it's a series of ones and zeros and each iteration of that file is the same it's the same series of ones and zeros it's not a copy with analog copies there's always a question of degradation in a way you could argue that degradation is the mark of a copy actually in a way. And with digital we have replication or propagation without copies actually. I can't really call it copies anymore. So a number of these artists as I said come together by confluence not influence. And we start to hear in their work this emergence of this vinyl crackle. What does the vinyl crackle signify? Well it more than signifies it.
Expresses this time out of joint because we no longer have the illusion of presence when we're confronted with the sound because we know that what we're hearing is the mediation, the material mediation which allows us to hear it is being foregrounded here and in some ways the sound of crackle is a bit like soft focus in film it signifies another time. A time beyond the present in which we're actually listening. And because there's no accident that this is related to The Shining. The Shining, which is in Stephen King's novel,
which I think is one of the best horror novels, really, of the 20th century, actually. that King sort of outdoes himself with The Shining and can really never repeat what he achieved with The Shining ever again, I think. In King's novel, he says, the corridors of the Overlook Hotel extend in time as well as space. And this is the... So the Overlook Hotel really is, as filmed by Kubrick, is on the cusp between a non-place and a hauntological place, you could say. When we first see Jack Torrens enter into the hotel,
he's interviewed by this typical kind of Kubrick non-person, you know, the manager of the hotel. And it's this kind of interface between the way hotels are now, transnational hotels, the way they're managed, the anonymous homogeneity of hotels and this sense of specificity about the Overlook Hotel. What is the Overlook Hotel? Frederick Jameson argues in his essay on The Shining, which you can find online, Historicism in The Shining, is very good. What is the Overlook Hotel? There are lots of ways it's American history itself. American history itself, which is based on an erasure,
because in the film, not in the book, the hotel is famously on an Indian burial ground, like the whole of American history itself, you could say, built on an Indian burial ground. And, OK, so I think The Shining is a very significant film because of the moment that it emerged. yesterday as I was saying a shift from social democracy to neoliberalism from Fordism to post Fordism happens at the end of the 70s beginning of the 80s precisely the point when The Shining comes out and Jack Torrance in The Shining is like the last man
in many ways he stumbles through history dressed in his lumber jacket and his jeans This is a man who's enticed and drawn back into the fantasies of opulence, particularly of the 20s and 30s. But he's also a man who is out of time, who doesn't belong anywhere, which is to say that he only belongs in the Overlook Hotel. And this scene, one of the most powerful scenes in the film, where Jack confronts Delbert Grady, the butler, who at some level he knows also has, in the recent past of the hotel, killed his own children. Yet Grady now appears to be a butler in what seems to be the 20s or the 30s.
And playing in the background as this is going on is Al Bole's track It's All Forgotten Now. Kubrick's placement of music in films is always extremely thought about it's all forgotten now with this a hauntological anthem in many ways as this is playing Delbert Grady says to Jack you are the caretaker, you've always been the caretaker part of the horror of The Shining is this sense of fatality that Jack
like Oedipus was always destined for a horrible fate which he was never going to be able to escape and in a way this is the horror of patriarchy itself where the father is always in the role of the caretaker. What is the caretaker? It's someone who takes on the job for the management. The management that you never see in a film. There's a point earlier on where Jack confronts the barman. The barman, incidentally, is played by the same person who plays Tyrell in Blade Runner. Surely two of the biggest bit parts in the history of cinema, actually. I've never seen anything else with that guy.
