Thanks very much for inviting me. It's my first time in Melbourne, but I've been aware for many years that Melbourne is a hotbed of continental philosophy, and especially Badguianism, or Badguianism, or whatever it's called. I've had the occasion to experience the Australian style of philosophy a couple of times when people have come over from Melbourne to the UK, and there's one particularly memorable occasion where I could sense there was a particularly Australian style of pop philosophy in development, if you like, when perhaps in the spirit of that linguistic operation native to this great land, popularization
via truncation, whereby there's a kind of democratic urge to ruthlessly curtail any word that is presumptuous enough to extend beyond two syllables, perhaps someone in that spirit, a particular Australian scholar, introducing a paper on Badiou's idea that philosophy has four conditions, science, love, art and politics, opted for the memorable acronym SLAP theory. He is here tonight, I'm not going to point him out, but this was an inspiration for me. So I'm not going to talk about Baju, but it's just a way to say I hope that I'm in good company to confess the personal impulse that underlies a lot of what I'm going to talk about, which is that although I love philosophy, philosophy is a bit up itself.
and the history of philosophy has been largely the preserve of the privileged, of various types of haughty, refined persons and far too many words in excess of two syllables. In other words, it's not really very pop. And this, in a sense, is contrary to its natural vocation because the existence of philosophy, I would say, is essentially an expression of what it means to be human in a generic sense. To be human is to live certain problems, to encounter certain questions about oneself, which are the preserve of philosophy. And therefore, in principle, everyone should have access to those problems, at least, and to those questions.
But the resources for discussing them over the duration of the history of philosophy have become increasingly specialized and self-referentialed and require a great deal of time and leisure to study. And like we all do, I can appreciate and enjoy the sublime majesty of a finely wrought philosophical argument, but it's hard to avoid the grudging observation when reading the great thinkers that these people seem to have had a hell of a lot more leisure time on their hands than I ever did. I mean, they spent less time on Twitter than me, which is perhaps something to do with it, although I don't call them tweets, I call them aphorisms Nietzsche would know what I'm talking about so philosophy is something I love
but which belongs in worlds in which I'll never feel entirely at home whether it's the Wittgenstein Palace the family home of the philosopher whose family fortune was second only to the Rothschilds whose dad had a monopoly on Austrian steel or whether it's Imperial Court Counselor Leibniz walking through the gardens with a princess, or even Nietzsche taking the waters at Baden-Baden. They're not really my kind of people. There are exceptions. The self-taught post-Kantian vagrant Solomon Maimon, a real outsider, a man who had no fortune, no profession, practiced no business or trade, who, in the words of Freud and Thal, thoughtlessly fell in love with philosophy.
but although the intention here is not to start a class war in philosophy you can see that in one sense this is a class question very much in the vein of Mark Fisher's thought in the sense that it's about the difficulty one has when one is not imbued with a sense of entitlement the difficulty of feeling that one has the right to participate in such lofty affairs Or as the parental superego in your head would say, why are you wasting your time on that? And this question is also bound up with contemporaneity. How to do philosophy with a conviction that it has a relevance to the contemporary, without it being an antiquarianism, or a kind of rarefied LARPing,
as if one could still do philosophy as these historical figures did, without the benefit of their fortune. Now, isn't this also particularly important when we see that the great post-war period of democratic access to higher education was a historical exception rather than an indication of the general movement of modernity? we see here Thomas Piketty's diagram which I think of as a kind of general general emblem of this idea that where once we thought that there was a democratic trend which would continue in fact now we see from this wider perspective there was just a dip in the
difference between the richest and the poorest and now we're well back on our way to business as usual. And in universities today, we're unfortunately well on the way to the graduate study of philosophy becoming something that only the idle bourgeoisie can afford to dedicate their time to, once again. Higher study is really becoming a privilege rather than something that's open to all and that, of course, is what makes organisations like the MSCP important and I probably can't teach you anything about doing pop philosophy because you're doing it already. But I would argue that it also makes it crucial that we continue the project of trying to circulate philosophical thinking within a pop or a pulp milieu through cultural production.
This is not just a question of class, though, but again, one of history and of the contemporary. The question about the constraints that our contemporary condition places upon us, our own experience of time, communication and thought, which is not the same as Plato's or Kant's or even Deleuze's. and I feel like we want to we neither want to simply affirm the contemporary need for communication as if we all communicated more and more everything would be great nor do we want to pretend that nothing has changed and we can carry on as before the old style remember how in one of his many enigmatic invocations of a different form of philosophy to come
Gilles Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition the time is coming when it will hardly be possible to write a book of philosophy as it has been done for so long this is a matter not just of writing but of reading as well and I can't count the amount of people even and especially people who are actually working in academia who have a job in academia and it's a kind of open secret I've had this discussion with when we say no one has time to read a book anymore You know, I'm a lecturer, I don't have time to read a book, so who does? Never mind write one in the old style. The practice of reading itself is being utterly transformed. It's a commonplace that we read more on screens than on paper,
and in an increasingly fragmented and yet fluid way. But remember, it took up to the second half of the 20th century for philosophy to even realize that it happened in books. I mean, that's what Derrida did, and that came as a surprise. So maybe it will take a lot longer for philosophy to catch up with social media. So the time isn't coming. The time's already here. We're already living in the time when it's no longer possible to write philosophy books. despite a quantitative increase in pages published it's no longer possible to write in the old style without it being a kind of imposture
a humanities LARP where we pretend we can subtract ourselves from everyday reality and inhabit a weightless world of pure ideas that exists outside of material history as if dad was an Austrian steel magnate I turn here to with apologies for repeating the anecdote from elsewhere to something that Mark Fisher once said to me when I was kind of bemoaning to him the fact that we were listening to the Wu-Tang Clan and I was saying well people like us are never going to do anything as good as this and Mark just said well we don't come from the street
we come from the living room I thought it was brilliant in a way it kind of sums up Mark's authenticity to who he was and where he came from but in the current context we also don't come from the palace or from the Greek agora and what does the living room mean? the living room means not being a first hand participant in culture and especially high culture but being surrounded by and immersed in technologically mediated mass cultural products, TV, film records, comics, paperbacks. We don't come from ancient Athens or from Jena, so while we can have admiration for all of these historical figures, I feel like it's our duty, if we're not going to be fakes, to take seriously Deleuze's demand that we find our own way of doing it.
