The recent film by Patrick Keeler, which is the third in his series of Robinson films, this one's called Robertson in Ruins. I don't know if people are familiar with this earlier film, but one's called London. I forget what the second one's called now. But... Robertson in Space. Robertson in Space, thank you. Yes. and this third one that's recently been issued by the BFI if you haven't seen it it's really that unbelievable thing a British film that's worth seeing there's not many and there's an essay film
actually the best British films the only worthwhile British films of recent years are sort of essay films I think really and in Robinson and Ruins is really actually different from the earlier films the earlier films were analyses really of neoliberal Britain particularly in relation to the question of space and they're made up of static camera shots they're not stills but the camera doesn't move, it's static and then a kind of essayistic commentary, a fictional essayistic commentary. And what this latest film is about
is, I think, fits into this whole question of non-places and hauntological place. Unlike in the previous two films, which are mainly focused on urban or built-up environments, this film is about landscape and countryside. and it's really about the kind of militarisation or corporatisation of the unvisited vastnesses of the countryside you could say in England the secret places when a military, they're secret but they're open
open secrets as it were how they're secret is that they're kind of as Burroughs says what do you do to make things disappear? You create a lack of interest around it. You don't actually this is what these spaces are about these scientific corporate, militaristic a lot of synergies between these different bodies take place and experiments happen no one's particularly interested in that lack of interest is cultivated. it. And what Keeler constructs here is, I think, an interesting analysis of, yes, these covert corporate non-places, on the one hand, and ontological places. And what he particularly
talks about is sites where there were struggles over land between the working class and the ruling class. And there's often no monuments to these struggles anymore. That just looks like ordinary countryside and pastoral scenes out of John Constable paintings now. And also, what is an engagement within this film, and this comes to the theme of speculative realism, some of the things we were talking about yesterday, the role of what he calls non-human intelligences, and spaces without humans, actually. One of the key running tropes in the film is a focus on lichen, as it grows on signs,
as life forms that confines space in the gaps of human habitation. And Keillor's claim in his film is that it's only by alliances with the non-human that there's any sort of future for humanity at all. Alliance with non-human intelligences. When we hear that at the start of the film, we start to think about we imagine that Robinson the character is a familiar form of madness to do with the idea of aliens etc. But the non-human intelligence he's talking about are not extraterrestrial, they're terrestrial life forms
and you know what Keeler is engaging with here is many of the things that I've talked about in the last couple of days but from a different angle and on the one hand the ontological ubiquity of capitalism. In fact, it's difficult to imagine an alternative to capitalism. On the other hand, the pressing and crucial need for there to be some response to this ecological catastrophe, which we all know we're facing, but which we can't seem to get it together to respond to. Okay, someone else's work touches on this question of ontological space in relation to politics
is Laura Oldfield Ford, who, his work has just been, his work has came out in a former series of fanzines called Savage Messiah, which could be called psychogeography. Neither she nor I really like this term because it's, I think, been taken over by a certain form of bourgeois dittentism. You know, we just wander around the countryside and write a lot of disconnected drivel. And this, Laura's work is really about, particularly London, the space of London, and about unearthing the residue
or traces of previous forms of struggle in the city, previous forms of collectivity. So in lots of ways, I see Laura's work as sort of parallel to the music of Burial, which I played yesterday, and which I'll sort of end with today. These contestations, really, of the corporatization or gentrification of space in London. And one of the things that, in terms of the ruthless reinforcement of capitalist realism, and that's the sense that there is no alternative, and also why we are so busy all the time, why we had no time for, as I was saying yesterday,
no time for erotics in a generalized sense, not just about sexuality, but no time for cultural erotics, no time to develop a series of new forms of enjoyment. Why we had no time for that. What's the chief reason for that? Property prices. Certainly in the UK, in the last decade, the press is not accidentless, actually, that in the last decade, the property prices went absolutely exponential. But, you know, they've increased ludicrously up to 2,000. But since 2,000, they've gone into science fiction stratosphere. And nothing, I mean, of course, you know, capitalism depends on property
in the most abstract cognitive sense that I talked about yesterday. But it also depends on property in the most banal sense. And of course, the link between the hyper-abstraction of finance and the everyday life was property prices. Was it a trigger, the financial crisis? Was poor black families, predominantly in the US, being unable to pay their mortgages? and so what you had was this weird situation where capitalism had gone to ended up with this massively convoluted process whereby
it was funding it was funding these poor black families to have houses and that ended up being the most expensive thing capitalism has ever done probably of course if it actually just built social housing for those families. It would have cost far less than the bank bailouts ended up costing, right? But it had to go through that massively Baroque process and then it's crashed the whole system. And that probably in itself is a little parable about the stupidity of capitalism. But, you know, property prices enforce conservatism. You know, just on lots of levels, isn't it? Just the sheer fact that you have to spend so much of your working life
having to pay back mortgage or pay high rent means that you're too tired, worn out to engage in cultural work or that you'll engage in cultural work which you think will already fit the models of things that you're already successful. You know, level of fear, anxiety, etc. in relation to property is so high. You can't afford to be out of work. There's no accident that punk in London in the 70s, and London and Manchester particularly, or the no-wave scene in New York and the art scene
of the late 70s, early 80s, both of these scenes were contingent upon areas of the city which were condemned, derelict, and could be squatted, or very low property prices. When New York was bankrupt, it was good in terms of cultural production because you could live there quite cheaply. Now, you can't live cheaply in London at all. I mean, that's, and so this whole struggle over space, property, squatting, etc., that comes across in Laura's work, which, as I said, is coming out fairly soon in Verso, you know, is extremely sort of powerful set of connections, I think, really.
