Okay, yeah, so I'm going to talk today then about some of the main ideas in my new book, Ghosts of My Life, which really in some ways runs parallel to, or is the other side of, the kind of ideas that I deal with in capitalist realism really. if capitalist realism was about the complete takeover of capital of not only of culture and economy but also of the psyche then Ghost of My Life deals with what was thwarted by that the traces of the outside the persistences of of exteriority in this world
completely dominated by capital but what I'm going to do today really is bring you the bad news that you already know which is talk about music culture and perhaps UK music culture especially as a symptom of temporal pathology a temporal malaise which can be understood at least two levels. One is the level of history itself and the sense of historicity. A newly ubiquitous sense of the waning of historicity
to use a phrase from Frederick Jameson. Jameson's theorizations of the postmodern which developed in the 80s I think now look increasingly prophetic. And what Jameson was theorizing in the 80s is still a somewhat marginal phenomenon, still an emergent phenomenon, is now ubiquitous to the point of, almost to the point of invisibility, I would suggest. But I'll come back to that. What is the bad news that you already know? Well, the future has disappeared. The dimension of... Oh, sorry, I meant to go on to...
The second aspect of this temporal malaise is the experience of time itself, the phenomenological sense of time in everyday life. And I think... I guess my big thesis of relationship between these two things, the more that our everyday life is taken over by the urgencies of what Jodie Dean calls communicative capitalism, what Franco Berardi Bifo calls Samuel capitalism, the more that the rhythms and the dispersed attentional economies of communicative capitalism take over our life,
the more that there is this difficulty in grasping a sense of the historical moment in which we live so yeah sorry so what is the bad news we already know is that the dimension of the future has disappeared that in some way is that when Maroon were trapped in the 20th century still that what is it to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on higher definition screens or 20th century culture distributed by high speed internet actually so there's a strange
what ought to be a strange sense of repetition of a cluttered or blocked time a time that's in many respects slowed down or flattened or retired or gone backwards. Where the sense of a forward momentum of culture, which isn't the same as a progress. I'm not arguing that what has disappeared is a sense of the progressive in culture as if somehow 90s jungle progressed above Robert Johnson. I'm not arguing that. what I'm arguing is that the thing that's disappeared is a sense of difference or a sense of the specificity the sense of culture belonging to a specific moment, that is what has disappeared
in the 21st century so there's now a feeling that nothing ever really dies but that's not good that means that we are assailed on all sides by kind of zombie forms which persist forever by revivals anything can come back anything can come back there's a kind of what we might say excessive tolerance for the archaic but part of the problem is we since the sense of historicity has waned, has declined it's difficult to characterize anything as archaic anymore, what does it mean to say something archaic in a situation
when practically everything feels old. The phrase that captured this for me and which I used at the start of Ghosts of My Life from Franco Berardi is the slow cancellation of the future. The slow cancellation of the future, I think, which captures not only that sense of termination but the gradual nature of it. Of course, it's not that the future in culture disappears overnight. it withers it drains away but at least in terms of music culture and in the UK context I think I think we can say that this
waning, this disappearance this cancellation of the future started to become evident about a decade ago and has intensified since then. And I think in that time, our expectations of music, which I'm treating as, as I say, symptomatic, symptomatic as the most obvious example of this, but it's not as if this only applies to music. Our expectations have declined and this flattening out of time has become more naturalised. I don't think we anymore expect music to sound like a radical break from the past.
We expect music now and culture more broadly to be a quite subtle, If it's different, it'll be a subtle remodulation, a subtle reconfiguration that is available and understandable, accessible, only to initiates and aficionados largely. It won't be some gross sensational shift, which is readily apparent to anybody. for Baradi the slow cancellation of the future clearly is not just a cultural thing it's also a political thing and of course the sense of the disappearance of a political future
the sense of a future which would be radically different in political terms from today is also part of this but it's also about the disappearance then of a certain linear sense of time I think a certain narrative of time with where time is marked in the same way that space is marked Those are kind of time marks in the way that there are landmarks.