His suspicion that philosophy has probably not yet attained a contemporary form. Another important concept here from Mark's work is what he called pulp modernism or popular modernism. For Mark, when thinking about modernism, rather than the pioneering largely bourgeois heroes who experimented in their garrets with breaking received forms, what, according to Mark, vindicates or justifies modernist experimentation is whether it succeeds when it's decanted into pulp formats that circulate and travel on the sheer strength of their infectious cultural compulsion. The important point being, to quote Mark,
this kind of filtering, he calls it filtering, of high ideas into low cultures. He says, that didn't involve dilution. There was often a condensation which intensified things. So we're talking here about cultural producers who pick up the legacy of high modernism and inject it into commercial networks, into what the Dorno scornfully called the culture industry, make it travel, give it the impetus and energy it lacks in its formalist academic mode but also interestingly as Mark points out this is not a one way procedure for instance Malame at the height of his experimental modernism says the effect produced, that's what I'm after
it's interesting to know that this is after he's been reading Poe and he's borrowing from Poe's theory on how to create effects in the reader's mind through a series of deliberate and carefully calculated ruses. In other words, pulp. So there's a borrowing in both directions. But how does this work with philosophy? Isn't philosophy by its nature resistant? How can it possibly lend itself to this kind of usage? isn't it too demanding and specialized a discipline and especially in the case of continental philosophy isn't it much too deeply involved in its own history to be molded into a popular form
and to kind of bring my own experience to it I think that my project with Urbanomic the publishing company over the last 15 or so years has always been inhabited by this tension. And indeed, I think, retrospectively, I would say it was born out of this tension of trying to take this weighty, hide-bound, history-laden thing called philosophy and make it travel faster in new formats with new modes of distribution and among new audiences. So my personal and professional life
for the last decade and a half, and the two of them are no longer distinguishable for this reason, has been defined by this dilemma. How can a fascination with philosophy and a conviction of its importance cohabit with a revulsion for that insular academic game of philosophy that's happy, content, or even proud to have no contact with the living room, and is comfortable with its status as a specialized discipline. So from the very start, when I first created the journal Collapse, it was out of a kind of state of desperation. So I'd been at university, I did a philosophy degree, I started a PhD, which I just abandoned after a year
because I felt like I couldn't stay in a university any longer. And my supervisor was also Nick Land, which didn't help very much. And I went out and I was like, okay, forget about philosophy. I'm going to go and live in the supposed real world. And I did. I was a programmer. I made websites. I did technology research. And eventually, after like seven years, I realized the real world was shit. And I thought, well, I'm going to have a go doing philosophy again. So I applied for a PhD. I was lucky enough to get funding. I arrived in a university, and immediately I was like, oh no. No, yeah, I like philosophy, but no, this is not it.
There's something that just kind of suffocated me about that environment. And so I started this journal Collapse really as a kind of outlet for trying to create my imaginary version of what philosophy should be, because the official version was very unsatisfactory to me. And then increasingly over the next decade, as it gradually expanded from a hobby to an obsession to a source of great suffering and eventually almost to a viable business, that question of how to create another form of philosophy was joined by the question of how it could be sustainable, which is also, which is to say commercial which is also a question of
pop, you know, in a quantitative sense how can I sell enough of these to print the next one and that of course runs the risk of compromise and I've just tried to make the right compromises, I'm not stupid enough to think you don't make any compromises so that's my way of justifying to you why I'm talking about myself in the sense that I think it's a genuine kind of laboratory experiment in trying to think about how you could possibly do pop philosophy without it being kind of secretly subsidized by the academy. So since 2006, we published eight volumes of the journal Collapse, and now I think we
have about 30-something books on the catalogue, some of which have sold large amounts. I mean, I think the last time I heard the average amount of copies of philosophy books sold, say someone who's kind of written up their PhD for a book, is about 300 to 400. And some of our books have sold about 7,000 now, the biggest selling ones. So it's kind of way beyond what an academic philosophy book would usually sell. So there's something happening. And I'm always kind of trying to look back and understand what it is and what I've done right and what I haven't done right. But this whole thing, I think, is totally beyond just a quantitative measure. The concept of pop is something more than just selling more copies.
I guess when you think about pop, you think firstly about pop music, maybe, and then perhaps pop culture in a more expanded sense, which then was made visible and extrapolated into an aesthetics by pop art, and then today maybe in a more negative light we think about the concept of populism which is a kind of entirely retrograde political phenomenon I guess so I'm going to try to kind of bring all of those different senses of pop into thinking through this question I'm going to look at everyone's faces and see what reactions I get from this next slide.
One way to understand what pop philosophy might be is through the, no doubt, laudable efforts of authors such as Alain de Botton, bringing the history of philosophy into the aid of a kind of glorified self-help. And I know, I think you have a school of life in Melbourne here, right? As we do in London. where you can join seminars on things like how to communicate better at work, how to face death, or how to be confident. Or you can perhaps join Alan for a philosophy brunch, which sounds lovely. By the way, Alan de Botton's father was not the steel magnate.
His investment firm in Zurich did quite well for itself. moving on this is another book which I spotted yesterday in a bookshop in Sydney which I thought was another great example I must say I hope the author isn't here, I haven't read this book just going from the cover alone I think it was kind of an interesting one again it's attaining pop philosophy through the application of the history of philosophy to your personal problems timeless wisdom Again, suggesting that philosophy itself is kind of pure and ahistorical, but it can be applied to modern dilemmas. Suggesting, I guess, that the thing that philosophy is most useful for is working out your emotional dilemmas.
But it's not serious, it's jovial, it doesn't take itself too seriously. It looks heartwarming, it means well. is obviously uplifting like a good latte. And it wants to make you feel better. And, you know, who could argue with that? Me. Is philosophy about making you feel better? Anyone who's spent a few decades studying philosophy can tell you, no way. That's not what it does. Inquietus est cor nostrum. That's what St. Augustine says. Our heart, for St. Augustine, the heart of post-Lapsarian man, our heart is unquiet. It can find no rest. Its inquiry into itself, what Augustine calls the question I have become for myself, is not
one of a patient, systematic exegesis. It's not one of comfort. It's something like a continuous unease or even a panic. I remember one of the best things. When I arrived at Warwick University as an undergraduate, I was really miserable and depressed. And it was fantastic. I think it was in my second year that I first met Nick Land. And one of the turning points of my life was when he said, well, life is just like a wound that you keep scratching to open it again. That's what philosophy helps you with. And that kind of made sense to me, at least. I wouldn't exactly say it helps me in life, but it gave me a path to follow. I think he said poke it with a stick actually life is a wound
you've got to poke it with a stick and philosophy is the stick so yeah Lyotard, Jean-François Lyotard picked up this notion of inquietude in the 80s and he writes a lot of interesting stuff about it but before that it was reprised by Pascal Pascal's anthropology kind of exemplary, agitated, fragmentary, modern body of work, an anthropology that's kind of summed up in the terse formula in Pascal's Pensee. Condition of man, inconstancy, boredom, inquietude. In Pascal, as in Augustine,
the attribution of inquietude to man as a primordial condition isn't understood merely as a diagnosis or as descriptive, but as a normative and even programmatic demand. Not only is inquietude an inevitable aspect of human existence, no matter how much we may try to suppress it, it's to be acknowledged, exacerbated, and intensified, poked with a stick. And this is the philosopher's task. The philosopher's job is to stir up trouble in himself and his fellow humans, to expose the constitutive inquietude of the human, which modern civilization, importantly, as Pascal says, intensifies while supplying us with copious diversions
with which to repress and ignore it. So where modern civilization stirs up inquietude in order to sell you stuff, philosophy needs to stir it up more so you stop buying stuff and do something else. So in short, without wanting to promote philosophy as self-harm, self-help as pop philosophy just doesn't cut it. And yet it is burgeoning. The most brutal manifestation of this in the UK is the fact that in the major bookshop chain Waterstones, you have philosophy in a separate shelf to smart thinking. So another option then. totally abandoned the history of philosophy and become something more like a philosophy brew,
an outsider philosophy, where people just brew up philosophical concepts in their garage, which has no need for the authoritarian approval of the great dead white men. And I've got some sympathy for this, and a part of doing the journal Collapse was about trying to cast off that dead weight of the past and to say, you can do philosophy. that's kind of inspired by Deleuze because of course Deleuze says this too you know, you have to be able to do philosophy without being weighed down by the past and it's all very well for him to say that but he knew what he was talking about, you know, he'd spent his whole life studying philosophy in Paris but yeah, I mean it's a good idea
and a discipline with a specialised vocabulary and jargon can be excluding But if you try to do this, you have to contend instead with the power of the spontaneous and the power of common sense. And the fact that the things that come instantly and spontaneously to us are in fact the most banal, socially conditioned ideas. So most outsider philosophy, I fear, simply ends up reinventing the philosophical wheel badly. or it ends up as some kind of paranoid conspiracy theory. I mean, one really important part of studying philosophy, and I think it's humbling, and that's important,
and it locates you within longer history. An important part of studying philosophy is that you're forever having huge brainwaves than thinking you're a genius and then finding out someone wrote a book about it 200 years ago. So that kind of engagement with the history of philosophy can't simply be thrown away, I don't think. So returning to my confessional, which is less racy than Augustine's, we published eight themed volumes between 2006 and 2011. it's now on hiatus for a while because between volume 1 and volume 8 things got a little bit out of control and it began to be a project
which I didn't have sufficient time to dedicate to doing one a year but essentially the publishing program of Urbanomic and all of the activities that we do have come out of the same principles that emerged from the experiment of collapse. So it's still a relevant thing I find to reflect on. And I've got some models of how it works, but it's important to say that these have kind of emerged gradually through my ongoing reflection on what I've done. So it's all a retrospective reconstruction. But I'm going to describe some of these models and tried to connect them to these different concepts of what pop might mean.