and you see the form of Laura's work it looks a lot like the sort of things you used to see on the covers of Crass Records if you remember those Crass Anarchist Anarchist group actually the most well that's actually false I was going to say the most interesting thing about them was the covers actually if you go back and listen to the music it is interesting but they had this female artist called G. Voucher who did the covers which were these incredible kind of tableaus based on kind of mythologized contemporary Britain, really. And some of the style of that you can see echoed in Laura's work,
which often has these traces on it and these layers on it, which connote the different, as it were, strata of experience. of experience still embedded in urban life. And the fact that a lot of Laura's work is focused on brutalism, tower blocks, et cetera, connects with Owen Hathaway's work, Owen Hathaway's two books, New Worms of Britain on Militant Modernism, which are really about reclaiming the modernist project. The modernist project then as popular modernism now, not as high literature or high art for a small elite,
but as a kind of vision of a new kind of humanity, widely disseminated, in a form of tower blocks, but also in a form of penguin paperbacks, etc. And phenomena, he thinks, like post-punk were part of this kind of popular modernism. and really the defeat of modernism in architecture and the return of kind of post-modernism, Prince Charles with his horrible, kitschy kind of oldie-worldie little villages with organic honey being made by milkmaids dressed in old dress and all of that. You know, like this is that, you know, post-modernism
in architecture, and of course the term comes from architecture originally, as you know, that then the triumph of this post-modern architecture is also the triumph of a kind of return of the familiar, actually. And what am I talking about is, we talked about more length yesterday, really, is that capitalism as the combination of the most cutting-edge process of destratification, genetic engineering, et cetera. On the one hand, genetic engineering. On the other hand, talent shows from the 50s. You know what I mean? This is the world which we live in. This is typical of capitalism, really. And, you know, so the hopes that, well,
in something like social, post-war social housing in the UK, which, you know, large proportions of the population lived in, and which has now become retrospectively impossible, because of the high property prices in the UK, it's almost politically impossible for any government to engage in the widespread building of social housing because it would crash the value of so many people's houses so that thwarted dream of a different kind of modernity again and not one we should go back to as it was but we should go back to as it was the hopes that we projected into the future really fucking Java update
I told you. Right. I don't know if we, do we have to leave the room at one o'clock or? No, no. All right, okay. I can't go on for two minutes long because I have to catch the plane. Okay. I might, oh, what's going on? Okay. Okay, this is a painting by an artist, Nigel Cook. And I think this, is Cook's work I think captures very well the existential terrain of modern UK actually a lot of his work looks like the imagined
world of Rave 10 or 20 years after the fact where you know instead of smiley faces you've now got these sort of dissolute tramps wandering around. It's like an animated cartoon world that has gone to seed, that has become kind of decadent, where it's covered with graffiti, et cetera, et cetera. This is the space of lots of the utopian hopes of collective delirium that we had in the 90s. This is where it is now. And this brings us back to Burial, who I'd started with yesterday. And I'm going to play you another of Burial's tracks,
that you have in Burial the echoes of that lurid, the lurid kind of pinks and bright blues of kind of rave imagery, but now kind of gone into this kind of grey, this grey pall has fallen over it. You know, a lot of the animatronic kind of rave beings that you imagined, that rave projected, now lying dissolute, broken up, smoking. This is the existential space conjured by Burial's music, which reaches the deep sadness that has underlay life in Britain in the last decade.
