Okay. I'm usually massively overambitious in what I think I can get into the time, so I'll try my best. What I want to defend in a way is a certain conception of melancholy. It's just about the only possible strategy in a kind of miserable world of capitalist realism. I think the crisis I'm talking about today really started at about 2000 and still persists today to some extent. I think that crisis is less acute here specifically in Berlin for some of the reasons that I'll talk about.
For instance, why Berlin survives as a cultural centre is the kind of inverse of why London and New York have failed now. And that's part of what I want to talk about today. What were the conditions for cultural production being positive in those cities? They still survive here to some extent, but they don't really survive in London. Okay, so in his book, After the Future, Franco Berardi Bifo refers to the slow cancellation of the future. that got underway in the 1970s and 1980s. But when I say future, he elaborates, I'm not referring to the direction of time. I'm thinking rather of the psychological perception
which emerged in a cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever-progressing development, albeit through different methodologies. The Hegel Marxist mythology of Alf Heibung and founding of the new totality of communism, the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy, the technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge, and so on. My generation, Bifo, continues, grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it.
and look at reality without this kind of temporal lens. I'll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, and no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling, it's social planetary trends, he says. I think never being able to live in accordance with reality, that's one definition of melancholy, actually, that I really want to defend. But Bifo's a generation older than me, but he and I are on the same side of a temporal divide, a temporal split here. I too I don't think will never be able to adjust to the paradoxes of the new situation in which we live an immediate temptation here and this is how people often respond to this is to fit what I'm
saying into a kind of weary really familiar narrative it's a matter of the old failing to come to terms with the new saying it's better in their day. Yet it's just this picture with this assumption that the young are automatically at the leading edge of cultural change that is now out of date. Rather than the old recoiling from the new in fear and in comprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognizable forms. A recent example of this, I watched that TV series girls and um they they uh all of the lead characters uh went out to a kind of edgy nightclub in brooklyn what was this edgy nightclub playing it was rap that could have been made in the 1980s
sort of house and techno that could have been made also in the same period you know this is what the the sound of the leading edge is presented to us as being now and we could say well this is just a television kind of televisual distortion hasn't really got to grips with the the real leading edge of things. There is no leading edge. There is nowhere. And you know, a simple kind of thought experiment can establish this. You imagine any music, and I mean any, made within the last two years. Imagine it being back to 1995. Imagine people in that time listening to it. Are they going to go, my God, I've never heard the like of this. No, I think about almost everything that we can imagine that has been produced now, almost any music.
But I say, let's drop the almost. Any music that has been made would not cause a future shock. The only shock people are going to feel is the opposite. What you're telling me this music is from 2013, it doesn't sound any different, that scarcely different to what we're listening to now. I mean and that's the kind of I still feel that I still feel that and that's probably this theme of the of the golden age I think is you know my take on that would partly be to do with that sense of you know we up until the 90s for sure that we we had that sense of forward motion in culture and particular music culture which obviously is something I'm especially interested in that has been
lost since that time. It's not that nothing has changed, but the scale of change is so tiny and so small and incremental, I think. And the effect of that is gradual lowering of expectations, gradual lowering of expectations. You know, if one were to look back at the 70s, he's full of negativity. Everyone's going, it's a shit time. It's the worst time ever. it's the blank generation yeah of course we're precisely now likely to look back on that as a golden age of musical production etc I think there's a relation there between the removal of negativity from the culture the massive over rewarding
and kind of self congratulation of our period and the lack of innovation in that period and the lowered expectations lowered expectations typical of a kind of widespread depression I think. Depression that's so pervasive that it's not even recognized as depression. Nobody expects there to be a record like there's a riot going on this year or that nobody thinks there's going to be a record like the Stooges Funhouse. Nobody thinks that that can ever happen again. Nobody. And we all accept that this is the case. That the great days of music are in the past. And how has it come to that actually? Why have we come to gradually and slowly lower our expectations.
