I'm going to make a start now. First of all, thanks to Barry and everyone at Incubate for a superbly well-organized festival. And thanks to everyone for coming to listen today. I hope some of you, or most of you, were at Simon Reynolds' talk, which just happened because in response to that talk, basically scrapped what I was planning to do and at least initially be developing a sort of series of responses to what Simon said,
partly because that will make the talk more specific to this sort of DIY theme, which I think is a crucial theme at the moment. And the issues that Simon raised in his talk about the politics of DIY and the recuperation of DIY are, I think, crucial at every level at the moment, crucial at every level, and especially in terms of politics and culture and the relationship between the two. And I think a lot of the struggles we're engaged in at the moment are over precisely the relationship between politics and culture. I mean, as I think was clear from Simon's talk, the concept of DIY is one around which,
well, an attitude of dialectical ambivalence, I think, is really required in terms of this concept. And especially from me, because, you know, well, not to say the only reason, but the prime reason that I'm here talking to you today is not because I had a book out, not because I lecture in universities, not because I write in magazines and newspapers. The reason I was able to do all those things at all was because of having a blog in the first place. And being able to develop a form of writing, which certainly would not in the first instance have come out as a book. There's no way any academic press would have published it.
And certainly wouldn't be acceptable in British journalism at the moment. The British media culture reached a point of truly excruciating middle-brow mediocrity. But hang on a minute. Okay, so to some extent then, or to a large extent, I would say I owe my position as a cultural figure to the DIY culture, DIY digital culture. But I couldn't just do it myself, as it were. The reason I was able to develop the kind of writing that I did wasn't from some internal resources
that I happened to have bestowed upon me. It was because of a cultural inheritance, which I was old enough to have benefited from. And that cultural inheritance consists of, you know, things like public service television of the 1970s and 1980s in Britain. More unlikely, in retrospect, source of this cultural inheritance, it wasn't unlikely at the time, but now seems unlikely, was the NME, New Musical Express. New Musical Express in the 70s and 80s was a source of major intellectual ferment.
It was the NME where I first saw the names Baudrillard and Derrida. It wasn't through the formal education system at all. I mean, I hated school and I just didn't do particularly well at school. What drew me into intellectual current was reading the referred glamour, I think, of the theory acquired from being in the NME and the contiguity of popular culture and high theory at this particular moment. And, you know, it's really, I see myself, actually, as a continuation of this culture, in conditions that are massively inhospitable towards that culture, actually, now.
And really, in a sense, that's what my book, Capitalist Realism, was about. It was about, and really a lot of my work is about, And what I plan to do today, and what I still may do a little bit of, is read you some hot-off-the-press bits from my new book, Ghosts of My Life. And really, Ghosts of My Life and Capitalist Realism are two sides of the same project, I think, which is a project of revealing the inherent negativity of the moment in which we live. And as I was just saying to people before we talked, Simon was worried after his talk that it was too depressing. I said to him, the talk isn't depressing the reality is depressing and this is something that I've struggled with
to realise actually and faced a lot of hostility with a lot of the very intense debates on blogs that went on were really about this question can one make negative judgments about the present moment or is any kind of critical judgment being exercised about culture somehow inherently oppressive I would say certainly one can make negative judgments about the present moment and to pursue this dialectical loop to its full extent the reason why culture is so bad is there's not enough negativity the motor of culture was negativity, dissatisfaction
you know like the and if we look back at the 1977 or the punk period the punk period was full of people who thought they lived in the worst shittest time ever now there's a stranger temporal chauvinism one finds with people today often where they want to say no no things are really good why? you know I think part of that is is defensiveness, about the full extent of how bad things are. We can't really face it, actually. And speaking personally, the only reason I was able to cope with the monstrous kind of... a kind of monstrous imposition of neoliberal culture was treating as a kind of blip.
