Special thanks to CTM and Transmedial for helping make this happen. Rather than do the general pattern of reading out very long bios for each panelist, I think we can cut through that and maybe just have each panelist introduce themselves and a little bit about what they do, and then we can dive right in. It'll save some time. So, Matt, maybe you'd like to get the ball rolling with that? Yeah, thanks. Hi, everyone. My name's Matt Cahoon. I'm a writer and photographer based in London. I blog under the name Xenogothic. recently written a book called Egress or Morning Melancholy and Mark Fisher that's due out on repeater books on 10th of March. My name's Lisa Blanning. I'm a former music journalist and current booking agent. I was on staff at The Wire for a while where I worked with Mark.
I'm Stephen Warwick, an artist, musician and writer. Maybe then to get the ball started, I think we have to maybe define some things first before we go ahead. One of those things that I've been thinking about is this term, the Fisher function, which was a term coined by Robin McKay a few years ago. It's one of these excellent phrases that Robin can just come up with like that, it seems. But maybe, Matt, you could maybe discuss what that Fisher function element means to you because it's such a wide thing to try and condense it down to a few sentences. Maybe it might be a good place to start. Yeah, sure. Where to start. I think, I mean I can't speak for Robin but I think part of the impetus behind that phrase coming into existence was that when Mark died it wasn't just
Mark Fisher that we lost it was we lost K-Punk also and Mark would always write about how his relationship to his blog was like an online mask that he could write through or like a sort of CCRU demon that was like a sort of possession that was just a compulsion to write. But more than that, it was everything that Mark made possible. The events that he would do, the collaborations, his just general, not so much influence, but his belief in communal activity that he wouldn't necessarily take credit for. And I think that that was, it was Mark's existence as a cog in a wider machine that he was so keen for,
emphasizing in his own work that I think the Fisher function draws attention to. Okay, so as in it was something that allowed Mark to have as a conduit sort of thing. This is what he said often about the K-Punk blog was that it's not me writing it, particularly in the earlier posts as well. Yeah, so it's literally the function of his work and other people's work that would have the function of other things on him. Yeah, as a conduit is the perfect word, I think. Yeah, I mean that's one of the fantastic things about the blogosphere is that it allows this stream of consciousness to come through. I mean, maybe I'd ask Lisa then, considering that you have a background in music journalism, have you ever felt a strong urge to just move towards blogging as it might be something that would allow you a bit more freedom there? Because I think what
comes across throughout the K-Punk project is this intense passion and care, along with vitriol for the things that he was talking about in cultural production. I mean, for me personally, no, because writing can be a pretty torturous process, although I think for someone like Mark, who I considered to be a natural-born writer, actually, in that he could write very well, very quickly, it was probably a bit of a different experience. And also, at the time, the blogosphere was a really incredibly interesting place, and it's less so now, so it was the right moment. the way that he would tell it anyway is that that was where he made contact with many people who
would turn out to be really instrumental in his practice and and really help feed a lot of ideas I think that throughout his history there was probably lots of periods like that but the blog sphere was like a a good fertile one so I think it depends on what kind of writer you are and he was definitely the right kind of writer in the sense that he would write no matter what even if he didn't have a deadline. I think that's absolutely true. I think Koju spoke at the first Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture about Mark having the skill to bring the right kind of people together through his cultural production. I think the cultural production thing is actually a central idea to what the Fisher function might be. Take Stephen, for example,
as someone who makes installations but also music and writes. it's the most interesting kind of cultural producer not someone who just sticks to one thing it's someone who creates different nodes in a network it can be a very interesting thing Do you want me to respond to your compliment? Yeah, I'd like you to respond to my compliment I mean, I think someone like Mark Fisher as a writer, especially with the K-punk within this format of blogging how there's a lot of possibility there it's not so strict with genre or format in how you write. So, you know, you could write an essay like Terminator vs Avatar or you could also essentially live blog Kanye West at Glastonbury. And he was, I don't know,
it was like written with someone certainly full of adrenaline when he's doing that. And that also brings urgency. I wouldn't say democratic, because it's a funny term, but I would say that there's a primacy to it which is very engaging and then that would make you more receptive to reading across the panel and I think that's very powerful. I think with Mark's work how he would write about music but then he would also write theory or he would write about kind of like quotidian existence whatever you want to call it. Like the music writing I appreciate how he tried to inject like a level of intellectualism into it without sounding pretentious
or Poe-faced. It kind of reminded me of when I was younger and would read something like Stephen Wells or these writers from the NME in the 90s. And it also kind of made me think about the level of interview or review or you'd have like Della Fidel or these people writing in the NME. And it was still quite, it was kind of the norm actually to talk seriously about something. and I remember there would be an interview from something like, I know PJ Harvey got interviewed and got called out for fox hunting and then after 9-11 it was just like, what drugs are you taking? So it's kind of cool that you'd have Mark Fisher blogging and kind of writing about quite wild topics and that brings with it a kind of anarchy
which I think is also very important and it kind of makes you think of like what Lisa was saying about how when the web is more standardized and then that in terms makes you more standardized it's nice to have this space where there's more potential. Has the web made us more standardized or has it made us more conflicted then? Because I don't know if it has done that. I guess it depends on how you feel about platform capitalism. Yeah. I've been thinking a little bit more on Mark Fisher's criticisms of the cyber space time crisis. This idea that there's this slow, insipid colonization of the body by technology. So I think as the web becomes more standardized and there's a uniform thing to how things are meant to look, at the same time what's happening behind it is far more chaotic, if you choose to internalize it, which most of us do.