Because it's not that nothing's happened in that period. I think that's crucial. It's a period of massive change, of course, since the end of the 90s. If you want to go right back, I think that BFO is right. There's a gradual decline from the end of the 70s, i.e. the period when neoliberals came to dominance. There's a slow decline, a gradual decline from the end of the 70s up until 2000. But through the 70s and through the 80s and 90s, there's still strong enough traces of the future left that you could believe that they were the dominant trend rather than the dying fall of something. After 2000, for me, it's clear it was a dying fall. you know what happened in that period then was you know exactly this shift into post-Fordism
neoliberalism etc you know from the end of the 70s up to 2000 but also since 2000 particularly of course it's the revolution of community of capitalism as Jodie Dean calls it or Samio capitalism, as Bifo calls it. You know, something which, again, I mean, I was involved, as we'll discuss on one of the other panels on Friday, you know, the intense cyber theory of the 90s. What we expected the kind of coming cyberspacial culture to be like is very different from what actually happened. In some ways, cyberspace is much more pervasive than we thought it was going to be. in some ways has left so much of culture untouched.
Well, I think, certainly if you come back to the example of music in this period, I think there's a relation between the rise of the current form of kind of cyberspace, actually existing cyberspace, i.e. that dominated by community of capitalism. There's a relation between that and the decline in innovation in musical production. Now, why is that? Well, I mean, partly what we've seen in this period is the complete coming to dominance of what Frederick Jameson called the nostalgia modes. I mean Jameson's highly prophetic text on post-modernism from you know the mid to late 80s
what Jameson's describing there is simply something which we everyone takes for granted now you know the generalized formal kind of exhaustion the reliance on pastoralized established forms the tendency towards pastiche etc now Jameson famously makes the connection between this pastiche or nostalgia mode and capitalism, or late capitalism, in the title of the book, Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. But actually, it doesn't really say why that is. Why it is that capitalism, late capitalism, neoliberalism, post-Fordism, whatever you want to call it, why it is that that would lead to this kind of failure of innovation.
Well, so why did the arrival of neoliberal post-40s capitalism lead to a culture of retrospective and prestige? Perhaps I can venture a couple of provisional conjectures here. The first concerns consumption. Could it be that neoliberal capitalism's destruction of solidarity and security brought about compensatory hungering for the well-established and the familiar? Paul Viridio has written of a polar inertia a phenomenon he calls polar inertia it's a kind of effect of and counterweight to the massive speeding up of communication his example is Howard Hughes living in one hotel room for 15 years
endlessly re-watching Ice Station Zebra or so you know the more that the security is removed from the social world the more that people will hunger for what they already know or as Franco Berardi has argued the intensity and precariousness of late capitalist work culture leaves people in a state where they are simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated. The combination of precarious work and digital communications leads to a besieging of attention. In this insomniac, inundated state, Baradi claims,
culture becomes de-eroticized. And he uses eroticism in a kind of broader sense than specifically to his sexuality. The art of seduction in a broader sense of seduction takes too much time. So according to Baradi, something like Viagra answers not to a biological but to a cultural deficit. Desperately short of time, energy, and attention, we demand quick fixes. You know, if you want to have sex really quickly so we can go back to checking our emails. Like another variety of examples, pornography, retro offers the quick and easy promise of a minimal variation on an already familiar theme. The other explanation for the link between this form of endemic late capitalism and retrospection
centers on production. Despite all the rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new. In the UK, the UK is obviously a very strong example, I think, because of the key role that the UK played in music culture. and it's a complete failure to do that anymore. Why is that? So in the UK, the post-war welfare state and higher education maintenance grants constitute an indirect source of funding for most of the experiments in popular culture