You know, I thought that the culture, the cultural... I don't mean the specific content objects, I mean the cultural infrastructure. The cultural infrastructure that I grew up with and therefore taken for granted, one thought that would persist and continue forever. And that the kind of, what Dennis Potter, the great sort of TV writer in Britain, called the occupying powers of neoliberalism, and they'd taken over public service television in Britain. We all convinced ourselves this was just a temporary thing and things would get better. In fact, things got a hell of a lot worse. And you've probably heard that analogy of a frog that gradually is boiled to death by the fact that the temperature goes up only slightly
until the point where it's dead. And I think this is the situation with culture where gradually neoliberalism, i.e. the domination of massive corporate interest, that's what neoliberalism is a code for, really. What corporate interests wanted to do was massively lower expectations about what you could expect from culture. What they wanted to do is reduce culture to entertainment again. What they wanted to do was have industry moguls. An unbelievable situation has occurred now, isn't it, I think, with people like Simon Cowell acquiring a strange luster. Someone who openly and brazenly has no cultural acumen whatsoever.
who all that recommends him is the capacity to keep betting on people's capacity to buy rubbish. You couldn't imagine a figure like that. The level of conservatism required in order that a figure like this could become central to popular culture again. I think this is a measure of how bad things have got, actually. That was the introduction to the introduction. You see why I'm not going to what I was supposed to be doing. But, okay, one of the things I was really interested in then was Simon's distinction between the two types of DIY. Like, you know, the kind of cool dimension of DIY
to do with music and culture, et cetera, and the more depressing, mundane type of DIY, you know, to do with maintaining your own domestic space. And I think really in lots of ways that that opposition is, that shift is really one which is emblematic of a general cultural shift. I think, you know, Simon was absolutely right in what he was saying about what was radical, interesting, et cetera, about DIY in the period of punk, but as Simon also at Australia, DIY was nothing new up to punk. It had been really the motor engine of popular culture up to that point. What was interesting about it was not just that people were doing stuff. You know, people can do stuff, you know, been doing stuff throughout history or whatever.
What mattered was that the competition for public space, and as Simon just at the end of his talk, the concept of public is crucial here. And I would also argue that alongside the concept of public space And following on from Simon's remarks about the real scarcity now is the scarcity of attention. What is also crucial is public time. Public time. Where we share things together. And that is increasingly difficult to acquire, that kind of public time. And actually, to refer to another dimension of the example I just mentioned, why are things like the X Factor, Britain's Got Talent Popular?
Because they offer a sort of degraded version of public time. And this is something to be celebrated, actually. Even after the ideological blitz of neoliberalism with its emphasis on individualism, people still want public time and that they'll be prepared to put themselves through excruciatingly bad karaoke competitions in order to enjoy that public time, actually. So that here from... I remember when Simon started talking about DIY, as in, you know, home improvements or whatever, I was reminded of that. Someone can probably help me here. I think it was a track by either Black Flag or Henry Rollins called Family Man, where, you know, it's a kind of spoken word thing
where Rollins just lays into the Family Man and he's got all his nails sorted out in his garage and all of that. I think that antipathy towards interiority, domesticity, et cetera, was really crucial actually to the frisson of post-punk, but not more than that, to everything that led up to post-punk. Post-punk was the swan song of what I call popular modernism. And it was something which had developed in a post-war period. And it wasn't quite the swan song because I think a lot of the things that Simon and I remained enthusiastic about in the 90s, like UK dance music, in some sense inherited the mantle of popular modernism. But part of what I'd be saying
was that really since the start of the 21st century, roughly speaking, I think more like a decade ago from now, that popular modernism has been all but extirpated from culture, from mainstream culture. And I think one thing to also remark upon at this point, also in reference to what Simon has said, is that it's not as if the mainstream has died. In fact, to refer to the X-Factor example again, we see the mainstream as kind of bigger than it ever was in lots of ways. Because part of the reason for that is we don't compete for it anymore. We've given up on it. One way of seeing this DIY cultural dimension of it
is that it has successfully hived us off into spaces where we could gain not the melancholy perspective of the no audience underground that Simon talked about, but a sufficient audience underground. And that allowed really... When we removed ourselves from the so-called mainstream, and by the mainstream I'd mean the heart of popular culture and also of parliamentary politics, When we move ourselves from that, it's not as if the right wing thought, okay, they've left that alone now, we'll also leave that alone. The right wing were rubbing their hands with glee when we did that, trust me.