I think we're saying like Apple or Instagram or something censoring sexual content and kind of bringing this perpetual infantilized state, which is also kind of like a very American idea of a fear of growing old and I'm not attacking America but I'm just saying that's also very common where there's like a fear of being a deaf so there's this constant need to have this like teenager as an idea or with like certain streamlining of platforms which make you infantilize you and then maybe if you want to engage with a more adult concept or discussion that could get disencouraged. Maybe spin out a little bit what you mean by they infantilize you.
I mean like if it's ignoring something like the facts of life. I think I would agree with that assessment because in the way that social media is designed to get knee-jerk reactions out of people, kind of react in an emotional response somehow because that creates more traffic or more attention grabbing instead of thinking about something or considering something and maybe that is an infantile response. Yeah, like it capitalizes a punch upon your feeling slighted or something, you know, by something. Okay. Maybe Matt could situate that then in terms of going beyond the pleasure principle.
It's like you're stuck between the life drive and the death drive constantly. Well, I mean, I think even it's almost as if the intention is to elicit a personalized response. It's like, what does this mean to you? And it always makes me think of, especially in relation to what Mark would do around the CCIU, and how you had, it was so decentralized, and it was this sense of having these masks online. I can't remember who said this, but someone from within that milieu was talking about how, So Mark wrote this essay called Practical Eliminativism, Getting Out of Your Face Again was the subtitle, and sort of having that response to removing yourself from your own ego, but from an ego that's placed on you by capitalism, what Mark would call that mandatory individualism.
So in that sense, having something that's called Facebook is sort of the worst possible outcome from sort of that late 90s moment that you would have to have, you would have a profile online that was fundamentally yours as an individual, whereas originally maybe the attraction of the web was that you could dissolve that entirely. I mean, yeah, you know, like the promise of the early internet was that it was more this kind of expanse where it was a lot more anarchic or people who weren't able to be offline could be online, be as a mode of existence or express themselves how they want to be or connect with other people who might not have access. I guess I would say the term marginalized, however you want to describe it. Yeah, and there was a lot more promising to it.
And then I guess there was like ever moving slow shift towards just individualization or self-actualization, which is very atomized and then doesn't really encourage you to communicate with someone, just at someone. And that's also the capitalist promise too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's like if you think of a profile, like having a plot of land of your house and your garden and your car. Come to this point then, because Mark Fisher is this highly revered analyst of what the contemporary moment is and what culture, what stakes are involved in actually participating in it. But at the same time, interestingly, Mark Fisher never really tells people exactly what to do with their culture. It's not very determinate, you know what I mean? It's kind of a strange thing, this is a very healthy analysis.
But at the same time, it doesn't quite bring, like the stakes are never told, okay, well, why not try this new thing, you know? And it's something that, like, having seen him speak many times, that there was this, often a criticism made of his work, that, oh, well, you're just complaining about the culture, and that, you know, that you don't understand youth culture, or something like that, and he said, well, you know, show me something new. But at the same time, I think something that's missed in that was that this criticism that there's no shock of the new in culture, that there can't be something new, and that everything's a pastiche in postmodernism and that. I think what's lost in that possibility is that if you stop thinking about cultural production in terms of objects like books or records or fixed text pieces, and what he's very good at is contextualising them. There's no disrespect to the person, but I never thought I'd really get excited about the musician Roshin Murphy.