But in that earlier scene, Jack says, you know, I like, the barman says, okay, your money's worth nothing here, Jack. Mr. Torrance, actually. And, you know, he says, I like to know who's paying for my drinks, but he never finds out, you never see who the management is, the management of the overlooked hotel. you know the management is that some really some hideous amalgam of patriarchy and capitalism itself which requires its fathers to be to be homicidal to kill their own children and of course for Freud in Moses and monotheism this is the fundamental task of the father is well not to actually kill the child but to mortify the child that you know what what happens
to Moses and monotheism is that, according to Freud, there's a traumatic, the founding event of human history itself, of civilization, is when a band of, the band of subordinate proto-apes, or sort of proto-human apes, gang up together and kill the alpha male, the alpha male sort of father of the society. to kill that father. And why? Because the father is dominating them and has exclusive control over the females, exclusive access to the females. And so the brothers think,
well, if we kill the father, we will have the access to enjoyment that the father now has. But of course, it doesn't work out like that. When the sons rebel, kill the father, and eat him, according to Freud, what happens is that instead of now achieving this access to total enjoyment, instead they're overcome by feelings of melancholic remorse. And rather than having got rid of the father, the father, from being a contingent physical being, becomes an infinite presence as a spectre. Now, the internalised voice of the father is unanswerable and makes demands which are infinite. And of course, Freud's point partly being that the role of the father,
in his own day particularly, the role of the father was always a fantasy role and a symbolic role because you couldn't confirm who the father was. There was no pre-genetics. There was no way of absolutely proving who the father was. I mean, with blood tests, you could disprove who certain fathers were, but you couldn't absolutely prove it. So Freud's point being that, of course, the father, even if you happen to be the biological father, actually your role as father was always a symbolic role. And I think that The Shining is about this hauntological dimension of fatherhood, I think, partly. And what it is to be the caretaker, to be in this role of passing on mortification, as it were.
You are not in charge yourself. You're never in charge. You are simply, as it were, in lieu of something else, a lieutenant, a tenant who is merely passing through. Sorry, wrong way. Okay. I'm going to play you another track now. Thank you.
Okay, that's also tracked by the caretaker. This is from a six CD set, Theoretically Pure Anterior Grade Amnesia, which came out. I think sort of round up 2005, 2006 time. Okay, so we can hear that development of the project. And what theoretically
pure and terigreed amnesia is is the thing that Lenny suffers from in Momentum, which is the complete opposite of what we all never think about amnesia, i.e. that the whole past his white hand. As we remember from Lenny, what Lenny suffers from is that he can remember his past up to a certain point. What he cannot do is make new memories. He can't hold any new memories. So he's locked in this perpetual present which is disconnected from the past. Back in time. And what the caretaker tried to do on this 6-CD set
is simulate this condition. So as you can see, whilst in the first track, you can still hear the song, albeit buried beneath this, beneath the levels of distortion, echo, and reverb. On theoretically pure anterior grade amnesia, it's the reverse. What you can hear is the distortion and the echo and the reverb, but you've got very little sense of the original tracks. There's about 60 tracks. All of them are numbered. And what it does when you listen to it is it does simulate the condition in you as a listener and that you can't remember what you've heard.
There's not enough, sort of as it were, sonic landmarks for you to remember if this is the track you've heard before or not. You get these occasional flarings of recognition where you think there's a trace of a song that you've heard before, but you can't be sure about it. So it's as if we ourselves and we're listening are suffering from this condition. But I think that it's not as if we're suffering from that condition, it's not as if we are suffering from that condition. and this is what I mean by the caretaker's work of diagnosis in lots of ways rather than suffering from nostalgia what we suffer from is theoretical pure anterior grade amnesia
in a sense that there's a cultural history which is intact going up to whatever time, the year 2000 and after that point we can't make new memories So we rely on the old forms in order to navigate around in an environment which is kind of forbiddingly lacking in any temporal markers, you can say. And in a way, this is a way of restating the problem that Frederick Jameson had broached in his work on postmodernism when he argued that there's a crisis of the present, that he started to see in the 80s.
Modernism had been about trying to grasp the present. It realised that you couldn't grasp the present in terms of 19th century realism, that you'd need some kind of cubistic strategy in order to represent the unrepresentable in lots of ways. Jameson arguing that things have been aggravated since the grand period of modernism but with the introduction if modernism is about the city in lots of ways and early forms of mass media such as film and newspapers then by the time that Jameson's writing The Emergence of Video MTV which everyone used to think about
as the the classic exemplum of a new kind of culture at that time. Then the issue is more about the kind of media time than it is about the kind of urban time. But of course, 20 years after Jameson's writing, things have become accelerated, well, accelerated, as they said, to the point of a nation. and you know the space of communicative capitalism as I tried to indicate earlier on makes our ability to navigate ourselves to locate ourselves in time much more difficult than it ever was previously so rather than
I think this is an interesting way of thinking about things, rather than thinking about nostalgia, thinking about memory disorders that what we're confronted with The stuff that, although it's old, we don't think of it as old anymore. It's contemporary to us. Like demented people. You know, if we confront people who are demented, they'll often think that they're still living in 1964 or whatever. In a way, we still are living in 1980, but we think we're not. In some ways, culturally speaking. It's like a form of widespread dementia, which we take for granted, actually. I've juxtaposed that playing that caretaker track with the title of the recent album by Echoplex, an artist based in Bristol, called Memorex, a brilliant title.