Simon referred to Jodie Dean's work, and I think, probably it's Jodie more than anybody else who woke me up from this kind of slumber about this kind of thing. that, you know, as Jody points out, I think one of the most forceful points is what we call post-politics, you know, is just the end of our politics, the end of the left wing. On the right wing, you know, the right wing, particularly in the U.S., we can see the right wing is vociferously active in this period. The right wing, and also, another thing is, that Jody also points out is that we buy on its own terms the promises of a kind of participatory culture. We think things should be open. We shouldn't impose stuff on people. The right doesn't think that at all. The right thinks, okay, we've got all these channels available.
We will impose our agenda on people. And that's what they've done. They've taken over parliamentary politics and installed what I call capitalist realism, i.e. simply the belief that there's no alternative to capitalism and specifically no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. and they've completely taken over mainstream media with very small, increasingly tiny islands where that isn't the case anymore. I think it's interesting the concept of marginality actually. Because when I've spoken to a number of post-punk musicians and they didn't want to be top of the independent charts. You know, they didn't want to be in this position of marginality.
I mean, you know, I was talking to Mark Stewart of the pop group, and he said, look, we wanted to be the Beatles. You know, Joy Division wanted to be the Beatles. They didn't want to be in a special space. They wanted to compete, and that's part of what made them great. They had those ambitions. I think it's sort of behind Simon's talk and something he's talked about elsewhere, and that's something I agree with, is this, what's behind DIY is a lowering of ambition as well as expectation. You know, we'll just release stuff and hand it around to our own set of sort of like minds because we don't think that we can take on the mainstream culture. And so that means that we've retreated from the battlefield. And, you know, I really want to retain this term of war. That we basically, you know, it's the old leftist slogan that's only called class war when we fight back.
and that the class war has been fought and very successfully on every front by the ruling class over the last 30 years. They've paid themselves more. They've expropriated more money out of us. And we call it post-politics. That's great. Part of how they were able to do that then is by this process of what I call psychic privatization. Psychic privatization, which went alongside the privatization of public goods, etc. So, you know, everyone is, instead of being competing for public space or public time, everyone has retreated into a private space, you know, where, in lots of ways,
you know, this is major in British TV. I don't know what it's like here. There's so many programs about doing up your own house. and one of the most pernicious of these programs is Location, Location, Location which is on Channel 4 and actually that's in itself significant Channel 4 in the early days of the network that's where I first saw Tarkovsky films that's where they would have hour long debates with philosophers on there now it's Tories talking about well you've got your 450,000 pounds are you going to spend to buy a townhouse in London or a mansion up in Yorkshire. As if this is normal, as if most people can afford this. I'll come back to property maybe in a minute
because I think, you know, if you... Well, I'll do it now. You want to look for one explanation for cultural conservatism, the decline of innovation, for, you know, it's simply the property prices, the major form of social control in the UK. And as ever when I come to sort of Europe, I'm basically here as a negative John the Baptist figure. To say, I know that there's a creeping trend in many European countries towards neoliberalization. And don't let it carry on is the message. Part of what I'm saying is using the UK as an example, the UK which was a wellspring of culture and working class creativity without any shadow of a doubt.
in a period of popular modernism. Now a dead husk. A dead husk full of busy and harassed people trying to pay exorbitant rents and mortgages. Just last week in the UK, in a piece of legislation that went through almost unnoticed, squatting was more punitive legislation about squatting. One of the major enablers of the punk and post-punk scenes in the UK, in the US and elsewhere was squatting, simply that people could live in an urban environment. The urban environment as a concentrational force, I think, which would bring things together in a way that I think the internet is a dispersal force largely, actually.
Not entirely, but I think Simon's right about, in a way, you need the synergy between the concentrational elements of the internet. That's why it was interesting, things like the Arab Spring or whatever. It was not because it broke from the normal conditions of cyberspace, which are dispersal, which are temporal and spatial dispersal, to bring about a kind of temporal and spatial convergence and concentration, actually. But, yes, property prices, I think, are a genius form of social control, really, because it simply means that people have so little free time so little time most of the time of people in London is the city of capitalist dystopia you know no one's fooled by the 2012
capitalist carnival I hope because you know London is a miserable city you know an extremely miserable city and really running off I mean it's really interesting the opening ceremony I mean I did think it was interesting I don't know how many people watched that as an example of Anglo-Delirium or whatever. It was quite interesting, but if you look at the musical examples there, it's heavily weighted on music, but almost none of the musical examples were recent. I mean, I think Dizzy Rascal was the latest. And if you had the misfortune to see the closing ceremony, the excremental kitsch of the closing ceremony, that's what Britain's really like.
mediocre, shoddy, and kind of really poor. So I guess my message from this is that you can't just do it yourself, actually. The conditions... Sort of slightly contrary to what Simon said, I do think there is something inherently kind of progressive about the notion of DIY, but only as something which is an aspiration. The aspiration is that everyone should be able to produce for themselves. We're clearly not in the conditions where people can do that. And the false kind of recuperation of DIY ideas by corporate capital is evidence of how strong those ideas are.