And the sadness which found no outlet. Part of neoliberal culture is obligatory positivity. You know, like I was trying to say yesterday, if you're downhearted, if you feel miserable, it's your fault. Or at least it's not your fault, but your responsibility. You know, you should do something about that. You know, you should go out and get yourself some antidepressants from the doctor. Or maybe get some therapy and talk about your mother. But it's certainly nothing to do with the disintegration of the public world and the disintegration of the opportunity for a kind of collective experience. and you know that is that's my diagnosis you know not that of don't accept what your doctor says
nothing to do with you you know it's everything to do with this collective space falling into this kind of this dereliction and wrong way I think burial in many ways is like the Edward Hopper for sound of our era. Hopper had shown these dealt with this form of urban loneliness in his work. Why these pictures continue to have this poignant hold on us, isn't it? These lonely men and women in diners or cafes at night in the US. I think Burial does the same and this was of course about the non-spaces
in a way, an early form of the non-space. strangely paradoxically when we look back at the when we look back at these older forms of non-places they have this anthropological pull for us you know like in UK there's this thing called classic cafes which is this chain of generic 50s looking cafes which is kind of interesting but that I think Burial's contemporary equivalent of that is his track from his second album called In McDonald's And I'm just going to play you that to end with, because that should bring us right back to a nice little loop. We're back to the question of non-place, and we're back to the burial as we started. Okay.
I think what, part of what Bariel does is he, and he'll hear this, he takes the kind music R&B particularly that you would hear in these environments but gives it a different background so the kind of sadness and longing that you hear in our R&B tracks but which is covered over actually by the the productions which they're given emerges in a different way
when he gives it this you know when he when he gives it this desolate backing it feels completely different um it's a bit like you know uh winds of desire film i actually fucking hate but they uh he does that but in a good way it's like instead of that sense instead of it like being everybody hurts which i was just this reminds me of that film you know that it's like that that's the longings and the sadness of the city uh set free from the bodies and just floating in this in this kind of cyber ether. That's what comes out of Burial's music, I think. But what is the image that corresponds to this?
Not Hopper's image anymore, but... Here we go, this from Inception. You know. I don't know what that is. This shouldn't be... Okay. But, um... Okay, so, Dan, that's it. We've had a few minutes before we have to get a package. Yeah, sure. I wonder what happens to people in the ontology?
I mean, the ontology, as you describe it, is very much connected to music and space and the atmosphere. And is there any room for people? What do you mean by people? I'm not sure what you mean by people. Like human persons. Well, I understand that. Well, how does it not feature people? Because it is really to do with people's relationship to space and time, isn't it? It's people who feel it. I mean, it's not without... The thing is, one of the things that one can talk about is actually, Razanegro Stani has this great line in Cyclonophilia in the footnotes. Actually, this footnote is incredibly lucid, unlike the rest of the book, which is incredibly dense and opaque,
about inorganic beings. He's saying a lot of the horror, there's this whole genre of horror to do with the inorganic being, the inorganic demon. But the inorganic demon is like the whistle in Whistler, I'll come to you. In other words, it requires potentiation by humans, you can say. But if this object lies there, it does nothing until a human activates it. There's a whole series of these ontological stories, I think, which are like that. a couple of incredible ones by a writer called Alan Garner who wrote for this age group which sort of doesn't exist anymore which he wrote not for children but for adolescents his book The Owl Service became
revived a lot in the last decade particularly because some of the artists called ontological ghost box have gone back to it. The Owl Service is about this dinner plate, bizarrely, which potentiate this dinner plate with these owls on it, which when they are when they enter into this family situation potentiate this trauma and this return of this inorganic owl being. And probably even more powerful than Garner's book, The Owl Service, which was made into a TV series in the late 60s, early 70s. Of course, it's on YouTube.