Understanding it not as a quantitative determination or as an analogue to populism, but pop as a particularly modern cultural mode that's fused to a format and a medium. So, you know, a brutal way of saying, talking about the development of collapse over the years would just be to say, I didn't know what I was doing. and that each subsequent volume is really a kind of punctual diary of my own wandering inquiries into this question of how can I do this? Is it possible to do this? But there was a few kind of first principles. One was that philosophy is a form of creative practice
and a practice of making things. And I've always been really into making things. and at a certain point in publishing collapse I kind of realised what I'm interested in isn't really just doing philosophy like if I could get rid of all the material parts the paper and the cardboard and the making parts then I probably wouldn't do it it's actually the whole thing the process of making is actually something that I'm dedicated to And throughout my whole life, in fact, I've done this. So at school, I made newsletters. When I was doing A-levels at like 16 and 17, I produced a philosophy comic, which I distributed to everyone.
As soon as I arrived in university, I published the kind of forerunner of Collapse, which was a kind of fanzine that was photocopied in the philosophy department. So making things is very much a part of it. I found a kind of spurious justification for this in Louis Althusser. In Pierre Macaray's words, Althusser, who I guess is one of the philosophers who's done the most to examine what it means to do philosophy materially, says, the fact that philosophy is a discursive affair means materially that it does nothing except align words in a certain order, producing statements. So even at the level of words, you can think of philosophy as a material practice,
almost a practice of typesetting, really, conceptual typesetting. So philosophy is, in the last instance, a material practice. It's also material in wider ways, in the sense that you produce books, you travel to conferences, you're linked to a global network of other people via the internet, etc. These are all material constructions that affect the way that you think and you can do philosophy. And one of the aims of Collapse was to affirm the materiality of it. And anyone who's seen philosophy books published by academic presses from, I would say, the 80s through all the 90s will attest to the fact that these people really didn't think that the material properties
of the book were important. I mean, look at the covers of some of these. They're absolutely atrocious. So it was very important that I kind of thought of it as an object as well as just a block of content. Then one thing that I took from my repulsion for academic philosophy was that it had to be peripheral. It had to work around the edges and across borders and to connect philosophy with the non-philosophical. And then related to that point is the fact that I think actually philosophy is something that everyone comes across, whatever discipline they're doing, whatever practice, whatever their life involves.
Philosophy is something, or philosophical questions are something that arise for everybody when things break down, when the conditions which you expect to be in place in order to carry out whatever task you're doing are no longer there and you're forced to think. So philosophy is something that in a sense happens to everyone in all disciplines. And I found a very important element of Collapse was doing interviews. And I found in interviews, interviewing scientists or artists, people from different disciplines with different practices, everyone has a kind of wealth of philosophical questions that they don't have a chance to exercise. So they're just getting on with their job. Every now and again, something strange will happen
and they'll kind of store it away and they don't have anyone to talk to about it. So when you interview them from that philosophical perspective, often they have a lot to say, and it's really interesting to find out. So to sum up, I guess, doing the journal was a way to transform a personal dissatisfaction into a public positive gesture, and a potentially embarrassing and humiliating gesture because, you know, it might not work. It might be totally embarrassing. I don't know. It was just done out of desperation. But it was to say philosophy can be done otherwise. It can be something else.
And it ended up really a strange combination of a philosophy journal, a fanzine, that is in the sense of a personal, idiosyncratic, non-commercial and non-academic publication. and an ongoing art project, if you like, the making of a work through the assemblage or through the montage of other people's work. And that's the importance of the editorial role that I play in bringing together apparently kind of heterogeneous, strange groupings of people into one volume. So here's the model. a retrospective model academic journals tend to construct themselves
around a very narrow area of interest with specialists who all know each other and I've got nothing against specialists I think highly specialised knowledge is one of the most entertaining and fascinating things in the world but I didn't see any publications that had a will to bring together specialists from different disciplines to share knowledge, to connect things together and to use philosophy to do this. And for me, it seemed like that would be part of what philosophy could do, would be to discover ways of mediating or modulating or mixing different areas of knowledge about the world. So rather than pop then equaling and dumbing down, pop would actually be making something less insular,
proliferating connections and adding multiple access points for different readers and different audiences to come in. So the normal idea of a journal might be that you just have a circle, a circumscribed discursive space into which all the contributions have to fit, a criteria that all the contents of the journal have to follow. And this, I think, reflects the structure of the university itself. The ambition of the university has always been to reconstruct for the next generation a global sphere of knowledge within which sub-disciplines and their interactions are clearly defined and understood. So a journal might be understood as a microcosm of the university model of knowledge
defining this discursive space into which all the contributions have to fit. And so the model here arguably constitutes a global image of thought in which you continually patch up and fill in the sphere of knowledge to pass it down to the next generation with disciplines, sub-disciplines, sub-sub-disciplines etc down to infinity. And the job of each generation of academics then would be to fill in the gaps more to secure the sphere of knowledge for perpetuity and if they're really radical to create a new sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-discipline. And there has been of course I guess over the last 20 years a trend towards interdisciplinary activity, but I'm not sure that really changes
very much. It's kind of a secondary thing, which only reconfirms that disciplines exist and have autonomy. Interdisciplinarity, in other words, still kind of clings to the edges of the confined spheres of knowledge. And what I wanted to do was basically something a little bit different to that. To make a slice through all of this, a kind of montage, a moving image that would zigzag its way across all of these heterogeneous types of knowledge. The other problem with academic journals is the kind of process of homogenization, which is that you send in an article, they review it and they return it,
and you send it back and they review it and return it. And in the end, everything kind of gets leveled down, flattened down to the same level. So there's a mechanism by which the journal itself as an institution ensures a homogeneity that contributes to this university model of knowledge. I was actually more interested in hearing from people who were doing research that wasn't necessarily finished or conclusive to publish work that gave an insight into the process of research. what it actually means to think, that showed thinking in progress, even if it had rough edges. And I was also interested in publishing work that showed how philosophical thinking was at work in the world,
how it wasn't just armchair philosophizing. that concepts produce ways of practice ways of producing, ways of living in the world whether it's in the world of work of artists, of scientists, of architects and so on that thought is a productive process and this was the idea behind Subtitling Collapse a journal of philosophical research and development was just kind of a provocative joke to say that we're borrowing from this term, research and development from industry, to provoke the intellectual industry. The idea that philosophy is not just research, research and research forever. There's also a development. There are also things that develop out of it.