Concepts like self-reliance, et cetera, are not intrinsically bad, of course. But they are bad in conditions such as we live in now, where people plainly do not have the conditions for self-reliance for themselves. And one of the great genius moves of neoliberalism was really to capture the desire for freedom and democracy that people had developed in the 60s in particular, to capture those desires and literally sell them back to them. Neoliberalism was almost like a genie in a fairy tale where it did exactly what people said they wanted, but when people found out that it's not quite what they wanted people wanted more freedom wanted more flexibility have precarity instead
they wanted not to have a bureaucratic state running everything okay we'll pull all the benefits from you then this is how neoliberalism operated but it doesn't mean I think the step sometimes taken by nostalgic Leninists is then to say what we really need then is to go back to the old centralized state model there's a reason that collapsed and it wasn't only the organised powers of capital that led to the disintegration of state socialism this is something that Michael Hart and Antonio Negri argue really well but it's not just them who've come out with that it's the whole Italian autonomous tradition that they're coming from which argues this point is absolutely right
people didn't want to live under those conditions People didn't want to live under the conditions of massive state bureaucracies. And the problem is that the right managed to, and I mean literally capture those desires, whereas the left was left wrong-footed by it. The left is left in a state of kind of mandatory doubt, as it were. This is the kind of mode that the left went into where it thought, well okay, Stalinism is really oppressive and it's kind of forcing its ideas on people. So what we need instead of that then is to be in a state of kind of chin rubbing doubt and it's really good to not know what we really think about things. Well I think simply that opened up the space
for the right who have no doubts, have no doubts at all and have no compunction about telling us about how good they are for us. How else have they robbed? this is the biggest swindle in the history of the planet this kind of great robbery of bank bailouts it's an astonishing swindle but it's based on the premise of a very successfully disseminated ideological message that rich people are good for us we should be grateful that people are rich because we all benefit from that whereas we're in our corner going I don't know if we're doing that good and maybe we should think more carefully about what we're saying. These are not good conditions for winning a war.
Partly what I'm saying here is that politics and aesthetics cross over, but conditions for good aesthetics may well be negative capabilities, as Keats called them, of doubts, misgivings, questioning. Conditions for winning a political war are conviction and strategy. The right know that. And that's why they're ruthless. And we need a certain amount of... I'm not talking about putting people in gulags, abusing people, anything like that. What I'm talking about is resilience, conviction, and resolution. On simple points, we believe in fairness and justice and these are better than the conditions of total barbarism
in which we now live. in which the rich can cream off far more money than they could ever spend in a hundred lifetimes while people are still starving on a semi-arist planet. It's an obvious point to make. But nevertheless, the obviousness of it should translate into the obviousness of convictions as well. And I think that the problem is that it doesn't say much. Oh, God. All right, okay, sorry. I'm going off the point that was off the point, but never mind, it's okay. So, I mean, okay, All of this is extremely live, I think, in the context of the UK. I mention, of course, because I know about it, but also because I think the UK has been a laboratory of neoliberalism in Europe. New Labour is the model for the capitulation of socialist parties to capitalism, really.