Memorex was a cassette manufacturer. That's M-O-M-O-R-E-X. But of course, by spelling it like this, he forms a kind of conceptual pun based on the wreckage of memory, the destruction of memory, together with this notion of something which preserved memory, which was the cassette form, and actually got issued on two cassettes, the Echoplex records. So I think this is another way of getting to the digital pathologies that we're encountering. if we don't have a sense of the present
then that is also a problem of memory it's a problem of narrative that if we don't know what the present is then we can't distinguish a memory from what we're actually experiencing at the time and I think again I think that's why part of the significance of something like Inception you know which is it's a non-space and a non-time a non-place but a non-place built out of memories remember a lot of inception yeah
Yeah. and two deaths. So all of them exist at the same time. And we don't, it's actually, we don't want to go back to only one, one thing that we know where we are. No, we don't want to go back to anything, I would say.
We don't, we don't want, we don't want to go back to anything, but this is the situation. We're not happy with where we are and I think at lots of levels we're multiply unhappy and we're more unhappy than we think we are. And we'll only, I think we'll only realise how unhappy we are now when we're not in this state anymore. Because that's what, you know, it's cultural depression. We're all depressed to one degree or another. We don't think that's going to happen again. That's pretty bad. You know, that's okay, you know. It's like, you know, this analogy of a frog being boiled, isn't it? That if you turn the heat up gradually, it doesn't really notice and won't jump out of the water. And, you know, that's what we're... We're not being boiled to death. we're being sort of boiled at the point of stupefaction where our brains are sort of heated up
that we just can't really... It makes us too sluggish to get out of the situation that we're in, really. We definitely don't want to go back to anything. But the problem is that all these discourses of postmodern multiplicity that post-colonialism has played a part of, really, just form this last man kind of... from last mandelitantism don't they so instead of you get this bad opposition between okay old monolithic modernist culture now pluralistic diverse uh anything goes you know but neither of these things are particularly desirable really surely it's the opposition itself that is the problem and that's um and so the question is how do we move out of the old you know which certainly
was. There was dimensions of that old culture, whatever you call it, social democratic, modernistic, paternalistic culture that was restrictive and repressive. But the thing is to go back to when we were in it and think about how we could have come out to it differently than we did. Because when we wanted to come out of that, we didn't want to go into a shopping mall. We didn't want the whole of the cosmos to become a shopping mall and a kind of you know buy on demand online sort of video arcade that's not what we wanted I think so the question was how could things have turned out differently and that is the question for me and which is
to retain the critique of those critique coming out of post-colonialism coming out of feminism coming out of everything else which attacked the privileged and restricted nature of modernist, Fordist culture or whatever, is to retain all of that but not end up in where we were because those discourses form this weird synergy with late capitalism, which is not, I can't make the mistake of, like, I think that Giesek makes, where to say, okay, they're the same as late capitalism. They form an alibi for late capitalism in the current conjuncture, for sure. But that isn't, the point is that they don't have to and that how do we maintain those and maintain a desire for a culture
that isn't an eye culture? You know, this for me is the central problem here. So, yes, I wouldn't want to go back to anything. I wouldn't want to go back to anything. And, you know, the danger of any of this stuff is the pull of a fake nostalgia. Well, all nostalgia is fake. that's the point because nostalgia is not about going back to how things were it's about the allure of things when you have distance from them the ache and pain of which is produced by the distance it's a classic kind of Lacanian truissance and nostalgia I think