And I think this is, you know, this was how those of us born, you know, in the same period, you know, from the late 60s, 70s onwards, you know, experienced time as marked by music in certain ways. that there was a strong connection between particular periods and music. And it was, you know, one could periodize music, not only by the year, but often by the month. And the sense of a rapid supersession of styles, genres, techniques, methodologies, which went along with that. The sense that, you know, it was really experience of modernity through popular culture.
You know, and modernity, as theorized by someone like Marshall Berman, has this sense of impermanence. has this sense that all the solid melts into air, that any particular form is temporary, evanescent, it will be overcome, it will be replaced, it will become obsolete. I think the way in which we experience that, not now in culture but in terms of technology. The experience of modernity is now in terms of smartphones or iPhones. That's where we have this sense of permanent obsolescence. In terms of culture, we have the almost opposite now. There's no criteria for obsolescence in culture. There's, as I said before, an accommodation towards what previously would be characterized as the archaic.
But part of the problem is there's no effective sense of the contemporary to which one could compare the archaic now. and that's, as I said, I think been in place for about a decade. So one of the phrases I use is there are non-times as well as non-places. Marco Jay's theory is a non-place as the space of circulation of late capitalism which are effectively indistinguishable one from another. Airports, retail parks, etc. I think years, time has become like the non-place. that, you know, what was the sound of 2005? What is the sound of 2008? These years seem to fade into one another now.
If I ask you what the sound of 1975 was, even if you weren't alive, you've probably got a sense of what it is, actually. But I think what's characteristic of the 21st century, increasingly, especially since around 2003, is that disappearance of that sense of specificity of cultural time. And the lack of distinguishing marks that, is to say, of a particular period. And our sense of the futuristic now belongs to the past. It has not been updated since the 90s, really. in the 90s with genres like jungle felt radically unprecedented
they felt like there's nothing you'd heard before nor could you have heard it before and there was a feeling of the future rushing in towards us and we being caught up in it I think that's almost entirely gone now the futuristic and when we use the word futuristic it's almost the same as the word gothic it refers to an already existing and established set of generic protocols it's like a font, like gothic font futuristic means it sounds a bit like Kraftwerk or something like that it's not actually futuristic, it doesn't refer to an actual future or indeed a virtual future that is impinging on the present it refers to a set of already existing associations which
you know, have now been eternalised the way to establish a lot of what I'm saying I think is a simple kind of time travel experiment which is if you imagine beaming back anything any music produced in the 21st century into 1994 I picked 1994 deliberately because it's 20 years ago and it's hard for some of us to accept the 1994 is 20 years ago but if beaming it back to 1994 what would happen if people heard that music in 1994 um would they go my god this is this is inexplicable i've never heard anything like this this isn't even music um i don't think
anyone's going to do that i don't think anyone would do that actually i think the the reverse would be the case, if you beam back music from 2014 to 1994, people are going to say, you serious? This is coming from 20 years in the future. This doesn't sound that different from what we've got today. And I think that's, you know, thinking of that 20-year period illustrates the kind of slowing down, a flattening of time that I'm referring to. Because if you think back of 1994 to 1974, the vast sonic worlds that had been born and died in that period. The enormous kind of series of mutations that had occurred between 74 and 94. Or again, between 54 and 74.
The speed, the rapidity, the efflorescence of different sounds, different sensations that emerged in that period. Since 1994, I think that that's flattened out. nothing at all has happened, but I think it's hard to make the case that almost anything that has been produced in its 20 years subsequently was sonically unimaginable in 1994, I think. It's a whole series of fairly logical extrapolations of of propositions, of methodologies that were already in place.