Not that much. But reading Mark Fisher, writing about it and contextualising it as the teleology of that glam tradition being in some suburban festival in London, that's something that gets you quite excited about it without actually having to listen to Roshin Murphy's music. not that I have a problem with it, you know what I mean? But that's something that as people involved in cultural production I'd like your opinion on is there may be a possibility to take this idea of no future shock and take it away from the object and move it towards something that requires much more concepts. Maybe that's an excuse for this conceptronica phrase, for example. Which I have no problem with, by the way. I think it's a symptom of the same discussion of the individualising nature of capitalism. The cultural presence is the same. so rather than reifying the individual you reify a genre
this album is this it's what Mark would call a popular modernism it's placing or dissolving yourself into a continuum from a modernist standpoint it's like a Virginia Woolf thing I think in her book Mrs. Dalloway she makes Mrs. Dalloway say that she refuses to say I am this and I am that and removes that as something that she's supposed to do and it's that impetus to refuse to say that you are this or that or putting yourself in a box or being put in a box for the sake of commodification in all of its guises. That's the sort of thing that I think is being resisted there. Because I think there's a controversy around that sort of shock of the new. Because I think especially at a festival like this,
there's plenty of stuff that's exciting and new. But it's that subtle tension between contextualising in terms of a continuum or contextualising in terms of a label. And they're not quite the same thing, I don't think. Why not? Because it's where you sit to be part of a continuum, to sort of position yourself in trying not to use the word tradition. With a teleology? Yeah, right. It's an expression of a... Well, I guess you're talking about life and death drives. To go that way with it, it's where you fit in a fundamentally human or existential mode rather than capitalist commodified instance of being over time and being timeless, being untimely,
being the goal, I guess. Which would bring us nicely to egress, maybe, because this idea of analyzing the teleology and collectivism of a culture, which I think is the shorthand definition of egress, maybe. Sorry to make a shorthand definition. No, no, well, it's tricky, because I feel like part of the horror of a lot of stuff that Mark was dealing with, and the CCIE more generally, is sort of Lovecraftian, Kantian horror of being stuck within time. And we can't escape that. Everything is defined temporally. And that ends up, I mean, that's a potentially big tangent. But that raises lots of questions about how you define yourself culturally. Okay, let's come back to egress and horror then, because actually there was an interesting
email thread going in relation to Stephen's work, how you discussed horror, that maybe you and Stephen would like to go back and forth about. Well I guess to re-go over the email I sent when we were chatting yesterday, I had the pleasure of seeing Stephen do a, what do you want to call it, a performance lecture. That vagueness is what's fantastic about Stephen's work. Yeah, for sure. But it was about the X-Files and you were talking about pre or post 9-11, that sense of the horror of the interior of things intruding on the home as a domestic space or even on the individual as a person. Yeah, like this supposedly neutral vacuum which was created between the fall of the Iron Curtain and 9-11. And then the need for an enemy.
your phrase which I liked a lot of the horror of interiority like the invasion of your domestic space the rise of the internet and again like this transition from the early web to 2.0 as we know it now Nora Khan and I we read it together we were writing about the X-Files but we were using that as a kind of device to talk about other things which were a lot more scary, horrifying. We're kind of talking about nationalism, racism, borders, fear. Fear as a tool to divide people, but also to control people. But then instead focusing on selected episodes of the X-Files,
because then that's this way of having a conversation which could be more lighthearted. It's something that people could relate to. it's also something that you could kind of reflect back on and think about like a nostalgia you might have had or like this childhood comfort but when I certainly or we certainly look back on it we realised that a lot of the episodes were quite problematic yeah like you would see like the club space would be a zone of danger you would see there was one when there was a serial killer who can shift gender and they hang out in clubs I mean, you can see where that's going. And then also the X-Files was a place, a TV series which its first fan base developed online.
And we were interested in this early computing of hanging out in chat rooms and how Chris Carter would lurk in them to kind of change the narrative or see how people respond to in this kind of public opinion kind of way. and yeah certainly like my interest in someone like Chris Carter would be like Hitchcock or something of how they would play with societal fears sometimes satirically but to kind of maybe counteract this controlling fear that people have but to do it in a more subversive way via satire and I guess yeah so we would from that talk I guess one of the questions that I had for was then how that research, if at all, informs your most recent record, Moi,
which is very... Well, I wonder, is there a link between that that you see of that fear of interiority and all those things that were then intruding in the sense of the X-Files? And that sort of, I guess, it's almost meta-conspiratorial in the Chris Carter sense. Yeah, I mean, I'd say the record, Moi, yeah again it's like quite humorous on the record you know on the face of it is actually quite existential or a lot of dread or anxiety but then also there's moments of calm you know there's one track consolatio uh when when i perform i dress as pinhead from hellraiser but in that way i was almost like being camp with that
because my interest in Hellraiser was how it was like this gay S&M story which got transfixed onto a nuclear family and it got censored by the studio and I was very interested in that lack of that big elephant in the room when that happened and I think that's why that makes that film so odd or uncanny or however you want to describe it I mean you know like calling your record moi you know like yeah everyone can relate to themselves maybe that's a play on that or can you or can you you're also playing you're playing on lots of different voices and things too right so there's like a sense that you're also you're relating to yourself but you're also playing with yourself at the same time yeah yeah I mean it's just I guess
I find that right now there's a big focus on how you present yourself and then that can relate to say passing and I think about the kind of radical possibility, dare I say, of passing. And there used to be a kind of subversive quality to that of passing as something which you might not be. And then when something is so literal and it becomes this checklist of how something has to be, then that kind of kills it. I mean, I think what's most important, a big thing for me on the record was that people were going up to me and were like, oh, I listened to your record, or I listened to it online. I like the humour of it. It made me laugh and it made me smile.