Everything is bits and... But his other book called Red Shift, which is about a spearhead which was dug up in this realm of Cheshire near where Joy Division lived, as a matter of fact. And this book is incredible. This book is like... it's like it's Harold Pinter for adolescence. It's extreme, the dialogue is extremely cryptic. And it really is about this crisis of time. But in terms of psychosis, it seems like the lead character as a boy is suffering from this psychotic breakdown. And the psychotic breakdown partly takes the form of a kind of simultaneity of time,
where this axe head, or spearhead rather, is simultaneously present in a number of different times, which are the sort of Roman time, there's a time of the Civil War in England, which seem to achieve this simulacineity in the novel, which I'm not sure what the status of that is. But once again, it's the object, the inorganic demon, which is nothing in itself but requires the context of humans. and you know I think this is certainly my take on hauntology is quite a heavily psychoanalytic one I think that I mean what is hauntology about? It's about objects that can't be digested properly
that refuse to be incorporated into a smooth sense of time or in a current context that refuse to be incorporated into atemporality, actually. That's, you know, I see this as a refusal of atemporality, actually. But, I mean, the power of burial is that both, the power of something like burial, I think, is both about atemporality, is saying, look, we're stuck, things haven't moved on, yet it's also a refusal of it. And how does that refusal express itself, expresses itself in this spectralizing?
You know, the sense of things were different once from this. We can't go back there, but we shouldn't be satisfied with where we are now. And, you know, I clearly won't puzzle this, because I think by the questions that I think, you know, these are, you know, it's humans. It's human emotions. It's all about emotions and memory. you know emotions memory and um disaffection i think so it's not just this we couldn't have ontology without or we could have a ontology without humans but it would be a very different one to what i'm describing i think i was wondering it would be interesting to know what distinction you would make between this uh interpassivity that you talked about where this film
WALL-E was a good example where it's doing the anti-capitalist work for you while it's showing you these passive creatures and supposed to spark a sort of criticism of where we're going it's sort of making you that at the same time I'm kind of curious where you draw the line there between what this sort of projection that, for example, burial is... Well, I don't think you can necessarily draw into the formal properties of the work itself, particularly. But I think it's to do, well, it's partly to, well, I was going to say it's to do with how indigestible it is, but now we find burial, burial's music being used as part of, you
a fairly mainstream capitalist commodity media. I don't know if that's... We can say in advance where that line is to be drawn, actually. I don't want to make it seem like it's a trap. I just wanted to know what you think. No, I think it's a good question. I think it's always contingent as to where that is drawn. It's a question of how easily your popcorn goes down while you're consuming it, doesn't it, really, as it were. Like the, you know, why that Wally thing struck me as significant was because, well, the American right-wingers really hated the film. It's really interesting. A lot of American right-wingers condemned Wally.
They said, it's the most outrageous attack by a corporation on its customers ever. You know, people have seen Wally, I guess, many of you, where, you know, towards the end. It's a really interesting film. I mean, it starts off as, you know, it's a lone robot abandoned on Earth, which is in this job of cleaning up the massive waste and detritus of human civilization. But of course, you know, it's still programmed to do that job even though there's no one it's doing it for anymore. So you think that human beings are dead, you know, and that all that's left is the cultural relics of this now extinct species. And that's the best bit of the film, really, is the first bit. But then it's almost like a silent film
because he doesn't talk. What he does is that every morning when he wakes up, he makes the sound of the mapping motion. Right, yeah. OK, yeah. So these kind of physical and sonic relics of this now dead corporate space, or what we think is dead corporate space, you know, he's picking through them. But a bit that I focused on was not so much that early bit, but the second bit where, sadly, there's this crushing disappointment when we see humans. You know, again, isn't there? You say, oh, God, we're still humans, they're still there. Humans are off-world in this spaceship, and they're sort of waiting for a point where Earth can be terraformed again, where the toxicity of the environment is depleted
and people can go back and live there again. But in the meantime, what are they doing? They're massively obese. They're sitting in these, they don't even walk around, they move around these motorised chairs and sort of consuming this slop constantly and sort of pressing buttons. And, you know, I don't know about in Sweden, but in the UK, lots of people live like that. Like, there's these mobility chairs that old people sort of like, well, obese people also use. The streets of Britain are full of these things. You know, it's just like Wally already. But, you know, people, instead of walking around, they're on these two-factor walks. So they're using these mobility machines. And, you know, there's just that, you know, one level of responding to this film is,
look at the perfect reflection here. You know, here's people going, oh, look, you know, isn't capitalism really bad? And why don't it be really awful if people live like that? But one level of responding to that is saying, oh, isn't it really clever of, like, Disney or whatever to attack, you know, to get this subversive message through? The other thing is, well, you know, but of course this isn't what, what's the effect of that message? And, you know, it's also true in Avatar, isn't it? Avatar has this, you know, obligatory anti-capitalist message, oh, corporations are really bad, and all of that. But, you know, this is how Hollywood, when is there a good corporation in a Hollywood film? You know, what I'm suggesting with this is that the time of capitalist realism
and the time of anti-capitalist representation in Hollywood have totally coincided with one another, you know, as it were. That, you know, there's, this must be, well, we can hypothesize some relationship there, which is that relationship, as you said, of like, it performs anti-capitalism for us and it allows us to do the very things which we are joining in condemning. because it's condemning it. We don't have to. Not only can we, we're not ourselves required to condemn it, we can do the very things which are condemned, which are passively consumed and not engaged with anything. Of course, the other fascinating thing about it was the fact they developed this sort of evil corporation in the film.