And part of that means then the disappearance of retro, I think, or the disappearance of the concept of retro in the very universalisation of retro. I mean, there's always been, as long as there's been popular music, there's always been retro dimension to popular music. There's nothing new about that. I think what is new about the current moment then is really that there's not the failure of any alternative to what would have previously been considered retro. Now we can ask the question retro compared to what? What is not retro now? I think that really I guess follows from what I've been arguing so far. I guess this became apparent to me in the mid 2000s which I refused to call the noughties.
although in many ways they're a decade which deserves such a horrible name but um was you know when i was walking through um i was walking through a shopping mall and i heard the amy winehouse cover of um uh of valerie um by the hot indie plodders the zutons um and when i first heard over it in a casual listen i thought it i genuinely thought that this was a 60s record You know, I thought that... So I reversed the temporality in my mind. What I... You know, I thought that the Zootons was a cover of this 60s song. You know, it's a production by Mark Ronson. Mark Ronson specialises in those kind of refurbished sound of the 60s. Of course, if you listen to it closely,
you realise that it's not 60s sold. It couldn't be. Nevertheless, that initial response sort of indicates this kind of flattening of cultural time that has occurred. So it's something which had come out 40 years later could sound sufficiently like something from that earlier period. A similar thing happened when I first heard the Arctic Monkeys, who subsequently became even more boring than they were when they started off, which is so much evil. when I first heard the Arctic Monkeys when I saw the video for that track Bet You Looks Good on the Dance Floor when I first saw that
I actually did believe that it had come from 1980 that it was some post-punk group that I hadn't actually heard at the time but had somehow been rediscovered and almost everything about the way the video looked the way it was shot, the clothes they were wearing and of course the music itself conspired to construct that appearance, that simulation. And again, I think if we actually imagine it being played in 1980, that record, no problem. It could very well have existed then. There's nothing to prevent it being absorbed into actual 1980. And I guess the reason I mention these things is that, for me,
that these should obviously have been classified as retro. These are obvious. Something which sounds like it could have come out 30 years ago, or 40 years ago, ought to be classified as retro. Yet they weren't. They were posted to us as if they were part of contemporary music. But what is contemporary music then if it can accommodate music which is not influenced by the past, but which sounds like it really could have come from a historical moment of long ago, long ago. I mean, 1980 in 2005, 2006, that ought to have been a very, very long time ago. I think part of the reason for this is that
we can see the 21st century in many ways as a disaster for musicians, actually. that a lot of the developments, of the key developments in the kind of music culture of the 21st century have not been good for musicians, ultimately. The key technological shifts, you could say, are to do with consumption and distribution of music rather than production of music. Now, it's not like, again, it's not that 20th century was a, an ideal situation for musicians. It's not that the days of record companies, advances, etc., was a housing period. But in retrospect, it's looking better and better, actually,
than now. Because paradoxically, in some ways, big record companies insulated some musicians from market pressure, actually. they gave them the fact that they were record company advances that they could make money from recorded music the fact that recorded music was a commodity that could actually yield remuneration this gave musicians some autonomy and autonomy I think which they increasingly lack in the current moment part of the problem is we could say that a lot of cultural production has been effectively decommodified or has become a commodity
effectively priced at zero, whereas the things that cultural producers rely on have been hyper-commodified, you could say. They still need gas, electricity and housing, just to which I'll return to, perhaps the housing is perhaps the principal thing in a city like London, which can explain this sense of malaise. But I think the other dimension of this in relation to technology is that this new technology doesn't yield sensations, you could say, in the way that previous forms of technology were, music culture. Music culture, when you've got a wah-wah pair,
or whatever, you could obviously hear that. When you had samplers, you could hear the effects of samplers. When you had synthesizers, one could hear them. 21st century, as I say, music technology has certainly mutated music culture, but it hasn't mutated it in the level of what one is actually hearing. You can't really hear this communicative culture. It just facilitates the distribution, the circulation of music. it doesn't change the actual sound of what is produced so developing this kind of thought then about why this has happened why we're in this kind of temporal malaise
why in particular it's kind of music culture that exemplifies this the first and obvious explanation then will be the emergence of the internet and that's you know that kind of neatly coincides I think with um the time I'm suggesting with when the future definitively disappeared uh in around about a decade ago you know when the internet became ubiquitous of course the internet was there before but the the uh the domination of our lives by the internet really only started a decade ago and and this is essentially the argument of Simon Reynolds in Retromania and for Simon the key thing