In the UK, the whole concept of the big society, which you may have heard about. The big society being... This shows up... This is a reason for hope, folks, is how bad the right wing are now. What made the right wing strong in the 80s was they were used to fighting trade unions and used to fighting the left. And that's why they were battle-hardened. This bunch of flabby Etonians that we've got running Britain at the moment, hopeless, they've got no clue at all. They're not used to fighting anything. I got to the stage this week where I started feeling sorry for Cameron. Cameron's now like the kind of janitor for the ruling class. He's having to like clean... Last year we had to apologise for Murdoch and the
Metropolitan Police and the whole political class in the UK basically saying, yeah, we're all corrupt. This week he's now having to apologise once again for the police because of the Hillsborough thing. I think there's two stories going on here in other words. One is, okay, we have been weakened on our side. The successful campaign against, I think, two key leftist principles, values of solidarity and security. I think those are effectively eroded and destroyed by the neoliberal project. But the neoliberal project is itself in a serious trouble and the ruling class has serious problems of legitimacy. And that's the other side of what has happened in the DIY culture
is that the kind of cover-up that was engaged in about the Hillsborough disaster in the 80s would not be possible, actually, because of things like Twitter, the Internet, etc. The level of informational leakage is much greater. And really, the logistics of power depend upon being able to do things behind closed doors. that they're increasingly unable to do things behind closed doors and that's one of the kind of dialectical dimensions of this kind of destruction of the kind of aura of a kind of mainstream political and entertainment culture, I think. So, I mean, that being just a way of explaining
how such a shitty concept as big society could be floated by Tories in the UK, by the ruling class, in other words. A big society, then, it's difficult to remember that this is how poorly thought through, that the concept of big society is a play on the idea of big state. Okay, not a big state, which is bad, we all know that. Big states are terrible. But a big society. And what's a big society? It's where everybody participates and does things. there's a great there's a couple of comedians who did a great satire on this where they they sort of went into the role of being members of the ruling coalition in the UK at the moment
they go around and knock on people's doors and say what are you doing tonight and they say well I've just come back from work I've got to feed the kids and put them to bed and all that what are you doing after that how about some time working with your community How about emptying some bins and stuff? I mean, this is an absurd model where you're asking people who are already overworked to do more. Quite clearly, the concept of the big society then was another example, trying to push on the already extreme kind of neoliberal privatisation a step further. People would, you know, communities and voluntary groups groups, i.e. all of these things which we thought we'd sort of done better than in the
20th century, like voluntary groups, okay, fine, but they really stood in for a kind of impersonal system of care that was provided by social democracy, really, and there's something good about that personality, actually. That care without community is, with nationalised health systems, that's a good achievement. and claiming that there's an advance to return to conditions of 19th century philanthropy. This is simply not true. Which isn't to say that the mistake to make then is to then think oh well social democracy was this gleaming zenith or that's the best
we can hope for. Things might not have been that great under social democracy but they're much better than they are now. Well, that's true in some ways. But that doesn't mean that we should be satisfied with that. I mean, one of the things to learn if you study the rise of neoliberalism was how it made the politically impossible become the only possible model of realism. You know, in the current issue of the London Review of Books, there's a great story about the privatisation of electricity in the UK, saying, Britain is the only country stupid enough to privatize this electricity. Part of the argument there is
that the architect of the concept of privatization when he was coming up with this idea that all nationalized industries should be privatized it got utterly crazed. Utterly crazed this could never happen. Yet within a decade it had happened. in a country that at that time the UK was like at that time that seemed to be dominated by well not dominated by that would be falling into the kind of neoliberal retrospective picture but where the workers movement was a major component of social power at that time so how did they planned for something that seemed impossible and far beyond the reaches of the current possibility then this is the big lesson about political possibility
is relative to the current situation. And if you can see beyond the current situation and think beyond it, the impossible becomes the inevitable. And part of what I'm suggesting then is, and this relates to that, if you read the piece that I wrote for Gonzo Circus on time wars and struggle over time and attention, Part of the problem with the digital culture that Simon was describing earlier was that it puts us in a permanent state of reactivity. That's the other side of what we call activity as actually reactivity.
Actually the concept that captures this is from Robert Fowler, interpassivity. Interpassivity is really the dominant mode of social media. It's not that it can't be used for other things, but that is, I think, the typical form of how social media operates. And that's why corporations love it. Join in the debate. Upload your content here to us. You know, they like it because it's, for many reasons, One of which is that you're generating value for them, simply. Why weren't we all up in arms with this Facebook thing? Why weren't we demanding our money back? They put the infrastructure in, but we've created the content which makes it valuable.