So in collapse, unlike this hierarchical series of circles, each contribution overlaps with at least one other so there's a kind of distributive structure loosely held together by these partial overlaps collapse is therefore defined by the nature of this series of overlaps not by the circumscription of the space in advance it's the overlaps that address fundamental questions in philosophy and it's the overlapping it's in the overlapping of them that those questions gain some new life or some new energy they only really come alive when they're between two therefore as a whole each volume is best seen again as a montage
where it's the splices between the elements that really produce something new and again that's the importance of the editorial work I spent a lot of time thinking about how to sequence the contributions sometimes kind of going back to the authors and saying well you know there's this other contribution which you could address in what you're saying and so trying to make sure that there's this chain without a break in it. So there's interesting effects from this model. One is that any two contributions taken on their own might appear to have absolutely nothing in common. so say in collapse 2 an article on Islamic theology
an interview with a physicist or in collapse 6 an article by a computational ecologist and one by a medievalist scholar or in collapse 7 a contribution from a synesthete a chef and a student of post-modern warfare but through the maximally broad use of a theme for each volume and through this series of conceptual overlaps this chain is built between them and you can get from one to the other and that journey itself is a novel cognitive procedure it produces this slice through knowledge this thread through many different disciplines
so this is a way in which editing or curation of each volume is in a modest way a creative act, insofar as to create is to synthesize, to connect elements in a new way. And the second thing, the second effect of this, which I really like, and this is really crucial to the question of pop, I think, is that any one reader is unlikely to be familiar with all the contributors. Now think about a normal academic journal. Someone who's in that discipline will probably know all of the people who've contributed to it already. Here, probably you might have heard of one or two. But then having bought the volume, your eyes are drawn to the other contributors
and you're kind of stretched out into all these other areas and you learn about these other practices. And so hopefully for each reader, their horizon is somehow stretched by their being hooked into this chain of concepts. and in terms of pop in terms of its continuing viability what's really interesting about this is that it seems to create a new audience it creates a new constituency and that in turn brings new people who want to contribute and that I believe is the key to it continuing to be something that people are interested in is that it's actually created
a new audience. Additionally, I guess I would say about Collapse that there were also people who I'd met whose work was unlikely to be published in any existing journal. And one of the things that I'm most proud of is introducing authors such as Reza Negarastani, Quentin Mayasu, who have since gone on to find wider recognition and who, in a really interesting turn of events, now are so respectable that they're asked continually to contribute to respectable journals. So that's another interesting way in which the wider world has had to accept the rogue elements
that collapse has introduced. So that has had some kind of effect. So structurally, from the very start, to sum up all of that, collapse was set up as a kind of coincidence engineering machine and you can see how through this model of knowledge as much as through the distributive and commercial aspects collapse acts as an agency that creates these new connections, that stretches readers and produces a new audience now in order to be entirely honest about the process again I have to return to my confessions and talk about a more personal vision of what I wanted to create. And as writers always say, you write the book that you want to read.
I think I definitely set out to create the kind of journal I'd like to read. Although at that point I had no idea whether anybody else would want to read it. So some of the models that I used to mention to people for collapse. One was the Calle pour l'Analise. This is a journal published by Althusser's students in the late 60s. It's a really interesting one because everything in it, and there's some articles by people who have later go on to become great luminaries like Badiou and Irigaray, Derrida. But there's a really intense feeling of work in progress, like everything you read in there, you know that that's right at the edge of what this person's managing to think at that time.
And then Minotaur, the great surrealist magazine, and then the situationist times which is some of the issues of the situationist times have an incredibly eclectic list of contributors and often around themes but what we decide to tell other people and sometimes what we tell ourselves isn't necessarily the whole truth and I'm not really that sophisticated to be honest so this is the genetic account rather than the retrospective order of reasons so I'm not sure whether you have these in Australia but these annuals used to come out yearly
and I remember very vividly as a child how it felt to have this book that felt kind of compendious it felt like it was too huge like it had too much in it to take in to ever read it or to exhaust its content. So these used to have kind of, I guess, comic strips, stories, puzzles, etc. A whole kind of miscellany of stuff. And usually they were something that you would get for Christmas. So it's something like when you've broken all your toys, that's what you'd have to employ your time with over Christmas. And I remember distinctly that when reading these, I would skip over some parts so that I could deliberately miss them out and then come back and discover them later.
So projected, I think, from this experience was this idea of a book that was inexhaustible, that had all these miscellaneous different types of content which you could return to and discover new connections that you hadn't seen before and in which different types of content would follow one another. And then at my grandparents' house, I was also exposed to the great serial publication Reader's Digest, which kind of brought together articles, completely disconnected articles from other magazines and publications. And that was also the same kind of thing, this strange kind of miscellany. It was only like years later that I started thinking about this and started admitting to myself that these were probably more influential on me than anything that I'd encountered when I was studying philosophy.
So there's something about this compendiousness, this uneven nature of having many different types of content and this inexhaustibility, or as it seemed to a child, that I wanted to reproduce. and so like the ultimate question for me with collapse then was in a world that produces such an incredible variety of knowledge, such mind bending speculations and so many different ways of looking at the world why doesn't any of the theoretical literature really reflect this? Why is it always intent on reproducing a very sober model of knowledge? then just to go back to the format
quickly the idea of the integrity of the thing was very important to me and it's also the reason why Collapse is a physical and not a virtual online journal because there's a certain kind of commitment involved as an editor as a publisher that I commit myself to presenting these contributions, putting them in a particular order, physically binding it together, again making something and presenting it to you. And that's a statement and a commitment that I've made about the object, a kind of wager that together these pieces synthesized together in this way, present you with something new and significant. And I think that commitment is very important. And unfortunately, because of the technology of publishing, it's becoming
rarer and rarer. It requires very little commitment to publish a book now. So making the thing was very important, and particularly a paperback book, because what could be a better example of the democratisation of knowledge than the paperback book? Mark, in fact, mentions paperback books when he's talking about pop modernism. He talks about the fact that Virginia Woolf being published by Penguin was a huge deal for the spread of pop modernism because it's widely disseminated. It changes it from being something purely for the bourgeoisie to something which anybody can be exposed
to and have their world shaken up by. In my childhood, one of the things that was very important was Puffin Books. Puffin was the junior imprint of Penguin Books, who published many of what are now known as the classic children's authors, and acquired rights to reprint a lot of earlier work that had been published in hardback only. And this was at a time when paperbacks were still considered to be kind of vulgar. There's probably a certain type of parent who wouldn't want their children to have paperbacks even. But the other important thing about Puffin Books was they published this magazine called Puffin Post.
So you could join the Puffin Club. You've got a membership book and you've got a badge. This green one is actually the Australian Puffin Club badge. The UK one was a different colour. And one of the interesting things that I remember when I started thinking about this was how in all the Puffin Books and in Puffin Post magazine, you always had this line, editor, K-Webb. This was an amazing woman who ran Puffin Books for decades and basically created what we know of as children's literature today, between I guess the 60s and the 80s. So there's something very important about seeing K-Webb,
editor K Webb and thinking this editor person must be like, she must be doing something really important because her name's on everything. So all these things I admit to myself now, I suppose, have to come in somewhere, this feeling that you're in a club or a gang, this feeling of getting let into a secret. In a sense, all of these things are external to the content, yes, but frankly I never ever believed in the content as being a free floating thing. Ultimately, it's a total failure of pop philosophy. Although I tried to counteract this by including in each volume content on many different levels, if you like.