is what the internet provides is oppressive weight of the past the accessibility since with the weight of the past so easily available to us this makes it harder for the new to emerge I think that's partially true but it's not enough to explain everything another remark of Simon's is perhaps more telling where he says that what's happened in the last few years is that everyday life has sped up but culture has slowed down and I think it's this dimension
of speeding up that's speeding up. And here's where we come to what I said at the outset, there's this second dimension of this temporal pathology, which is the experience of time in everyday life, the phenomenology of time. You know, it's this... For me, this is not so much just the internet, but I think cyberspace, which is different. it's really only in the last few years with smartphones that we're inside cyberspace you could say until smartphones we went to the internet which we accessed through computers that already seems like a genteel age
of the Jane Austen world far distant from us now as soon as I think smartphones shouldn't be thought of as objects which we have but as portals into cyberspace, which mean that when we carry them around, we're always inside cyberspace, which induces a whole set of habituated reflexes, which we have to make a deliberate effort to step outside of. but again we can't just see this emergence of cyberspace the ubiquity of cyberspace on its own
we have to see it in the context of neoliberalisation and the combination of neoliberalisation and post-Fort is the micro-capitalist realism really and so what I'd rather talk about rather than cyberspace is capitalist cyberspace I think what we're inside is capitalist cyberspace and this then has coincided in a country like the UK with the final eclipse of social democracy and with it I mean what does that mean means the end of indirect funding, I think,
for something like music culture. A lot of the major developments in music culture in the UK weren't directly funded by the state. It's hard to think of... Well, there are some examples, actually. But in terms of popular music, it wasn't direct funding by the state that made it possible, but but indirect funding was certainly a key factor. The example of direct funding by the state would be things like BBC Radiophonic Workshop, etc., where they were part of a public service broadcasting remit. But indirect funding means the machinery of social democracy itself,
would mean things like student grants, unemployment benefit housing benefit social housing I said earlier if you're looking at a city like London as a particularly powerful case study here the situation with housing is probably sufficient in itself to explain almost everything I've talked about so far the fact that it's so expensive to live in the city deprives deprived the culture of energy I think deprived the culture of an unstressed or unpressured energy the city is exhausted on lots of levels on a fairly literal level
but then as a consequence of that exhaustion, as a consequence of that perpetual kind of business, busyness that inescapability of the ubiquity of urgencies something which is intensified via the cyberspation environment. I think that we, again, we can look back to the Gidebo period, Gidebo, the 60s, the spectacle. Again, it seems like some genteel period. You had to put TV on then or see an advertising billboard in order to be commanded or have your nervous system assailed by the urgencies of capitalism. Now we carry them around at all times with us.
And it's important to remember, and Deleuze describes communication, communication is a command. This is when we open up, we look at our smartphones, we're essentially being commanded. And this is a weight on our nervous system that wasn't previously there, I think. facing these hundreds of commands every day which we may well ignore them obviously we have to ignore them we can't possibly follow them all nevertheless the strain on our nervous systems must be telling at some level but to come back to this
social democracy and the indirect funding for culture I mean I think one particularly important example of this in the UK will be art schools the role of art schools in a lot of major developments of music certainly from the Beatles, the Who up to post-punk the art school was a major institution there again it wasn't teaching this stuff directly it wasn't teaching people to be in groups and make music, it wasn't about that but the institution facilitated a circuit which was a particular class dimension to it. Art schools in that period
were zones where the working class could go. There was an encounter between the working class and the established high culture avant-garde or experimental art scene. That encounter was highly productive for popular music culture. And really, with the rise of neoliberalism, we've seen the dismantling of that culture and its conditions, really. The re-embourgeoisie of art schools, I guess is what I'm talking about there. I guess what would once have happened was,
if you were a working class kid and you said to your parents, I'm going to art school, they'd say, no, you're not. You're not wasting your time doing that. You could do something useful. But the student had a full grant, had no fees to pay, so he said, I'm going anyway. With the introduction of fees and increasingly high fees, that space of autonomy is not there. The result that art schools are now, once again, as I said, dominated by the bourgeoisie. in the UK. And, you know, I think the result of what I'm talking about, or another dimension of what I'm talking about, is the re-stratification of culture, really. One of the things I'm interested in, why I think music culture was significant in the period,
you know, from the, especially from the early 60s up to the end of the 90s, was as a space for what I would call popular modernism, with this art school encounter as a kind of engine of that, where experimental techniques, methodologies, preoccupations were disseminated, extended, and furthered, and popularised via music. I think that's part of the reason music was important, because music wasn't just music. Music was a threshold, a portal into a whole other set of cultural resources really.