between the 60s and the 80s. The ideological and practical attack on public space and on public services meant that one of the spaces where artists could be sheltered from the pressure to produce something that was immediately successful was severely circumscribed and key in the UK that the key role here was art schools you know particularly nothing entirely ever happened at universities in the UK ever you know they're just as Foucault says a means by which the ruling class reproduces itself you know every generation particularly in the UK largely but in you know art schools were the engines of innovation and you know wave after wave of kind of music culture from the 60s to the sort of beginning of the 80s and a sort of re-embourgeoisie
month of art schools. I mean art schools were working class kids would go to have access to the resources of high culture in the UK. That's not the case anymore really. They just don't exist in a form that they did at the time of kind of the vibrant music culture. As public service broadcasting became marketized, I use that term in a very commas, I'm not sure how much markets, markets are kind of rhetoric for domination of capital really. Markets and capital are not the same. There was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful. The result of all this is that the social time available
for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural production drastically declined. And if there's one factor which, above all else, contributes to cultural conservatism, it's the vast inflation of the cost of rent and mortgages in cities like London and New York. It's no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 70s and early 80s coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities. Since then, the decline of social housing, the attacks on squatting, and the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished. But perhaps it was only with the arrival
of digital communicative capitalism that this reached terminal crisis point. Naturally, the besieging of attention described by Barati applies to producers as much as consumers. Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal. from, for instance, sociality, as much as from pre-existing cultural forms. But the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace with its endless opportunities for microcontact, and its deluge of YouTube links and other kind of internet links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before. It's very hard for us to take a step outside cyberspace, or this form of communicative capitalist cyberspace.
As soon as there were smartphones, then we're inside cyberspace at all times. And it's a positive effort to unplug from it. But what I'm arguing here then is that the problem is that our sense of futurity and of cultural modernity has been entirely colonized by communicative capitalism. So, you know, it has a monopoly on our sense of what the future is now. So while Simon Reynolds puts it very well, I think, the speed of everyday life has increased a lot. And we're endlessly kind of hectored by cyberspace alerts all the time or hectoring others.
but the consequence of the speeding up of everyday life in that way is precisely the slowing down of cultural time because there's no and one issue is the removal of boredom I think, that boredom has disappeared but boredom was the dialectical kind of precondition of something like punk and post-punk. Okay, they railed against boredom, but boredom was also, boredom was the white space, the void, which demanded something be filled by it. Now, even if we're in a bus queue, we're not bored anymore. There is no void.
There is no void. There's only the kind of, you know, we're endlessly plugged into the kind of ceaseless, low-level stim of idle chatter forever. That's possible at all times. If you talk about a golden age, there's a golden age of boredom, which is no longer available to us anymore. I really want to resist then a simple nostalgic model of things were great in the 70s, 80s, 90s. Things were great in the 70s and 80s. They sort of got a bit worse in the 90s, etc., etc. I mean clearly there are lots of a quote from Jeremy Gilber I've got here actually which I think
captures what's at stake here almost everything I was afraid of happening over the past 30 years has happened says Jeremy, everything my political mentors warned me might happen since I was a boy growing up on a poor council estate in the north of England in the early 80s or a high school student reading denunciations of Thatcherism in the left press a few years ago has turned out just as badly as they said it would. And yet I don't wish I was living 40 years ago. The point seems to be this. This is the world we were all afraid of, but it's also sort of the world we wanted. We all, look, let's put it this way, we all hate social networking. Don't we all wish we'd just go away, like we'd just disappear now? You know, like, but we're all still on it to some degree.