So there are things in every volume I think that the average reader could handle. but they're also very specialized pieces that could be understood as being full of jargon and unfriendly and so on but at least I kind of tried to put these in on equal footing however what I did find interestingly is that there's an audience that is not specialist but which doesn't mind not fully understanding And this, I think, going back to Mark Fisher's idea of pop modernism, is an important thing. It's not to underestimate the fact that people can pick up something they don't completely understand and still be fascinated by it.
And, you know, how else do you get into new things but by picking something up that you don't really get and kind of just being compelled to find out more? You know, so some of them will look at it and not understand it and then make something of it anyway. You know, there's a lot of, I guess one of the constituencies that really picked up on collapse was artists. And often I see contemporary artists do some work based on something in collapse, and I'd be like, no, you've got that totally wrong. But then in the end I actually kind of came to appreciate that and think that's a totally valid way of using it. I don't care, it's fine. And then some people would go on to learn more about it. Just to say that it's not a matter of dumbing down, really.
there's a receptive audience that can be drawn into reading weird shit. They're there, and yeah, that has advantages and disadvantages. It can be frustrating. But the good thing about it is that it kind of intensifies that tension that I said was there at the beginning, the tension, because it puts you in an exposed position. It's both, it becomes easy for conscientious, haughty scholars to look down on you and denounce you for being insufficiently rigorous. And it also makes it easy for people who can't be bothered to make an effort to look up at you and go, that's jargonistic rubbish, I'm not going to read it. So it kind of intensifies the tension in an interesting way.
More recently, we've started publishing, we've started a new imprint, K-Pulp, which kind of tries to look at this in a different way. the kind of supposedly lowbrow or pulp-formed genres such as science fiction, comics, genre novels as carriers for challenging ideas, which of course they always have been. So if theory or philosophy is about models of reality, then obviously fictions construct, experimentally construct alternate models of reality. so obviously you can do theory through fiction and fiction through theory and so that's the kind of ongoing experiment
that we've published two novels one by Melburnian Simon Sellers and Chronosis, a forthcoming comic by Reza Negra-Stani and Keith Tilford which is a really interesting experiment but what is the concept of pulp then? I guess historically pulp magazines came about in the very end of the 19th century and survived up to the 1950s firstly as pulp magazines which just contained stories and then later on kind of developed into comics and their name of course comes from the type of paper they're published on which is this cheap wood pulp paper
with ragged edges at the peak of their popularity in the 20s and 30s they were selling, pulp magazines were selling easily a million copies per issue so they really were massively popular and what I find interesting about pulp is you can't really separate the content from the format and the materials and I realised this when we were working on this comic and I was talking to the artist Keith about why I didn't really like new comics the only comics that I really enjoy reading are the ones that I've still got from years and years ago
and I realised it was because of the materiality of it so if you see, this is like a modern reprint and this is the original pulp or the original comic printed with the four-colour dot process. Anyway, it's not really pulp. I don't like the new one because the image is not fused with the page. It's like the image is floating above the page and could be removed from the page. And what's kind of great about pulp is this feeling that you can't separate one from the other. And there's a brilliant blog by a guy called John Hilgart who talks about the four-colour process. he says it very well whereas contemporary reproductions of mid-century comic art
are truly closed and flat old comic books are visually leaky and deep four coloured dots perforate the flat surface of the universe opening onto nowhere some uncharted cosmos a perforated universe and molecular level of detail that are unintended and have no intrinsic relationship to the illustrative content of comic books so it's a kind of a cosmic beauty produced entirely by the economic bargain made by the producers of these cultural products a kind of accidental aesthetics he says who's responsible for this art the hand of fate created this art in other words the materials as Nietzsche said
play their own part in what's produced so by pulp I think I understand primarily this idea of content that's fused with its medium I'm just going to mention briefly this I'm not even sure what to say about this project so having spent two and a half years more or less working with Reza Negaristani editing his book Intelligence and Spirit which features this diagram of a Lego model to illustrate the evolution of an artificial general intelligence. As a kind of downtime,
we decided to dedicate two months of our lives to making an actual Lego box set, play set to accompany the book. This kind of weird, delirious period and perhaps more important than the reality of what was produced was the dream which was precisely to somehow fuse content and form in this way the fact that it's a box is really interesting because for me working with a printed medium that was definitely not a book was very interesting and working in three dimensions and also understanding the very specific orientation regime of Lego boxes, which is very peculiar, and trying to get it exactly
right, trying to produce something that we didn't want to create something that was like an art object. We wanted to create something where you'd buy it, and then you'd rip it open, and it would be a bit of a disappointment, and it would get kind of frayed at the edges. So it would be a real object, the kind of object that it's meant to be. I was also kind of thinking about this history of boxes, Marcel Duchamp's Green Box, Warhol's Bullow Box, also about Jeff Koons and how he takes these motifs from serial boxes and the fact that serial boxes are perhaps one of the first things that we read. Some of our first reading experiences were of this three-dimensional thing, which we read the same thing
every day, over and over again. so this was kind of a very experimental process without really knowing what we're doing it's real philosophical research and development we made this map which is actually a map of the entire book and shows you the kind of journey through the 670 pages or whatever it is Actually, I found through the process of doing it, I actually understood the book more. But I don't know about anyone who's actually bought the Lego set. Instructions in authentic Lego style. Yeah, so research and development.
But in this case, the R&D department exists before you even know what the products the company is meant to be making are. so that's like the hard way to go about R&D but at a certain point I said to Reza this is actually what we should be doing what we should be doing is aiming to be able to not have to do philosophy in public anymore because it's embarrassing and shameful what we should be about trying to do is to create a new synthetic culture from all the stuff that we love a synthetic culture whose structural principles are not spontaneously received from the assumptions and the tropes of the culture around us, but are built out of the hard theoretical work that we do in philosophy. But we need to craft all of that behind the scenes
so that we can produce this product to give to people so they won't have to do the philosophy. So. Deleuze. I mean, Deleuze talks about pop philosophy in several places. Where does Deleuze get off talking about pop philosophy? You know, as I said, he's a haute bourgeois Parisian scholar, etc., etc. But it's kind of one of the more interesting attempts to do pop philosophy. Deleuze and Guitard themselves say that their attempt to do pop philosophy was a failure. But in fact, A Thousand Plateaus is one of the rare successes. and precisely for the reasons I talked about with Collapse
is that people pick it up and feel they can do something with it. There's something about the book that gives people permission to use it in a way that's not strictly philosophical. But when you look into what Deleuze says about pop philosophy, it's a bit stranger and I'm not sure that I understand it. Let's see. I think this famous paragraph from Difference in Repetition addresses this same tension between the use of new means for philosophy and the question of how to deal with the weight of its history the time is coming when it will no longer be possible to write a book of philosophy as has been done for so long ah the old style the search for new means
of philosophical expression was begun by Nietzsche and must be pursued today in relation to the renewal of certain other arts. So he talks about the history of philosophy then as being analogous to a kind of collage. In effect, he's talking about philosophy as a practice of what Duchamp called the rectified ready-made, a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophically clean-shaven Marx in the same way as a moustachioed Mona Lisa. It should be possible to recount a real book of past philosophy as if it were an imaginary and feigned book. So it's a kind of theory-fictional or hyperstitional way of talking about the history of philosophy. I think it's a call for philosophy to transcend both its classicism and its modernity.