I can't remember what it's called. You always seem to know the film facts. I'm just looking at your topics. The evil corporation in the film, they developed this dummy website for it as part of the viral marketing, which was quite convincing, actually. But yes, I think it's a I I I I You think it was to do with a certain dimension of a certain type of critical reflexivity that's in place, I think. But I'm not sure that we can say with any confidence that, I mean, I think anything can be recuperated by capital,
as I said before. It's just a question of what at certain points is an obstacle or what thwarts it, et cetera. And, you know, that can change, I think. I know it's an unsatisfactory answer to this, but I'm not sure there is a very strong answer to it, really. Go on. but the enjoyment and now you never feel happy I don't, I mean, it doesn't matter who they are from or what are, what is the content.
You get a slight, you know, is it, is it, I think feeling happy is, is it, is it right? You get, you get a rush from it. You get a sudden rush, but it immediately turns to disappointment. Because now that, once you've got them, that's it. Now, why would you want some more, don't you? And, uh, I don't know if they're formed or any, in any sense, that's true. And also, like, when, in Wally, when he, when he sees people, maybe, maybe it is better for humanity to be like this. than like what we are now. Well, we are like that now. Isn't that the point? That's what we are like now. So it's not like that's some projection of how things will be. That's just us. It's funny you mention Dawn of the Dead because they say at a point of Dawn of the Dead it's really, because I just did a panel on Dawn of the Dead on Thursday actually. That's why I found it really interesting that you thought it was Dawn of the Dead.
Because the point at Dawn of the Dead the character says what are the zombies? They're us. And that is that that's not a projection of anything. We are living like that now. And I think, no, I'll unequivocally say this. I think this is just depressing relativism, what you're saying. Nothing really changes, nothing was ever enjoyable that much. The point about this is it's a form of very low-level enjoyment which spoils all other forms of enjoyment. That's the point of it. The fact that you want to check your room, this is not like something you do for part of the time. It's something you want to do all the time. And any activity you're doing, from sexual activity through to, you know, listening to music or anything is destroyed by this very low level minor. Seriously, you're telling me that any email you could ever get
is as good as being at a rave or something like that and being immersed in it. No, you can't accept that. The point is that if you're at a rave now, you'll still be like that. That's what I mean about it. It's just really, like I said, For us, a minor part of our lives years ago, communication has parasited onto this libidinal drive such that it possesses large parts of our brain all of the time. And I just do not believe that what we've gained is worth that. And, you know, that's, you know, like I say,
yes I do think other forms of enjoyment were better and can still be better but I think we'll see I think we'll see forms of digital withdrawal or communicative withdrawal I think that as it is now it seems that things will only go more and more like they are but it may just be that we've glutted ourselves on this because we just don't know how to deal with it that it is like when you first get a drug and you just overload on it and keep taking more and more of it I think we will see digital withdrawal and that we will be able to reclaim back spaces for other kinds of enjoyment apart from this ultra banal form of enjoyment because no one enjoys it that much that is the horrible paradox that's not paradox that's the horrible what sort of is paradoxical
an enjoyment that grips us so intently but which none of us really enjoy that much a great example in Sherry Turkle's book of someone who wants to check their text whilst driving. Okay, and they say, I can't help it, I can't help it, I have to check who's texted me. You know, like, you're prepared to risk, this is the form of the death drive now. Okay, the death drive now, I mean, death drive is not about desire for death, it's about indifference in the face of death, because you're driven by something that is stronger, even than your desire to live. And, you know, okay, when this was like, you know, the red shoes, or, you know, or black swan, I mean, it's, you know, the sublime tragedy of, enraptured in dance or whatever. When it's okay, fine. When it's to check 140 character message, I think this is not good.