How can then Mark Zuckerberg walk off with billions of dollars as a result of our work? And why aren't we angry about it? Because your labor had made him that money. Okay. But, I mean, so that... So, I mean, what you find with something, what we find with Twitter, another case of massive dialectical ambivalence. For me, I'm always just about to leave Twitter. But then you get figures like the Olympic closing ceremony, which is only tolerable if you can share it with other people on Twitter, you know. But, and I think there is the value of Twitter, one of the values of Twitter. is as countermedia. Part of what I started saying earlier on about the,
and I think this is an important point, the mainstream hasn't gone away. The point is, in a way, as Simon was saying, it's the opposition to and within the mainstream that has disappeared and has been disabled in lots of ways by digital DIY culture. But the mainstream may be quantitatively weakened in certain ways, but it's still culturally hegemonic. and that's why if you look at what's on Twitter it isn't things that have been generated horizontally by Twitter itself most of the content on Twitter is generated in relation to the mainstream media but I think that's on the other side of it is part of the value of it as I indicated before as a counter media as an immediate kind of coping with being inside this utterly inane
kind of neoliberal cauldron in many ways and it does produce because of Twitter and the Olympics closing ceremony you did have a sense of something that was worth sharing i.e. contempt for what was going on in front of you rather than something which we've been invited to share which was the wonderful full illustration of the contradictions of capitalism with Jesse Jay saying it's not about the price tag while standing on a gold Rolls Royce. I won't talk the whole time so we can have some participation. Okay, so I think what's striking in the UK example this year is the full extent of the conservatism in the UK now.
2012 has been a massive carnival of reaction. The Royal Jubilee and then the Olympics. The Olympics are ambivalent. I'll talk about that in a minute. with no disruption or very minimal disruption in the mainstream culture and that's partly because of vicious preemptive policing there's a story in the Guardian of the Week about someone who was dressed as a zombie sitting in Starbucks on the day of some of the Jubilee celebrations who was preemptively arrested because they might be planning to take part in an anti-Jubilee demonstration where are all these anarchist groups? in the UK. It's funny with the anarchist groups in the UK. When is a TUC demonstration? They're very active.
They're smashing windows. Where were they? Where were they when it came to this utterly depressing, reactionary, barbarous spectacle of celebration of monarchy and empire? Where were they then to disrupt that? Maybe they didn't want to be arrested. Why did they risk being arrested at demonstrations by trade unions, etc. It's almost as if they're adjunct provocateurs put there by the state, isn't it? Anyway, but... I don't fully think that, but the point is that they might as well be. I just don't understand this, actually. If they think there's some inherent kind of value
in smashing up windows and stuff, why don't they do it all the time? I mean, you know, why do they only do it? when there's big demonstrations by trade unions, etc. I don't really understand that as a strategy, but they don't have strategy because it's, oh, forget it. Okay, but I mean, seriously though, I think part of the problem we've got with the left is that the domination of kind of anarchism and neo-anarchism in the thinking, we see this the Occupy Movement, where, you know, I think this is pernicious horizontalism in a way, where there's this kind of implicit and not so implicit ideology behind it. No one should be above anybody else. And also that mainstream media is decadent
which is not worth bothering with. We don't bother struggling with and also that parliamentary politics, local government, all of those things, they're decadent, superseded, etc. There's also a libidinal argument somehow that those things are boring. Whereas, you know, somehow this so-called direct action is kind of much more interesting. But, you know, surely, like, I don't know, I can't think of anything much more boring than an eight-hour, an eight-hour kind of general assembly, really. Like, surely, like, you know, if you actually read the accounts of, like, you know, struggles of, like, Ken Livingston to take over the great London Council and all of that, that's exciting. You know, sitting around, you know, doing jazz hands for eight hours, That seems to me the worst of all worlds in lots of ways.