And, you know, the great legitimacy of late capitalism is our desire for it. You know, and that desire can't be denied, I think, which isn't to say that we have to then... That doesn't mean we desire capitalism. It means the opposite. It means that, you know, desire, the forms of desire we have have been manufactured, plasticated, et cetera, by capitalism, et cetera. But nevertheless, you know, they're still our desire to some extent, and that's a serious problem then. which needs to be faced and the degree of what is it that we desire in this present moment and how and should we desire to desire it
I think these are the key questions so I think what we need to hold on to is not the thought that we should have to choose between now and the 70s as if that choice made any sense or was possible in any way Because, of course, there's lots of bad things in the 70s, to say the least. One of which was endemic racism, sexism, etc., in the mainstream media. Part of the way that this is recuperated by neoliberal capitalism is it wants to say, well, okay, well, look, we don't have racism and sexism in the media anymore, and that's because of capitalism. It's because of neoliberalism. That's obviously a ludicrous articulation. but you know
we shouldn't be forced into this model of thinking that all of the gains that have actually happened over the last 30 years are the result of everything else and this is where I think you know, Laclau-Mouffe theory of articulation is really important that political moments, positions are really about articulation linking things together and those links are ultimately arbitrary There's no necessary connection between, there's no connection at all between kind of anti-racist struggles, feminism, et cetera, and late capitalism. The success of neoliberalism is its capacity to make it seem like there was a connection between those things. As if somehow that the destruction,
the further message of that is as if somehow the destruction of the welfare state, the attack on social housing, et cetera, were somehow, you know, it's either we have social housing and the welfare state, or we have, you know, a world in which, you know, the England football captain isn't allowed to be racist anymore. You know, we shouldn't have to choose between those things. And so what I really want to defend then is not a specific historical period. So it really is to say that there has been a golden age. What I would defend is a tendency or a trajectory.
You know, this is the tendency towards kind of the commitment to the future that BFO talks about. That this future was never actualized. It is a virtuality. But an effective virtuality. that could draw out cultural production, that produced a sense of exhilaration, etc. It's that trajectory. In other words, we shouldn't mourn a specific historical period as if it were a fixed cultural object. What we should mourn is the destruction of a trajectory, a trajectory of innovation, cultural modernity, of what I would call popular modernism.
That trajectory was interrupted. It was interrupted for political reasons. And its interruption was part of the success of neoliberalism. But what I'm trying to say then is there were conditions for that trajectory. And neoliberalism has very intelligently destroyed those conditions. But we shouldn't then be in a state of culpable nostalgia about that, saying, oh, well, they've gone forever, is a question of how can we reconstruct those conditions now, I think, or looking into the future. And I think that that involves us recovering a sense of futurity in our own kind of strategies. I mean, part of one of the effective ways in which we're corralled
is by some of social media, social network kind of reactive time, where we just run around being outraged by one thing after another, protesting about one thing after another. All you need is really to at least be able to think in the medium to long term, five to ten years ahead. What do we want to have happened then, and how do we want to implement it? And so that, again, is a form of withdrawal. It's kind of necessary. And in order to produce the future, you need to withdraw from the past, I think. and I'll leave it there. Very interesting, we had from the
hacker side before a much more positive view, now two more depressed and negative statements. This will be very interesting now for the discussion. I would like to start with the discussion with the idea that one part of our festival here is of course called collapse of time. So I think this is a very important idea here, that the idea of a linear time is over. Now there was a quite harsh critique of this because also the idea of a future or of the missing of a possible future shock would still cling somehow to this idea of a linear time.