You're risking death for that. This is a bad situation, I think. I say that without any compunction, that this is not good. From a different perspective, because you mentioned it yesterday, your appeal to, at least to some extent, to speculative realism that entails us being there but sort of can lure out the demon. I mean, it only works if you believe in it, as it were. Right. But what would you say, do you feel joy in respect of trying to think? I mean because you base your research
and critique and study on cultural phenomena and so is there a drive with you to try to think what could be joyful also beyond cultural phenomena is that a weird question? Does it make sense to you? It makes sense I I don't know I can't imagine joy I can't do so long I ruin all our holidays like all of our holidays and my wife complains we have to go to sites of literary and cultural significance all the time but I guess I suppose I see
all enjoyment in cultural terms which isn't to say that that is the only form of enjoyment there are I don't know I suppose that's the way I am drawn. But, I mean, clearly there are other, as they say, other forms of enjoyment are available. You wanted to ask something, Martin, before? Yeah, I have a few hundred questions. Okay. Let's start with one or two. Being old people, you and me, we remember how when VHS became common, that kids spent time now becoming violent because of this and that.
And if you look back at those movies today, it looks quite pathetic, right? How could we get violent from that? Yeah. and it's then MTV was dangerous for us, then computer games were dangerous for us, and today it's our smartphones and our Facebook account that are dangerous. So it's kind of, it seems to me a little bit like, easy to attack a phenomena and it's bad for us. Obviously yes. question again is that we can of course not get out of any of these kind of we cannot get out of these in respect to saying we shouldn't. So we need to figure out we need to have some and at the same time we cannot come out of any of these
situations because the only imagination available is capitalist. So whatever we imagine our way out since we can already it's already inscribed and somebody will make money. so he that they can take you back and that we do Butler we all become free but so the subject becomes a performative overnight and that's great for all cultural but it's also great for all the people that really so now we can make money on on the subject. So that's sort of the 1990s, the moment of Ashtanga yoga, which is like self enhancement. Yeah, okay. So maybe here's a kind of connected markers again, or rather passing by fontology. The
problem with fontology is that it always refers back to something known, for positive or negative, but it stays within the realm of the known. So what are the strategies? Not to say, so what do you propose instead? But can you say something about strategies to make us, to force us not to think with the imagination that we have? And here, of course, speculative realism is that one way. We cannot think within, but we can only speculate. But I think that hauntology is a symptom, not a strategy. That's why I think that in the sense that you can't...
When a criticism is made of hauntology, I always say, by comparison with what? It refers back to older things. By comparison with what? Everything refers back to older things. So the question is that reflexivity about the reference, I think, is different about it. And that in a time when, as it were, retro is naturalized, like I was saying yesterday. So we have Amy Winehouse. It's not an issue that it sounds like something from the 60s. It's just that that is contemporary. Ontology, I think, at least makes it clear that we are referring to the past here. But as with burial records, they're not just a reference to the past. It's a reference to the past in the same way that going into a dilapidated building is a reference to the past. You've also got the present form of the dilapidation. And so you've got that double time,
which means that you're neither in the present nor in the past, but you're in this out-of-joint temporality. And that is, for me, what the most powerful hauntology does. It isn't just about referring to the past. It is about referring to the way that the present failed to be the future that the past led us to expect. You know, and this is why... I think that's part of the difference. It forms this kind of reflexive critique. that, okay, in referring back to, you know, synth-pop, or referring back to brutalism, or referring back to rave or whatever, you know, what you're referring back to is a projected future which would be vastly different from the one in which we live. You know, that's unimaginable.