I think what's at stake here is precisely for philosophy to become contemporary, to no longer be an imposture or a larp. And interestingly, Deleuze turns to the moment of pop art when he's talking about this. As an aside, it's interesting in relation to Deleuze's writing on art, because it seems what he's saying here, or what he's suggesting, is an entry of philosophy into the contemporary by way of contemporary art, by way of Warhol, pop art. and in that sense the book on Bacon can be seen as a regression into the aesthetic where Warhol would be a moment where art rather than being aesthetic actually plugs itself directly into the worst
of the contemporary, into the worst of the commercial the mechanised, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and difference in repetition Deleuze uses Warhol to set the revolutionary powers of repetition against the mere repetition of habit he talks about each art having techniques which can attain a revolutionary power that lead us from, he says, the sad repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory and then to the ultimate repetitions of death in which our freedom is played out and he's already remarked above that even the most mechanical the most banal, the most habitual and the most stereotyped repetition
finds a place in works of art and the example he gives of course is Warhol and he connects this with stupidity, the stupidity of the modern the more our daily life appears standardized, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects and consumption the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition. And even in order to make the two extremes resonate, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death. And what he means here is not death as the end, a terminus or a stasis, but I think those multiple little deaths, those trapdoors of pleasure through which we fall
when rather than scorning the latest pop hit as synthetic nonsense we allow our ears and then our limbs to fall prey to its tackiness to its itchy rhythmic hooks and allow it to alter us and to break down some of the calcified tissue of ourselves to make us young again regardless of how ridiculous pretentious or age appropriate that might make us seem the death drive is what breaks up habit the capacity to break connections so the injection of art, death or thanatos into habit is something I think like what happens when you lift weights you tear the muscle fibres but then they make new connections and you become stronger
as the Stoics knew with their spiritual exercises if philosophy is about anything then surely it's not about comfort or about being right it's all about doing the reps to get neurologically ripped. Ready for anything. This is thanatos entering by way of eros. Cruelty entering by way of the habits of stupidity. In something like the same way that new synthetic musics plug into the instincts of human rhythm and stretch it in new directions. Deleuze says art thereby connects the tableau of cruelty with that of stupidity and discovers underneath consumption
a schizophrenic clattering of the jaws. He's talking about Warhol as operating a kind of thanatropic alchemy of stupidity. Something that's taken up in Foucault's introduction to Anti-Oedipus later where he says the greatness of Warhol with his canned foods senseless accidents, his series of advertising smiles he connects it to a nihilism in which the senseless stupidity of detergent ads is equivalent to that of car crashes but by which in concentrating on this boundless monotony we find the sudden illumination of multiplicity itself it's a kind of apotheosis in which Foucault says the eternal phantasm informs that soup can
Deleuze returns again to this in Logic of Sense once again he seems to be saying the same thing for philosophy to become contemporary means for it to face that which is most modern and that which is most stupid in the modern and to turn it against itself and once again the exemplar of this is pop art so it's not against the modern in the name of the in a temporal to critique the rubbish of modern life with timeless wisdom. Nor is it a modernizing, bringing up to date of classical wisdom. It's against both the modern and the non-temporal or the atemporal to extract the untimely
from the serial boredom of everyday life. In other words, to extract and exacerbate the inquietude to drive forward the stupidity inherent in modern life in order that it can break through the regime of order and social regularity. And that seems to be what pop art emblematizes for Deleuze here. An alignment, he says, of the untimely and artificial, the factitious against modernity, in favor of a time to come, opens up this kind of thanatropic future, this future in which what we are is going to be ripped apart by this exacerbation of stupidity.
In a philosophy elaborated, he says, I think this is a diss of Heidegger, he says, a philosophy elaborated not in the forests and wood paths, but in the towns and the streets, in the heart of modern life, that is. The factitious or artificial must be pushed to the point of the simulacrum, as Warhol does. The moment of pop art, he says. Pop then reappears when Deleuze, now entering into the assemblage with Guattari announces in their Kafka book an escape for language, for music, for writing what we call pop, pop music, pop philosophy pop writing, Wörterflucht that is word flight, a line of flight for words
a way for words to flee control and perhaps the idea of a mind language in Deleuze and Guattari connects to this idea of pop art maybe in the notion of the stutter the idea of making language itself stutter and thereby escaping itself to falter in its repetition but then as soon as this project of pop philosophy is announced and begun it's acknowledged as a failure you find in A Thousand Plateaus slogan, rhizomatics equals pop analysis. This comes the page after they say, write with slogans. And there's a kind of self-referential thing going on when they say this.
They talk about the burdening of a book with too heavy a cultural load. But they specify that what pop analysis or rhizomatics would do would be to use that weight, the weight of history, the weight of scholarly equipment actively for forgetting instead of for remembering. Even if people have other things to do besides read it. Even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudo-scientificity in it are still too painful or ponderous. They're obviously already critiquing their own attempt to do pop philosophy here. And then very soon in his interviews in negotiations,
Deleuze says, of course we wouldn't claim that Antioedipus is free of any scholarly apparatus. It's pretty academic. It's fairly serious. It's not the pop philosophy or pop analysis we dreamed of. He says the same thing in the letter to Michel Cressol. And one last thing. In Dialogues, Delores talks about Bob Dylan as a kind of model for a writing practice. He says, as a teacher, I should like to be able to give a course as Dylan organises a song, as astonishing producer rather than author. And that hit should begin, as he does, suddenly with his clown's mask, with a technique of contriving and yet improvising each detail, the opposite of a plagiarist, but also the opposite of a master or model. You could perhaps say the same thing about Warhol's work.
it's not a plagiarisation of a Brillo box a very lengthy preparation yet no methods, nor rules, nor recipes it's kind of the same thing that I was hinting at with the Lego box, the lengthy preparation in order to produce something as superficial as can be so I mean, far be it from me to try to tell you what Deleuze is on about but I don't know what we're to make of all this. That a philosophy that finally acceded to the contemporary would succeed in facing the worst and the most stupid of contemporary life and placing into circulation and making move pieces, fragments,
ragged edges of thought that aren't original works of genius but some kind of rectified ready-made, some fragmented concepts that aren't copies corresponding to a model, that aren't statements that purport to index reality copies of copies of copies with no original simulacra that are poised between the weight of a heavy cultural load that no one can escape and the lightness that comes from going all the way through the nihilism of commodification and repetition to emerge into a vertiginous dizziness beyond the judgment of God. Some kind of writing machines proliferated through ciphers in the name of no author.
Does he mean something like this? Surely that can't be what he means. I'm not entirely joking here because as time goes on I become more and more interested in the culture, the online culture around urbanomic than in the contents of the book I find it absolutely fascinating this is where the things that you put out there really come alive and take on a life of their own and particularly with the kind of supposed movement of speculative realism which never really existed and then with accelerationism it's really fascinating because their journey into the stupidity factory of social media what's fascinating about it is you can't counter it with any kind of authority, never mind the authority
of reason. You have to just accept that the things that you thought you created have their own destiny and you release them into culture as you would release something into a Petri dish. For them to operate culturally means you giving up dictating what they mean. And that again just intensifies this tension about, well, how does that sit with the idea of doing philosophy? One of the recent books that we published, Agnes Gero's book Dialectic of Pop, has really helped me to think through some of these things. Her starting point here is to try and understand pop as a form.