There was in one of the talks before a musician who told us about his daughter and she is listening to music like Frank Sinatra, Die Antwort und Matmos and this comes one after the other and he find it completely great and wonderful that this is possible and that we have no linear time anymore. What I wanted to say is that this, or maybe to put it now in a question, if we really have to think about the future like in 10 years or something before, we need the linear time because only linear time gave us the possibility
to go over such long time periods. If all these time periods are over now because we map simply from here to there, how would you say or how would you think that linear time can be reintroduced anyhow? Because the desire for a future is a very understandable desire, but maybe we don't have any structures anymore which will ever give us a linear time back. I think it's a bit of a false opposition really because the collapse of linear time doesn't get you out of linear time and that you know non-linearity you could say was about
the future acting upon the present about certain kinds of spiraling of time etc etc what we've seen here it's something that Bruce Sterling tries to Bruce Sterling talks about atemporality so well we've just got to live with this now that's how things are just as you said you know you get Frank Sinatra next to Matmos whatever this is no break from what Jameson was describing in the 80s exactly what you thought would happen and for me it's not non-linear it's just a collapsed or flattened time and I you know I agree with Biffay that I don't know, the sense of
cultural progress is not the same as linearity I think but it's more that the idea that things should not be the same year after year whether that's presupposed it doesn't then presuppose a telos that things are progressing towards some point of perfection, clearly who believes that anymore but this kind of modernist notion that culture just shouldn't endlessly be repeating that it should be able to articulate the present moment I believe I'm a bit beefy on this I can't give up on that notion
and for me you see the problem is you've got Matt Moss Sinatra but where's the present in this? Where's the present? You've got lots of things from the relatively recent past or the far past. But you don't get the present at all in that flattened time. I mean you could also think of course that in this way for some people maybe this higher usage of non-linear time, even if there is the linear time would be a perspective of freedom, could be also something to say, okay, the new, whatever the new may be, maybe the new we have now
is something which is more into a higher complexity of archives or tons of people can use tons of things. I'm just playing the devil's autocad out of the glass bottle. The more you're talking, the more depressed I'm feeling. Is this what I mean by lowered expectations? You go from basically a model up to the 90s where your model of what the new is, is a new sensorium, new range of sensations, things which people had not experienced before, new modes of so-called subjectivity, etc. You go from that to, well, people can access archives. I think you're right and that's how people pitch it,
but that is itself a symptom of the massively lowered expectations in this period. And I do believe that my optimistic take on this is that it's just a long dip, really. that, you know, part of the... We have this kind of... Because you're always at the end of history at any one time, you know, you always feel you're in some sense the most modern culture. But the true extent of the retrospection and restoration and pastiche of our culture will only become clear
when a kind of a new model of the new emerges. And then it'll be the full extent of the horror, the cultural, the moribund nature of culture in the last decade or so, the full extent of that will only become clear when the next phase happens. And I think the next phase will happen. And then we'll see how bad things really are now. I mean, is any new possible to happen without the big impact of violence? And the other question would be, because if I would think on some other thinkers who also praise the new or the breaking in of the new, then we always have a kind of Paulus, St.
Paul epiphany or things like this. And the other question I would be interested for me is how does the concept of boredom, which I found very interesting too, or the lack of boredom, connect to this new, the coming new, or the new incoming? Okay, you want me to answer that? Okay, I think when we realized how bored we are, then the new will come. You know, there's a kind of meta-boredom. There's a meta-boredom of constant stimulation. But I think it's basically a new affective tonality now in our current phase, where we're bored all the time, but we're also fascinated at the same time as we're bored. You know, if you're sort of dissidently flicking through Facebook,
you're not sort of bored, but you're also sort of fascinated as well. And so boredom and fascination become mixed together in a way that prevents us seeing the full extent of the boredom. and also it prevents us accessing the positive dimension of boredom, which is, you know, it's as a motivator and as a kind of existential challenge that, you know, boredom and death confront each other, as it were. That when you, you know, boredom and death are the great motivators, actually. You know, how can we possibly be bored in the face of death? Yet, you know, the community of capitalism, semi-capitalism, It produces this fake sense of immortality.
We've got endless time to do anything. It doesn't matter. We can just one more click, one more click forever. We can really start doing things in the very near future. Yeah, pretty soon I won't be endlessly answering emails. I'll be doing my real projects. But just have to answer these four or five emails first. Oh, now, just before going on to actually starting this project, I just have to check my Facebook updates. And the point at which we can recognize that that will never end by any natural process. And that's what I'm saying, I think, is partly that I think it relates, this problem of breaks and ruptures. It's very difficult for those breaks or ruptures to occur
because of the kind of seamless nature of the cyberspacial environment. and its demands on us. And also, just as boredom and fascination become mixed, so work and leisure become mixed. In that, you know, it's, you know, we, you know, what is our excuse for endless kind of, endless internet drift? You know, it's research. You know, and I've got to check my messages. Why? Why does work, you know? So this mixture of duty of work and libido, because we don't only want to check our messages because of the requirements of work.