In 1990, it's unthinkable that music would be so familiar as it is in 2011. You know, since music in 1990 was so different from music in 1987, 88, or whatever, at any point in the recent past then, you project forward that rate of change and you can't imagine, you think you can't imagine what music would sound like in 2011. In fact, you could have imagined it all too well. The only reason you wouldn't have imagined it is you can't imagine it would have been so familiar to you then. You know, and that's serious about that. So, I think what is being revived is not the actual past of that, but the future that you'd expected. And that, you know what I mean? In lots of ways at the moment there is no alternative to that
because you can say, all right, well, let's have something that's genuinely new then. Well, there isn't anything like that at the moment. But that implies voluntarism though, doesn't it? That it's not like people have failed to do things like that. They tried harder and looked at them, things could have been different. It was the cultural conditions were just not there. So I don't know about the strategies. How do you strategize to produce new culture? Do you know what I mean? It's just like, I don't know how to do that. I mean, what I would say is that what I think will happen, okay, here's what I believe, things will happen now because of the disintegration of the reality system upon which that conservatism depended. You know, like, when, I mean, a part of this property thing
is really key, I think. People believe that they had a lot at stake in that system and that they had a lot to lose. When they learn there's really nothing to lose, things are different, I think. And so I think the sort of existential coordinates have changed, actually, and that that means that culture can change. And that's what I believe will happen over the next period. I think in the same way that we've got, in the same way that new political strategies will emerge, I think new cultures will also emerge the reason why we bring you here is to spend time with the potentiality of the version you mentioned before
there is sort of ontology and weird so how would you describe the difference between ontology and weird and we know that in London and in England or in the UK there's sort of a slight wave or fad of quote weird and... Okay, weird for me, so I don't want to work on this and I hope to have a book out on this like many of my books because of conditions super precarious conditions I can't even write a sentence, never mind about a book at the moment Okay, so I think the weird the weird is under theorized actually there's not really a concept of it there hasn't been Yes, I know, he did it He did it at an event that I organized. It's just the one on the weird and Lovecraft, yeah. Well, the weird for me is about,
what is a weird, what generates a weird affect? Weird affect is an ontological montage, I'll put it like that. It's where two things which don't belong together are brought together. Okay, and that's, that's the difference between someone like Lovecraft and someone like Tolkien. Okay. So, fantasy is really the naturalization of another world. Okay, so it effectively becomes like our world. So, okay, the fact they're bloody, whatever, elks and whatever. You know, what are they called? You see, I'm glad not to know that. What are they called those things? And I couldn't even bring myself to watch Lord of the Rings. Actually, what happens? I thought as a cultural duty, I have to watch these films. But I struggled through the first one. I thought, fuck, is that it? There's still three more.
And then I watched the second one, and there was a power cut, and it went off, and I thought, I can't be bothered to put the TV back on again. but whatever those things are orcs or whatever there's all of these things but the fact is because they're in a contained world it's just like our world so in a way with Tolkien what you've got is this horrendous reactionary feudal fantasy which has no charge because the whole world is self-contained with Lovecraft, who's this exemplar of the weird what you've got is the ordinary or mundane world confronted with Beings which don't belong to it. And actually, whenever Lovecraft, the charge of the weird is dissipated in Lovecraft, is when you get these ludicrous descriptions of these other worlds. Cone-headed star people and their little governments and committees and stuff.
Whenever he does that, it's the confrontation between these worlds which do not belong together, which generates the weird, I believe. The weird is about that. and there's a hauntological weird, that's the kind of issue here, a lot of hauntology was involved in reviving the weird actually and you've got this on M.R. James and M.R. James TV stuff the TV adaptations were part of that Lovecraft was part of it etc and so a lot of the ghost box label, a lot of the stuff that comes out of that label is very much interested in reviving this moment of weird and that's one of the interesting things about what Ghostbox does in terms of the conflation of social democracy
and the weird. Because what they do is they, rather than simply representing the past, particularly largely in the artwork associated with their work, with their label, rather than the music actually. The music often seems like a, well, can appear like a fairly standard pastiche from some of the artists. But in the artwork you have this conflation of like second school textbooks and Lovecraft etc. Lovecraft or James, things that you would have encountered via pulp paperbacks or by TV adaptations. So it's like as if their experiences at the time, which were of going to school in a social democratic state, as the UK was then, and
then watching public service television in the evening, it's just these two things get conflated. And of course, one of the key examples of this conflation is the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who did the music for lots of science fiction things, including Doctor Who. and two female figures were absolutely key to this, Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oran. And this music was weird. Their job was to produce weirdness. It was basically civil servants employed by the state to produce weirdness, sonic weirdness. And the point is that techniques
which had been developed in Europe, music concrete, Stockhausen, etc., developed for state-funded institutions in Europe and for kind of elite and elite art house music environments in Europe, became through a BBC Radiophonic Workshop part of the furniture of everyday life because they were used as local radio jingles or as atmosphere for TV, sound effects for TV series. so it's I think that utopian the utopian dimension of the weird and the relation, I think part of the power here is to deflect the
caricaturing of social democracy that neoliberals achieve as if this was some grey tedious bureaucratic world well okay there was dimensions of that for sure about that period but paradoxically the organisation of something like the BBC at that time allowed levels of weirdness to be widely socially propagated in a way that is unimaginable now and one example of this is actually Doctor Who which is you get this weird situation now where the music is unwatchable not only because of this horrible CGI and smart post-Buffy post-modernisms and all of that,
but because of the fucking music, which is like these sweeping John Williams strings from American action films. And if it wants to go back to the old Doctor Who, no matter how wooden the acting, how bad the sets are, it feels weird because of the music. The electronic music is so cold and empathic. Some of it sounds like throbbing gristle. It's so loud as well that you can barely hear the dialogue over it. And that sonic weirdness. We're now told you can't have a TV series for kids with an electronic soundtrack. This is part of the temporal involuting or retrogression in which we now live.