And that circuit has closed down. The possibility of popular modernism has closed down and instead we have a return really to a kind of kitsch high culture which is kitsch in the sense that it's still there, it persists, but is no longer capable of generating novelty, of producing the new, and a return to a kind of lumpen mass culture. And that space where these two fields were disarticulated and no longer exist in any significant way. So with the with the final decline of final attacks on social democracy,
and it's bad enough under New Labour in the UK, but in the UK we fell into the illusion of thinking nothing can be worse than New Labour, until we had the old Conservatives come back and we found, yeah, something can be worse than New Labour. And what's happened with the coalition government since 2010 is the picking off, almost systematic picking off, the last remaining elements of social democracy attacks on social housing attacks on squatting as well as squatting the possibility of squatting in a city like London was very important to something like punk it wouldn't have been possible punk is unimaginable in London today because of the housing situation
really so I think the result of all this then is this embattled sense of time at the everyday level. The key thing was, I think the key thing of something like the art school experiment at that time was that there was a space in the culture where people were freed up from the pressures of work, where they could pursue projects where they were going to lead, but where the imminent logic led them which was radically open. Those kind of spaces in culture, those times,
that kind of space-time has radically etrified now. The experience of what is to be a student in the UK is to be, as elsewhere, massively indebted and often working lots of jobs. working more than one job. So that's effectively closed out then, this space of freedom from work and freedom from the immediate pressured time. I think what this has also meant is the end of boredom. I think it's perhaps significant. We might look back upon boredom as somewhat utopian proposition now, in many ways. The dialectics of boredom coming out of the situationists and going into punk.
What are the politics of boredom? The idea of boredom as a kind of existential challenge. Boredom presents us with the blankness of death. The necessity for us to actually do something is a kind of existential injunction. That's been eliminated now. Boredom 1.0 no longer exists. I'd say we're now in a period, my slogan for this would be, no one is bored, everything is boring. What do I mean by that? Well, no one is bored because we're all inundated by microstimulitis, seamless microstimuli. So the point of we're at a bus stop where you previously would have been bored,
now, what is the first thing we do, we reach for our phones, in order to cover over the kind of terror of boredom? That doesn't really get rid of, that gets rid of our experience of boredom, but it doesn't stop things being boring. You know, I think the particular lure of a lot of 21st century culture is this mixture of curiosity and boredom at the same time. We're sort of bored even as we're curious about things, actually. Isn't that a kind of engine of, you know, as we're kind of insomniacly drifting through social media at night, we're kind of, at some level we're bored even while we're kind of curious. But since there's no reprieve from the urgencies of cyberspace,
that's what I mean by no one is bored. We don't have the freedom to be bored anymore because on another level we're tethered in. We're fascinated even as we are bored. We're distracted from our own boredom. We're distracted from the boring nature of things by the fact that we're always kind of, we're subject to these kind of idiotic compulsion. And again, I think that there's, a lot of BFO's work on this is very important, the inundation of the nervous system by stimuli, the producing this insomniac state of where it's no longer possible to dream anymore. And actually there's quite an interesting post on the Plan C website
from this anonymous group called the Institute of Precarious Consciousness or something like that, where they argue, we've really shifted from an age of boredom to an age of anxiety. With Fordism, the previous dominant regime in capitalism presented the problem of boredom. You're in a factory for 40 years. That's boring. You don't want to do it. Capitalism solved that problem. It solved it in a way that always solves everything via kind of the fairytale genie solution, which is, OK, you don't want to be bored. I'll make sure you're not bored. You'll be anxious forever. And this kind of, that's, you know, this sense of kind of universal anxiety, I think, is another thing which prevents us from experiencing boredom anymore, which doesn't stop culture being boring.