There's also an extra libidinal compulsion there. I think Jody Dean talks about very well in her work, the sheer compulsion to click in itself. I talked about this when I first got my BlackBerry. Of course, it then induces these kind of behavioral loops where it's an eye and hand system, isn't it, where your fingers become addicted to the process of clicking itself. So when I first got my BlackBerry, I got so addicted to checking things. There was one time I knew it was socially unacceptable to actually look at the BlackBerry because I was having dinner with somebody,
but I let my fingers just do the clicking motion under the table. There's kind of some satisfaction from this. So I think we're in the grip of these, I think the very low-level nature of the stimulus and the very sort of low-level nature, The low-level, seamless forms of capture are much more difficult to apprehend as capture. And the things which subdue and subjugate us now come with a lot of libidinal gloss on, and they come having captured a lot of our own desires, which is way harder to break out of, I think. Byung-Chun Han, he was pointing out lately that there is maybe also something
between this need to play with the fingers and boredom and death which would be exhaustion in the Korean subway when the people all fall asleep and even lose their blackberries or whatever because they're so exhausted of working and dealing with this stuff. But now we switch into German now for the other part of the discussion and then soon we will also have some first the audience so you can now start to prepare for your questions. This is for Mark. I was just wondering if there's a possibility for hope anymore or whether disillusionment or melancholy can be a productive force, whether that's replaced our conception
of hope. As a Spinoza I must object to hope as a concept. Spinoza says we should abjure both hope and fear, really. It's irrational. But if he means other... I think we shouldn't hope we should plan and organise, really. I think the reason Spinoza says that partly is that it's a kind of superstitious fatalism actually involved in the concept of hope. That, you know, it's as if, well, one, if things are out of your control, you can't do anything about them.
So it's a superstitious ritual to engage in hope then. Secondly, if things are in your control, then why bother hoping for them? Why not bother actually trying to implement them, as it were? so I think that's the way we should look at things I think part of what's happened with this kind of end of history the widespread acceptance of the end of history kind of story that acceptance is at a disavowed level people won't admit to ourselves that we think things are finished and that the golden age was in the past we won't often admit that to ourselves yet we almost all do sort of believe that now
now it seems to me the question about then is and part of that is we see ourselves in this spectatorial role as it were where we're just sitting here things are happening or not happening and we can't really do anything about that at a political level or at a cultural level and you know I'm not saying this in a moralising way because I think those forms of thought or the effects which inform those forms of thought are effects of a period of effects of a political project that of neoliberalism. It wants us to feel that way. It wants us to feel that things vague depression this is the thing that is
the key, is the kind of gold standard for power. okay like if you're too depressed you can't work and you're dysfunctional but being vaguely depressed where you're you know you've got very low expectations of things you don't think much can ever happen in the future that's ideal you know that's really ideal and that's the condition they've achieved with the general population I think we don't expect much from anything anymore you know and um so yeah i mean how but i do believe i do believe that i think that it's we're at the point of crisis of of that system um where well of course it fell into a crisis in 2008 with you know with a global kind of financial catastrophe but i i think that's not really
played at the cultural and psychological social impacts of that have not really unraveled yet and I think that in a way there's been a phony piece 2008 to 2012 where you know the sustaining illusion of neoliberalism was that we could go back to how things were that this was just a temporary blip you know we're now in triple dip recession in the UK I mean like triple dip I mean when is accepted we're in some new economic phase entirely and that this is not aberrant, it's how things are going to be from now on. Obviously a lot of neoliberalism and capitalism runs on belief. This panic stress to sustain the belief
that we can go back to how things were before 2008. All of the effort of the British ruling class is going towards that belief. Of course it will fail. It's failing. But the extent of its failure is only gradually becoming clear, I think. Gradually and fitfully becoming clear. Because what we're talking about is the collapse of a reality system. A reality system that was implemented over a 30-year period and just doesn't disappear the moment the actual conditions for it no longer exist. The consensual fiction of neoliberalism
persists after the conditions for neoliberalism have gone. But I think that we're entering into the phase now where the fiction is no longer sustainable even in its own terms and where the fiction confronts the kind of failure of the conditions for the maintaining of that fiction. And this really is a time when, it's a long way of answering this, a time when things can happen again. And I mean this on a fairly banal political level. And I think we need to rethink some of the commonplaces of post-68 leftism. For instance, parliamentary politics, the mainstream media aren't worth engaging with.