It's not really getting any political... I think, well, let's contrast that with what the right does. A lot of what the right does is quite boring organizational work. Boring work is work to manipulate people. It's not that exciting to do it, but it's really effective. The dominant force on the planet is PR. public relations and this is what fundamentally shapes people's experience of life and especially working class I mean the working class are probably most ambivalent about it because they're both inside that PR world more fully than the middle class who have a degree of skepticism and cynicism about it
which doesn't make them immune to it of course but also fully outside it as well and I think taking seriously the role of PR. How do we constitute a counterforce to PR? That means taking indirect action seriously. What the right is good at is indirect action. What is hegemony? What is it to control an ideology, a reality system? It's indirect action. It's control of media. It's control of people's perceptions, affects, etc. This is what the right has beat us hands down. Not only in doing it, but in taking that seriously as something, as a terrain,
which we should be fighting over, really. And yes, there's this carnival of reaction. And I think, you know, for me, 2012 echoed 1977. You know, in that 77 was the year, you know, both of punk and of the Jubilee. and it was clearly some antagonistically productive relationship between those two things. And that was what was kind of most, one of the most depressing aspects of 2012 was where was the antagonism? Where was the visible antagonism? You know, there's lots of sort of diffuse grumbling about it, but the point is that the level of indirect action, which is partly a symbolic or cultural space,
Where was this registered? How was the massively right-wing, anti-democratic, barbarian monarchism, how was that forced to register any kind of counter-discourse? No, not at all. Not at all. The pathetic spectacle of the BBC as a supine kind of monarchist lickspittles. They're going on for days as well, not even doing it very well. They're going to be bothered to find out stuff. Anyway. That's the shadow, really, of 2012. Also, since we're at a music festival, what is striking to me
is the complete failure of music to engage with culture since there is diffuse antagonism in the culture if you're my age you're used to that antagonism being filtered through music it's shocking how little music has responded or intensified this current situation. It's not that there's nothing, there's always something. You know, everything happens at some level. But it's about, you know, Simon was talking about those thresholds of kind of, I can't remember the exact phrase, but thresholds of relevance in a way. It is about, you know, thresholds of relevance
that needed to, the impact on a hegemonic perception of the world. And there has been none of that for music for some time. And what was striking about the most exciting developments in youth culture, the most exciting things in youth culture in the UK in the last few years have nothing to do with music at all. And they were the student militancy at the end of 2010 and the English riots last year. Now, I'm not going to be in a position of, you know, I don't want to be put in this position of sounding as if I'm uncritically celebrating the riots. The riots were sublime in a proper Kantian sense. and objects of both terror and wonder. People had broken out of,
people had to some extent broken out of this prison of interpassivity where nothing would ever happen anymore. In a spectacular way. Suddenly the whole sense of what reality was could be warped. It felt like you're not watching a film, but you're inside a film suddenly when those riots were going on. Once again, I must emphasize that. We're not simply celebrating a situation where families are being burnt out of their houses and stuff like that. That's not the point of this. But the point was, faced with the sublime apparition of those riots, where is music in relation to this? It's nowhere. Music has really faded out. And maybe that's part of it. Maybe that's why. Maybe music is not.
I mean, the old sort of the Adornian type argument against kind of engaged political music was that, you know, again, or Marcuse or whatever these people would be that it was a form of controlled desublimation, that antagonism that would elsewhere be, you know, directly forced against that sort of ruling class was instead expressed through culture. Maybe there's an argument for this, actually. but part of the issue with the English riots and why just not on a moral but on a political level why one shouldn't celebrate them is it's kind of interesting case of the points up to the point where up to the point where those riots had happened last year, the ruling class
in Britain was in real trouble was in serious, serious problems because of what was happening with the whole News International scandal. And I think the riots initially intensified that, but by the end of the week there was a massive authoritarian backlash. We had Oxford historians on televisions being able to say that the problems of British society are black culture. And he meant specifically black music as well. And that showed you how much the conditions had changed. He was on the BBC and able to say that by the end of the week. But, you know, so it only did prompt an authoritarian backlash. I think that it was also not, you know, it wasn't clearly,
whilst it was negatively political, it was social, political, and aesthetic conditions which led to those riots. I think what we're talking about is something I call aesthetic poverty as well as actual poverty. Now, a lot of the things, a lot of the right-wingers would say, these riots weren't caused by poverty. They've got mobile phones. They've got BlackBerrys. Look, a BlackBerry simply isn't... A BlackBerry mobile phone is, for community of capitalism, is like a labor was for an industrial worker. It's not an entertainment object. It's a means by which you're plugged into the late capitalist matrix. It's how it sells you stuff. It's how it keeps you hooked in. But for that very reason, it's also like it's got these dialectical possibilities. and that was one of the interesting kind of organizational infrastructural dimensions
of the riot was the fact that instead of being used to maintain people in states of kind of narcissistic interpassivity, instead of that, then, you know, the BlackBerry was used as a form of organization. And one couldn't help but be struck. Well, I couldn't help but be struck by it. But by the weight of this was an almost direct reversal of what happened in, if people remember that film from 1979, The Warriors. This is a very interesting film, I think, partly because of the period of which it happened at the very threshold of the coming of neoliberalism. The start of The Warriors, if you remember it, is that all of the gangs of New York are called together and it's put to them a proposition that if we all join up then we'll take over the city.