What's the... How can we understand pop as a particular modern form of art in the same way that we understand cinema as a form or photography as a form? The starting point is that with pop music, we're always dealing with recordings, mediated, mass-produced objects, right? Hence, we're always dealing with simulacra, copies of copies which don't have an original, really. which of course in itself is popular and democratic although obviously with vinyl today we know there's always a way to turn something into a fetishism but in any case a pop song is always something that's recorded pop songs aren't folk songs they're not rooted in a tradition they don't exist apart from the singer
they always exist with a particular one singer who sung it at one particular time they're also not written, scored, serious, classical music. They're intimately welded to their media. Again, there's this thing of being fused to the media of distribution. If a pop song is re-recorded by someone else, it's a different song. It's no longer the same work. And the whole book is written kind of against, but also with Adorno, who is the most kind of famous philosophical, as Agnes puts it, hater. Adorno is absolutely merciless about the craven submission to market forces of pop music its stupidity, its industrial nature
and what Agnus tries to show is that pop has a history of its own pop also has an awareness of that history and an awareness of the kind of thing it is the kind of practice it is pop already knows that it's fake and within the canon of pop songs what actually drives forward the pop form what enables it to this day to keep producing new things is its confrontation with its own internal its own internal strife about what it is about the fact that it's never going to be authentic so in a sense she agrees with Adorno but says yeah but pop music already knows this
and that's why it's so good so Ania says then that pop continues to strive for what she calls the utopia of popularity that is for something that has the depth of a work of art yet at the same time is something that anyone can pick up and listen to and get immediately without any training You know, completely counter to the kind of high modernist, abstruse music that Adorno was the great promoter of. For Adorno, like, the more difficult the music, the better it is. You know, the less people who can understand it, the more that proves that it's real music. So, I guess I'm saying that this, to me, feels like something similar to my own dilemma in philosophy, right?
How can you get that immediacy while still doing something that is enriched by the history of the discipline? But also kind of refusing to bow to the authority of those who presume to dictate what is or isn't music, what is or isn't philosophy. so the popular of pop says Agnes Gero must be conceived of as the hope of a reconciliation pop is the hope of a reconciliation between immediacy and truth between delight and reflection between entertainment and emancipation so with and against Adorno who she describes as an objective enemy
but a subjective ally she says yes pop is enslaved to the industry and the clichés and the constraints of it. But it knows this already. It's conscious of its artificiality, and that's what drives it. The dream of expressive immediacy and the demon of irony are always both present in every pop song. And if one of them gains the upper hand, then that's the death of the pop song. It needs both in order to drive them forward. This also gives pop a peculiar temporality. It's not a folk temporality of the cycle and the tradition. but neither is it the high modernist temporality in the Adornian sense in which one always has to determinately negate what went before. So in order for a musical form to be valid now,
it has to negate what went before. And in fact, Gero takes to task some of the music critics who tried to bring this type of temporality to pop music as if pop was always moving forward on this vector in which each song was somehow more something or other than the one that went before. She says, no, pop historicity, pop temporality is a syncretism. It's to do with scraps, patchwork, or collage. In the sense, close to what Deleuze talks about when he's talking about this ideal relation of philosophy to its history. Of pop, she says, it feasts shamelessly on the scraps of modernity.
So it's continually picking up all of these pieces from its own history and from its outside and putting them together in order to try and construct once again this utopia which it knows it's never successively going to create. So the history of urbanomic, if it's a kind of dramatization of my own psychological predicament or a history of my careening from one thing to another, trying to build this bridge. In this kind of tension, what Gero's analysis has allowed me to do is to try and understand that it's not a matter of trying and failing to do pop philosophy, but instead trying to understand it as an ongoing task and to continue to commit to this
never resolved tension because that tension is the motor that drives it pop forward and makes it productive. So, as a final conclusion, take Agnes Gerol's idea that pop is a utopia and the movement toward that utopia is driven by this ambivalent dialectical play between the search for democratic access and the need for immediacy and this commitment to the history and to the essence of what philosophy is. And then take Deleuze's idea of pop as the pushing of the mechanised habituation of everyday modern life to the point where it breaks open and reveals the vertigo of some kind of virtual futures.
I think then in light of what I've said about the way in which urbanomics has produced an audience, I would say that a pop philosophy is impossible today because it's necessarily a philosophy for an audience, for a population yet to come. It's a question of an art, a form and a commerce that would call that people forth. That feasts on the scraps of its own history only to regurgitate them in a continually mutating montage of concepts that it mixes with materials scavenged from elsewhere. It may sometimes fall short of the judgments of rigor and of reason, but I think it has its own dynamic that doesn't need to bow to any of those things.
And that's all. Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to make a brief and irritating announcement while Robin is taking a breath. So we're about to open the floor to questions. And doubtless, after such a wonderful talk, but also as the fans of Collapse and Urbanomic that you are, you desperately want to get on with this and ask questions. But I'm just going to say that because this event is being recorded for tonight, when you ask your questions, when you put your hand up, I'm going to come over and hold this little recorder in front of your faces, which might mean I have to stand a bit creepily close to you.
Sorry in advance. Okay. But this is Trades Hall. a space we in the MECP love it's designed to deny you bourgeois comfort hence the heating and the chairs and also me sticking this recorder in your faces so thank you please, questions for Robin also I can answer questions in the bar if other people prefer that I'm not saying I prefer it but I might do don't indulge their bourgeois complacency but yes we are going to the bar afterwards but questions And... While we're all gathered... Yeah. Yeah. Is that... Yeah. John. John. All right. Sorry, I'll get in. Creepy at me for a while.
Yeah, not for the first time. Not for the last. Please, please. This will be up close. Right. Yeah, thank you, Robert. I'm really fascinated by your use of quietude and inquietude. Because you can also see that stupidity can be thought of as quietude, you know, I'm not thinking anymore, I'm completely passive. And then inquietude as this incessant striving to overcome that kind of quietude. But I'm wondering again, coming back to your initial class analysis, how much can you separate that from the dynamics of capital? I mean, because the other person who really loves ceaseless striving, ceaseless, restlessness, ceaseless inquietude is Hobbes.
One of the great theorists of modernity says, look, the essence of man is not this inquietude, it is indeed inquietude. That's what's driving capital. And there's always this weird tension between modernity, the new, inquietude, and obviously therefore pop. And I wonder, can we find therefore if you like, a way, I was fascinated by this dialectic, so tempting to thread the needle between stupid quietude, capitalist inquietude, and a good therefore philosophical, well, will it be inquietude, or is that too tainted by capitalism? Or can we in fact recover a philosophical quietude
that is neither stupidity nor bourgeois capitalist, ceaseless driving for power? Orgy goes to the pub. I really don't mind. I'm quite hot and bursting. No, I think that's a great question. And, I mean, isn't Deleuze's answer for that, that one has to carry out this kind of forcing operation by which the scraps of inquietude, which capitalism allows you to get a hold of in order to sell you something to make you feel better have to be kind of pushed further. That's what I understand. How dare you, sir.
yeah I don't know I have an answer to that but it's yeah you're right there's kind of there's parts of what I've said that need to be joined up more in order to make sense of that alright anyone else I was just wanting to raise the idea, how can there be like a dialectics of pop?