Because they're inherently corrupt or whatever. and then we see what happens if we withdraw, if we withdraw from those spaces, then the capital and the right will happily take them over. So I think we, and we can see why, and another question is why after 2008, given that neoliberalism, there's no political system that's been so manifestly discredited as neoliberalism was in 2008. Why, given that it's a total and evident lack of legitimacy, why has it not collapsed? It's because, of course, it's not about ideas. It's about organizational infrastructures, et cetera.
And that there is not anything on the left, whatever that means, that is capable of taking advantage of that crisis. but you know in order and that won't just appear and what's also evident is that the anti-capitalist movements and the way they've been constituted since the end of the 90s also cannot fill that void occupy you know might have made few people feel good for a while well it's like um alex williams who's coming on friday because feel bad feel good feel bad politics you know you feel good because you're doing something you're out in the streets but You ultimately feel bad because you know damn well the capital can root around you. I mean, you know, the Occupy movement, I'm not saying it has no significance whatsoever,
but it didn't really cause capital any pause at all. And, you know, the hegemonic control of capital over media and politics remains. Why does it remain? Because, you know, we're not in it. You know, we have withdrawn from that sphere partly. so I think it's about a strategic re-engagement of those fears alongside other things the right is very good articulating things in that Laclau-Mouffe sense that it can pull together parliamentary politics the media, lots of diverse interest groups that actually don't agree with each other nevertheless they can constitute sufficient kind of solidarity the right is much better at class solidarity than we are you know, unfortunately.
But I think now is the time for us to, that's what I'm saying about, give up hope and actually start planning and organizing. But think five, ten years ahead. Because, you know, if you want to make changes in the mainstream politics and media, etc., we have to think in at least those terms. I just want to point out, by the way, that the double-sided theme of the whole festival is the golden age. Not that you get too confused now. We have more other questions. I think in five or ten years, the revolution will be if we don't produce any data anymore
and refuse data to be produced of us. And I think that will be the revolution when all the structures will break down? Maybe again, it's about refusal. We didn't get it here. To create data, refuse to create data, then everything will collapse. Is digital work with anything in life with your camera? Yeah, well, I mean, it's strange our propensity to produce in this way. Why, when a Facebook flotation went up, why weren't we demanding our money since we produced that wealth? Again, I think it's part of this problem of the link of libido and work.
So actually, if everyone comes off Facebook, then, of course, its value goes to zero overnight. And so we're workers for Facebook, straightforwardly. It doesn't seem to us that we are workers for Facebook because it seems that we're engaging in something enjoyable, which we are. But, I mean, maybe this strategic withdrawal from certain kinds of data production would be all of them. All of them. All of them. I mean, is it even possible? I mean, that... But I do think certain kinds of withdrawal, as I was saying,
are necessary. I agree to that extent. I don't know about a complete withdrawal from data production. I'm just trying to think through what that would even mean. It's a pacifist revolution. because the authorities the structures can't do anything anymore because they depend on our mass big data and all the algorithms and all that and when they all become redundant then it's a revolution I think you're more likely to be able to get every worker on earth to strike than you are to get them to get that kind of complete withdrawal from data production myself you also want to say something about stop producing. I mean, for example, Slavoj Žižek is always in favor of this idea too.