Culture is boring but there's no one who isn't preoccupied all the time who can access this border. So I think what this calls for then is a politics of time and understanding these different quantitative experiences of time. and how the attack on that unpressured, unstressed, that time free of urgencies is part of the domination of capitalism over culture at the moment. And what can almost pose at this is a metaphysical level struggle. There's a set of forces that want us to be permanently anxious,
have our attention permanently fragmented, permanently dispersed and that is definitely winning that's the dominant force at the moment against another kind of sense of time another kind of attractor which is towards this unpressured, expansive more open sense of time which is now radically fugitive it's very hard to get hold of that in particular in a city like London which I think London is a kind of doubling everything's blocked, cluttered anyway by the fact that everything's so difficult, overcrowded expensive
it's like cyberspace in physical form in lots of ways and then on top of that you've got the actual experience of cyberspace and everyone tethered and tranced by their phones as a means to escape it, but also to kind of perpetuate it. So, you know, one of the things that I sort of posit then in the book then is what does it leave us with in a situation where it seems that nothing new can ever really happen anymore? What do we do? When the future is terminated, what do we do? an important thing to stress here is not to take is not to adopt a too easily nostalgic perspective
where we say well yes everything was great 70s, 80s, 90s now things are really bad although I think nostalgia is easily criticised when the opposite is far less criticised which is a credulous a certain credulousness about the present, actually. It seems to me more of a problem than nostalgia, actually. And given the immense weight of the PR industry, branding, et cetera, and their role in deliberately producing this waning of historicity, I think, it can't be underestimated. you know they they're this force which
the problem with nostalgia in a culpable sense makes us overrate the past but I think the problem we've got is overrating the present in lots of ways and underrating our own dissatisfaction with it which we're invited to do which we're pressurised to do in lots of different ways so what rather than invoking an actually existent past and comparing it with the present. I think the point from which we can criticise the current moment, the point at which it can be found wanting, is in terms of the futures that were projected from the 20th century, not the actual existing past. It's the shocking difference between what we thought might have happened
and what actually has happened, which can be revealed by that experiment I suggested where we beam back something in time. And in the face of that, I think we're almost offered an opposition between a certain kind of politicised melancholia and depression, actually. It's not necessarily that nice a choice at the moment. But, I mean, okay, what I mean by politicised melancholia, politicised melancholia would be a refusal to adjust to the present moment. A refusal to adjust to this to say, I can't accept this. And that's fundamentally what I feel when I turn on the radio, actually. I turn it on, I sort of quite like this, you know, whatever track it is. Sort of quite like it, but it's not acceptable.
You know, this, I can't adjust to the fact that this sounds like it could have come up 20 years ago. It isn't just boring rock music now, it's dance music as well, whatever. You know, you can't adjust to it. And even if it's going to carry on forever, I think I'm going to refuse to adjust to a time when it's acceptable for things to be so anachronistic. The alternative to that, I think, is a kind of just depression, is a kind of naturalised depression, where we just accept that nothing new's ever going to happen, but it's not a problem anymore. And often this logic of depression takes over
where not even people say, well, you know, nothing new's going to happen now, so what? Did anything new ever happen in the past anyway? You know, it's kind of overrated. Things weren't really that new ever before. We start bargaining ourselves down, not only about the present, but about anything that's ever happened before. So I suggest that this is, you know, then that's part of the overrating of the present, actually, in certain ways, is that, those tendencies. So one of the things I explore in the book, then, is these strains of melancholic maladjustment, as one strategy for the refusal of a present which is not really a present, and a refusal of the failure of the future. And one of the threads that I try and pull on
is this longing, this yearning for a future in conditions where the future can't be delivered. And I guess that is the authentic articulation in the present. It's not... One can't by force of will alone create a sense of the future. We have to accept that the conditions which allowed a sense of futurity have really been attacked, and it's voluntaristic action, can't put that right, have really been attacked, they've really radically deteriorated. Yet, if we're not to accede, if we're not to completely submit to this present where the future has disappeared, what remains is a certain set of longings
yearnings etc and it's a kind of fidelity to those yearnings and longings that is one of the things that I track in the book okay we'll leave it there if that seems to have a point to end if that's okay okay thanks everybody