Isn't it kind of like an absence of dialectics? It's like all these like impulsive desires and like wish images constantly like impinging in from some sort of collectively produced death world where everything is constantly ending and beginning. Yeah, just raising that if you have any thoughts. Well, you mean if you're thinking about pop music as a kind of overloaded scene and this desire in a lot of this movement? Yeah, I was wondering, does dialectics even really have a role? Well, yeah, I mean, Agnus' argument is that, you know, if it was, that pop is never simply about that kind of, if you like, accelerationist satisfaction through this crazy kind of overproduction of desire.
precisely because it's a form. And as a form, it's always in... it's defined by this dialectical tension. I mean, I don't know if I would want to use the... use the dialectical method myself to analyse that, but that's her argument. Sorry, I'm not sure I'm answering your question, but... I don't know, why do you think there couldn't be a dialectics? involved in that? Because there's nothing negative, you mean? Um, yeah, it just doesn't really seem like it can, it's like constantly sort of like forming and deforming in such a way that... Yeah, but what drives it to form and reform is that it's continually taking on positive
new elements from outside. It's continually like scavenging off things from outside and from its own history and producing new forms, but it also has this kind of constitutive negativity whereby it knows that it's, if you like, a kind of inferior form. It knows that it's fake. It knows that it's mechanized and industrialized, and therefore it's always trying to address the negativity that's inside itself. So that's her argument against Dorner, is you don't need to tell pop this because it already knows it and that's already something that drives it forward. So that's the negativity in her argument. I'm confused about how pop can know anything about itself,
that perspective, how pop can know anything about itself because it seems like it's sort of like an amalgamation of things that are sort of thrown at it so that it can kind of be produced. I'm just perplexed how it can... Are you talking about pop music? Yeah, I suppose, generally pop music, I suppose. How it can know anything about itself because it doesn't seem like it's... The really interesting thing you see about Agnes' book is that she's a pop singer herself. So I really trust her analysis as something that also comes out of her reflecting on her own process and what she's trying to do in making a pop song, which must be something like that. It must be kind of agonising
to start making a pop song and realise people have been making pop songs for almost 100 years. What on earth am I doing? Trying to make a new pop song. So there has to be this kind of reflection within each practitioner's process of creating new pop new pop because I mean yeah but then it would seem like pop songs would come before culture and it like that seems incorrect it seems like you know culture would inspire certain pop songs first so to say that like pop knows itself seems I don't know I'm having trouble with that in that argument she does specifically
say that she's not considering pop in terms of pop culture the book is dedicated only to the form of pop song so she tries to think about it I mean it is a formalist rigorous philosophical formalist analysis which I'm sure people might take issue with I only really kind of brought it in insofar as it was useful to me in thinking about my own predicament. But, yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah, so I guess there's obviously, there's a different approach to the problem of the contemporary, if we're talking about Deleuze, right, which would be I guess this notion of like the
of the untimely or untimeliness this kind of Nietzschean kind of thing. so I guess my question is I mean an uncharitable, a really uncharitable reading of kind of what you've just spoken about would be okay if we imagine a philosopher who's kind of synthesising things in a kind of really accessible way kind of magpie-like borrowing from different traditions kind of weaving it together using modern technology I mean this sounds like it might be describing like a Jordan Peterson say, right? So like, I mean in what sense I guess is this, I think, this very correct injunction to philosophy to think the contemporary, how does it not then dissolve into just a kind of equivalence with the
contemporary, such that there's no possibility of rupture or disruption? Does that make sense? Yeah. It's basically self-help, drawing on timeless wisdom. Yeah. Which, I mean, it does have this appeal to authority embedded within it, doesn't it? Well, I mean, that's my point. I can't think of a more quintessentially timely thinker, like someone who's absolutely a product of just a kind of conservative status quo. So you're asking me how I can ensure that my enterprise is watertight from the point of view of becoming Jordan Peterson. No, no, I'm just wondering sort of what would be the condition.
I mean, it seems like there's kind of a role for a politics or maybe a metaphysics or something that's underpinning. I mean, what makes these things genuinely disruptive as opposed to disruptive in the sense of just kind of marketing a new innovation? Because I agree, absolutely, by the way, with the kind of tenor of your... I think it's an empirical, experimental question. You can always end up in a black hole. You can always spin off into something unsavory and timely, and you just have to keep up a kind of vigilance against that. And that vigilance, for me, is precisely the same thing as the inquietude.
It's like the refusal to ever accept a stable position that might enable you to make a comfortable living and stop being worried about what you're doing all the time, constantly. So yeah, I guess it's like just keep on poking the stick into your wound and you'll be okay. Just going back to the first two questions, let's say capital, contra, the dialectic. Yeah so to be dialectical involves some level of like socio-semantics right, you know at
least the kind of people that you're publishing like it's a process of giving and asking for reasons and so on. So how is that, like both pop music and the kind of pop philosophy that you're doing, is it really dialectical in that sense because it's like what you're saying at the end that it's not what you're producing isn't yours it's like you put it out there into culture and it works or not like it's not you don't get to decide what it is like the same thing with it's not like people are you know the kind of main culture around urban omic it's not like people are giving and asking for reasons about this like that's just pure production right like so it's more the kind of processing to be more like something like scientific understood as experimental rather than like a dialectical kind of collective yeah well thing I think what I'm doing ultimately
and maybe it's cowardly it's like refusing to decide between those two positions and saying what continues to be interesting to me about what I'm doing is that both of those things are happening and that they're kind of feeding into one another in a really interesting way that you have like I'm lucky enough I guess not to have had any authors so far who've seriously come back and complained to me and said stop shitposting about my rationalist masterpiece. That's kind of what's interesting about where we are culturally right now. The two things are kind of in constant interplay. Yeah, I think refusing
to refusing to position yourself in one camp or the other is the order of the day. But, you know, one thing I was going to mention, I didn't, because I think it might be kind of too specific a cultural reference. When I think about this stuff, I always think about the series Nathan Barley. I don't know if anyone's seen that. Which is kind of about this total idiot who's a kind of, what's he called himself, hypermedia node. who's like an early dot-com entrepreneur. And then there's this other guy who's like the critic who writes this piece called Have the Idiots Won or something, which is like all of these hipsters with their spurious internet companies
are taking over London, and they go around wearing stupid things on their head on tiny little skateboards and so on. And this amazing scene, I don't know if it's right at the end, but there's this amazing scene in Nightclub where you have the critic who's looking on and is just appalled because Nathan Barley's got on stage and he's doing this atrocious rap and the terrible thing is that everyone in the club loves it and they're all pumping their fists as he just spouts this total absurd, mean nonsense and there's a kind of sense in which you can't help but be on his side and be like, yeah, but idiocy has this kind of pure positivity to it that's hard to refuse and it's hard to be on the side of the critic who's saying, you know, shut all this down and let's think about this
sensibly, you know so I think it's the same with that meme culture, it's like you say, it's this pure positivity but it's not just repetition it kind of produces new stuff all the time, continuously that surprises you but what its relation is to the concept I don't know it's very difficult to understand but you know in the case of accelerationism of course it's really disturbing you know because I'm when was that published? 2012? 2014? Like five years later I'm in the position of having published a book that you know a guy who's gone and shot loads of people has put on his manifesto
accelerationism at that point what do you do? Do you say, do you like write a rebuttal of it? Or do you just accept that words have their own destiny and they go where they're going to go? Those kind of dilemmas are really crucial to understanding where discourse is in contemporary life. Well, given that it's almost time, that is very uncomfortable. I need some much more comfort. Thank you.