Stop doing. Just do nothing for a while. Just say no. But this would also mean don't blog, don't do anything. Because, I mean, maybe not even data. I mean, this is also a kind of angelic idea to end up like Bartleby and doing nothing. I mean, this is also something... Okay, another question now here and then there is another behind there and then maybe one or two more and then, okay. I just wanted to come back to something Mark said at the beginning about the disappointment in cultural development in London or in the UK and then you mentioned Berlin briefly. and a lot of the examples in capitalist realism
are obviously used in the UK and obviously up until 1989, 1990 there was two realities in Germany there was a capitalist and a socialist communist reality so if you could maybe say anything about partly the comment you said before and also to make it a bit more Berlin relevant well it's it's just the why to reflect on that obvious point about why there so many artists musicians etc based here what is it about Burnin that draws people obviously after a certain amount of time the fact that other artists are here is itself a draw but I mean it is to do with the fact that perhaps the key thing in what I was saying
about property prices etc something as apparently simple as that is surely one of the key drivers of the kind of cultural momentum in Berlin. And certainly by strong contrast with London. I mean, it's a genius move by the neoliberals, I think, is to enforce... The simplest way of enforcing social conservatism is just by pushing up rents and mortgages. And, you know, so people's available time for cultural production is so much lower.
And so I think what I'm suggesting is that, you know, in Berlin, because, you know, I'm highlighting one factor for many others as well, because of the availability of cheap property, that equals the possibility for cultural time and the persistence of welfare structures that are more quickly being eroded in the UK, I think. I think what becomes clearer now as those structures are more and more being destroyed need and certainly what was at stake in the student militancy in the UK at the end of 2010
I think was kind of the last struggle against the last moment of a struggle against the removal of those conditions for cultural production. So I think what I meant to say was that what is becoming clearer is that the banal level of political struggles over things like social housing, welfare, unemployment benefits, etc., student grants, the connection between those banal struggles and these other issues of cultural production are now clear, I think, are now becoming clearer. and you know perhaps a part of the picture
in Berlin is the spectre of the other reality the other reality that has been expunged very radically in the UK and you know it's reaching a point of dramatic kind of conflict in the UK I think at the moment where you've effectively got a shock doctrine on a shock doctrine as it were, we had the original shock doctrine in the 70s at the early 80s really and now when the effects of that shock doctrine have failed what do we do? Oh let's have some more shock doctrine
you know I think it's my view though that like the current government in the UK is that they it's you know that they pretty much know that they're not going to be in power for long but they can do enough damage that will be very difficult for it to be overcome and you know that's this question of hope I think in the UK in lots of ways it's hard to muster it because it seems like almost any available reality or world or metric you're looking at things are going to get worse but I just want to come back to this hope point you could argue that hope is the problem
the reason that things carry on so badly is we've got too much hope we don't face how bad things are because we hope they will change. And if we give up hope, then you can think, well, okay, they'll only change if we make them change, as it were. And maybe that, paradoxically, is a positive situation in the UK, where as the, you know, as the kind of... I think the ruling class has forgotten why welfare benefits, et cetera, were brought in, not from their largesse or generosity, but in order to contain revolutionary anger. So if you remove those sheaths, then that anger can emerge again.
And I think the increasing naked class war in the UK may then produce this kind of more sustained anger. Peter. Hi. Well, if I principally attend public talks and academic conferences in order to obtain a regular dose of healthy boredom, you've both failed me in that. Thank you very much. I want to seize on something in Prof Schneider's presentation because it seemed to me to suggest a poetic symbol of the kind of end of time and all the themes that you're both talking about in different ways
and it was the surname of the scientist involved in the lie detector Daniel Langleben was it And this name, Langleben, Long Life, with its somewhat Faustian feel of a pact with the devil, following which one is condemned to live perpetually in a sort of hopeless boredom, a restless boredom, seems to me to be a very nice image for the kind of boredom that Mark's been describing, the boredom of transparency and openness that is the dream, the ideology that the scientists,
Herr Schneider has discussed, are proposing, and the reason why hope is so difficult to sustain. after all if one is condemned to a sort of bored perpetual life as is the feeling a feeling of no change and endless sameness then what hope can there be I realize that's more of a statement than a question as well but okay so we take this as the final statement thank you very much for Thank you for coming, thank you for your attention.