But of course, randomly and arbitrarily, it seems, a shot is fired at the sort of person making this speech. It then scatters back into the standard kind of Hobbesian territoriality and war of all against all. It's almost as if the UK riots, or sorry, I should say the English riots, because they only happened in England. Scottish and Welsh people get annoyed. The English riots are almost the opposite of that, where there's the beginnings of development of a class consciousness through BlackBerry Messenger. Instead of fighting each other, we'll fight a common enemy. And I think that, in a way, this is how I can probably draw things to a conclusion,
is that by thinking about the possibilities latent in this form of organization, not yet realized in the riots, but clearly there to be mobilized, that just after those riots had happened, There was an event at Tate Modern where the Black Audio Film Collective appeared and they'd made an astonishing film. If you've not seen it, try and seek it out. It's actually very difficult to get hold of their stuff, which is another story about the decline of popular modernism because if anyone exemplified it, it was them. But the Black Audio Film Collective made a film in 1986 called Hands With Songs, which was about the Hands With Riots. and part of what made that film powerful was its experimental form
it wasn't a finger wagging kind of pedagogic type film it was a film that used experimental sound montage etc to make its point but there was an event at the Tate Modern where this was shown and the members of the collective there to discuss it and John O'Confor the director of the film said well look, of the current riots, then the current riots, look, you've got a situation where you've got these kids who can organize and within three days bring the British state to its knees. Imagine what it would be like if they got properly organized. There's a real power there. But I think we really have to,
I think it's sort of implicit in Simon's talk and something that I really want to take hold of and sort of end on today. is the idea, okay, what is the problem actually with this massive proliferation of culture, this kind of unfiltered culture? And a question from the back about curatorship I think was important in this respect. What is the problem with this massive proliferation of culture? It's really it's to do with the question of authority, actually. And what does curatorship add? It adds authority. authority is not a word that the left likes to use at all because I think we've been successfully suckered here again into a position of self-defeat where we equate authority with authoritarianism
and authority really is authoritarianism is the abuse of authority and it's effectively opposed not by being anti-authority but by a properly constituted model of what authority is and I think one of the pernicious dimensions of neo-anarchist horizontalism is it pretends we can just dispense with the question of authority altogether we can just get rid of it when in fact whilst on our side on the left side there's lots of hand wringing about authority on the right once again there's full occupation of authority that means that we don't have a democratic or collective model what authority could be.
And that makes things really difficult if you're a teacher like I am, if you're working with young people. You know, if I'm not to believe in authority at all, then surely I should just say, you know, hey, man, your view's as valid as mine. I just sit down, you know. And that is not only, that's not only is that, that's obviously clearly failing, failing the young. You know, it's also, So, you know, it's just, it's plainly false and something that no one really believes in. The fact that we believe in equality doesn't mean that we believe that, you know, people have equal skills, knowledge, et cetera. And part of, you know, part of overcoming inequality is how do we transmit the skills and knowledge that we've got.
And so, and I think, this is the question about, this question was a very excellent discussion in the tape, about the about in response to that black audio film collective film and the specter of authority was raised there again in a way that we need to re-engage in other words we need to re-engage from positions of authority with the young in lots of ways positions of authority not positions of authoritarianism you know and that is and we need to be able to transmit the skills and knowledge that we've got to them. But clearly, of course, as anyone who's done teaching realizes this is not a one-way process.
You always learn something from those you are teaching. But at the same time, I think it's important that we on the left take responsibility for the positions of authority, which we now occupy anyway. The point is that we are in these positions of authority. And being neurotic about it and disavowing it It's failing everybody, including those who were supposed to be teaching and assisting. So I'll end on that, I think. I don't know what I'm doing for time. Thank you. Thank you.