Where everything has to be just screaming. It's like this reverse autism in which we now live. Screaming emotionalism. Well, you know, people aren't allowed to, you know, my wife says I'm like autistic, but I think I'm just not subject to this hyper-emotionalist interpolation which we now have. I think it's like variety, you know, like I was saying yesterday about how, you know, Viagra, porn, etc. Well, there's emotional pornography, isn't there? You know, you can't just be allowed to feel an emotion. It has to be massively signposted with these, you know, enormous weight of a kind of cliched musical signification, you know.
look this person is now sad feel sad and they'll dwell on these sad scenes for like 5 or 10 minutes poor kids must be bored out of their heads we get it so I think that what would a condition for a wide dissemination of the weird partly there's a there's a hauntological weird which is a mourning for the conditions where that weird could be propagated. Because that is part of the argument here, that neoliberalism claims to have freed us from the boring constraints of paternalism and all of that.
But what delivers this hyper-banality, screaming emotionalism, et cetera, and this culture that everyone's dissatisfied with that no one can point outside. But seeing the UK of celebrity culture, Everyone hates it, but everyone's susceptible to it as well. You know, there was a phenomenon a few years ago, free newspapers in London, which was like psychic... This was like psychic toxins, which were freely distributed in London. It was a really sad moment in the history of London-ness, when it was like an invasion of body snatchers. You know, previously you'd see people read books and stuff, but once these free newspapers came out, you know, it was like they live. You know, you'd go in the carriage, every single person would read these free newspapers. what was in these free newspapers you know it's just like celebrity till-tattle
and it's this form of like Heideggerian curiosity or idle talk where you're drawn into you're drawn into reading it even though you're not interested in it you're bored even as you're fascinated oh look you know some gossip like oh look Katie Price oh not interested Katie Price oh but what's going on here and this you know this form of again, why does this work? Why does this appeal to people? It's because they're so tired. It's like that angel and devil on your shoulder. When you're on the train on the way home, if you've worked in London for a day, it's like, oh, I've got a good book here. I should be reading that. Yeah, but, you know,
what has happened to Katie Price's marriage? Ooh, what was that? And, you know, the lure of it, so strong, this comforting hyper-emotionalism. And this vicious circle with that, because it's not, there's no roughage in it. Because it's so, they need more and more of it at all times, really. And that's the kind of crisis that they're at. Like I say, everyone hates that celebrity culture. But no one can see a way out of it. I think it's another dimension of what you were talking about before. about, you know. But in that incompatibility between a known and an unknown, a true known that doesn't fit the unknown compatibility,
I need to, that implies the process of individuation where I have to create reality rather than refer to it. Right. Yeah, and I think it's anti-naturalization, isn't it? It's saying that, you know, and it's also, the weird is about the outside, isn't it, in a fundamental way. an outside which is totally unfamiliar to us which can interrupt and disrupt our world and the connection with speculative realism the reality, the real rather, is like that we know that the way the world really is beyond how we see it has the dimension of the weird, as it were so I think that maybe is Matt yesterday was asking about some of the political applications of speculative realism I think it is that counter-naturalization is crucial.
Like neoliberalism presents us with this impoverished version of reality. And it's no accident that capitalist realism coexists with reality TV as a major form of entertainment. But this reality has got nothing to do with the real. The real which is totally alien to us and which science discloses actually as being completely beyond anything we can experience or think about. I guess that that is one way of getting to a political application for speculative realism, is that the real is weird. Oh, certainly our encounter with it always produces the weird. So we need to start to talk to aliens. Well, we already need to listen to what they're already saying to us, maybe.
So it was fantastic to have an alien from London coming to the United States. And luckily, we haven't attempted to understand you. Since this would be to produce a oneness and we would all feel satisfied in being liberally perfect. but maybe it's exactly maintaining not coming together is one way of staying weird stay weird I'm going to have a t-shirt with that one okay well thanks everybody and maybe well I'm coming over again in September for an event who's doing that?
do you know? I'm having to talk with you Oh, right, OK, yeah. So yeah, I'll be over then. So maybe we can see some of you again then. And if not, I hope you can have dialogues by email or something like that. OK. All right, well, thank you. Thanks.