DOCH Lectures Mark Fisher 29-30 May 2011 #4

Thank you. Okay, so that's a track of the Dark Star album called North, which came out last year.

The significance of that record that is partly to do with its context, it came out on a hyperdub label which is largely but not exclusively associated with dubstep. And it really comes out of this trajectory that I was talking about yesterday, starting off with Rave going through Jungle, Drum and Bass, Garage. And I think this track then, and the whole sound of it, and the whole album, North, is quite symptomatic for a number of reasons. One of

which is just the level of introversion and melancholy that is palpable in that track and the whole sound of it. By comparison with the collective euphoria of the start of that lecturing. So from being a music that was about certain experience of collectivity, it becomes a music about isolation, a particular quality of melancholy, which I started to point to yesterday, some of the causes of that melancholy, and kind of digital melancholy.

And that's what I really want to explore today, partly, is the form of that digital melancholy, particularly in relation to what I see as this crisis of space-time brought about by communicative capitalism, you could say. So the first thing to know about that music then is the sadness, the introversion, the fact that it's really about an individual in a way that the music that inspired it was really not. The second thing to note about it is the strange atemporality of the sound.

Now, though that came out in 2010, there's nothing very much marking it out as coming from 2010. There's certain glitches or effects on the vocal digital effects that you wouldn't expect to have found on a record coming out in 1990. But if you'd have heard of something like that, wouldn't have caused you a great shock. I think part of the temporal dimension of the crisis I'm talking about is this issue of, well, atemporality.

The question of, just perform this test in your mind. If you could imagine something being played on the radio in a particular year from the past that has come out now, Would it have caused a shock or not? And I think increasingly, we can imagine going further and further back in time with music that is now presented to us as contemporary and imagining it not causing a shock. So I think if that, can we imagine that record played in as far back as 1980 even, and people being shocked, or even surprised or perturbed? I don't think so even. I think we can imagine that record coming on the radio in 1980, and people thinking it was some group inspired by New Order

or something like that. That's quite odd. I think we take this for granted now. Think how long ago 1980 is. You know, 1980 is like that. I have to remind myself, you know, 30 years ago. over 30 years ago. And just think about the difference between 1950 and 1980. You know, if you took, let's say, a New Order record from 1980 and took it back to 1950 and put that on the radio, there would be a lot of disjuncture there. You know, people would be surprised at what they were hearing. You know, the whole span, think of the whole span.

1950 pre-rock and roll to 1980 post-punk, disco. Post-disco by that point. You know, everything was in between that. You know, vast changes in music and culture. The 30 years subsequent, we're in a situation where, you know, a group who, you know, are coming out of the, issue a record on one of the leading sort of popular experimental labels in the UK and we can conceive of that record having come out 30 years ago. I'm not saying it actually could have done, but the point is that it's possible to perform that thought experiment, isn't it?

Where someone did hear it and thought, okay. Now this is not criticism of Dark Star or criticism of anything really. It's just to point to the strange and involuted and sort of enfolded temporality in which we now live. The increasingly flattened out nature of sort of cultural time. second slide yes right okay we've moved we've moved forward right okay um okay so uh anyone recognize this what uh what you know what film this is from interesting no it's uh that um that's no that's really good though uh it's from the terminal

Have you seen this film? It's on British TV every week. It seems to be on every week. I see it halfway through and I don't think I've ever seen the whole thing. But I keep watching it, I keep watching it, I don't know why. I didn't know why and then I realised the message it was trying to send me. This film is really quite a little known Spielberg film with Tom Hanks in possibly his most annoying film ever, an annoying role ever. and that's saying something given this Tom Hanks right but he plays this he plays someone who comes from a fictionalist European country but while he's flying over to the US there's some civil war

in his country and that country ceased to exist so he becomes a stateless citizen so that when he arrives in the JFK he's not allowed to leave the airport and so he has to stay in the airport for weeks and I don't know if it's a month a long time anyway and apparently it's based on a real case actually and okay so what message is this trying to send me okay well this what is the fantasy here well remember that you know Baudrillard said the point of Disneyland was to establish that it was a real America that was beyond that could be differentiated from Disneyland well isn't the point of the terminal to establish that there is a real America beyond the airport that will be different from being in the airport itself.

You know, that when you leave, when Tom Hanks' character gets to leave the airport, there'll be something vastly different from this array of shops and chain stores and all of that that he can go into. You know, that is not true. But what is interesting, having just been to JFK recently for the first time, is the way that this airport bears no relation to JFK. And that's not a very good image of it, actually. But if you see the film, the film is full of sort of franchise, retail, multinationals, all of that. JFK is actually pretty modest, the amount of shops that are there. Is it American or Russian airport? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's really, particularly if you've come from Heathrow, Terminal 5, where you're immersed in a global shopping mall. And to go to the US, it is somewhat Sovietized, it feels like. They just learn about, oh, we can have shops at airports. So they constructed this simulated, hyper-commodified, hyper-commercialized JFK for this film. and here's perhaps one other dimension of capitalist realism you know capitalist realism when I coined the term I didn't actually coin it the way I used it is kind of specific I suppose to a series of interests of mine but actually other people have used it before notably a group of German pop artists in the 60s

who really used it as an echo which I also intended of socialist realism. You know, socialist realism, you know, as what brought in under Stalin to replace the early efflorescence of modernism after the 1917 revolution, to bring back sort of familiar images, familiar propagandists, familiar and familial propagandistic images, you know, their family together, all muscle bands and all of that, with, you know, plows and machinery. And part of my notion of capitalist realism was, we clearly live in the midst of that, but it's PR and advertising which are our equivalent of that.

And of course, if one is to realistically represent what it's like to live in capitalism, then you have to have lots of brands everywhere, lots of product placement. And the level of product placement in the terminal is massive. Every scene has got him in some retail outlet or holding some debris from some franchise multinational in his hands. You want to take the job in the airport to be able to buy a Hugo Boss. Yes, that's right. Yes. So, okay, now, so why am I talking about this now? Well, what I'm increasingly interested in is the parallels really between what I was first talking about,

which is this sense of, to use the term, that Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk, the former cyberpunk author, has started to circulate atemporality. What is the relationship between that sense of atemporality and space? Airports were a classic example of what the French theorist Marc Auger has called a non-place. In his book Non-Places, he makes an opposition between this kind of space.