It just made me feel something. And I feel that's good. Is that good though? I'm not saying it's bad, but when you over-sentimentalise something, it can be a dangerous ground to get into. And I think this is like discussing what makes good music journalism. I think, and this is something again that the Cape Point Project did very well. It kind of set a standard for other music journalists. Because I find in a lot of music journalism that I read now, there's heavy, heavy, heavy use of hyperbolic language that doesn't need to be used there. It's not as analytical, it's more sentimental. I mean, as people who, the three of you, you all write about culture. What is it that is a defining quality in making a good piece of cultural analysis in writing? I think if it's dialogical, because if you're just being hyperbolic,
then what is that? If it's actually analytical, it looks at different sides of something, maybe it argues something outside of what you would normally think about it challenges your perception maybe could you resolve liking something which you have a problem with and another aspect of it like these kind of questions as a writer coming to terms with it or a consumer of it or someone receiving that cultural artifact but I mean more about if something's simply hyperbolic then he could be a TV evangelist I don't want to end up referring too much to notes and quotes, but there is this quote from Mark Fisher's text from We Want It All 2006, and he's quoting Nietzsche from Beyond
Good and Evil, and he asks, what are the conditions in which great cultural artifacts can emerge? What is a great cultural artifact, but what are the conditions that can produce it? But of course he's in typical K-punk style, leaps in the next paragraph towards celebrityality and celebrity big brother culture. There's another quote here from a mythical figure from the Descensus blog called Marcello, who I'm still not quite sure who this person is, but it says where once we assembled in front of screens or stages doing and cheering things we could never hope of doing or achieving ourselves, now all we do is require a humbling mirror, which is what Celebrity TV, Big Brother and that. So I mean, that doesn't seem to me like a situation that can produce a great cultural artifact necessarily, but with a very, very good writer like K-Punk, there could be a
nuance brought to it. I guess so, but then if you're going to be devil's advocate, you could be just like a really savvy spin doctor who's like intellectualizing a bad cultural artifact. But what's the defining quality then between a piece of journalism that does that and one that's actually like sincere? Difficult question, right? It's probably in the eye of the beholder, but I would actually, to me, one of the questions that comes out of that is the writing about culture in and of itself. So for instance, let's say Mark writing about what we might think of as trashy culture is spinning, is producing really great cultural artifacts or great culture out of, it's metaculture maybe, but in and of itself
he is a creator of really lasting, important culture. So there's perhaps that. I also wonder if there's a sense that there's a positive feedback loop at work in that sort of circumstance where like sort of saying that Mark was an analyst, I always sort of think that that's not the best way to describe him, that he's almost more of like a diagnostician. and I always think of that in terms of there's this Deleuze essay where he talks about the critical and the clinical and he has this whole spiel about how sadism and masochism as medical terms come from writers they come from Seder Masoch and the Marquis de Sade and how and he sort of
wonders where that relationship has come from but that feedback loop between those two things one one that is inherently cultural and one that is then medical that relationship is, there's something in that that needs to be paid more attention to and I feel like that's the same, I think it was Kojo Eshin that said that before the K-Punk anthology was announced by Repeater, Kojo suggested that a great name for the collection would have been Essays Critical and Clinical if that hadn't already been taken by Deleuze and I think that's what Mark was so great about a lot of his writing, especially his personal stuff we're talking about mental health and at the same time then talking about capitalism so you have this like a medical sense to his writing well in a very loose way and then you have the cultural sense and it's how those two things relate and they are a feedback loop where one they influence
each other and so like one of Mike's most famous essays on the K-Punk blog maybe been writing about Dido's Life to Rent album and sort of seeing that as both the product of a mainstream malaise, but also then giving that malaise holding a mirror up to it. So you have an individual or some sort of cultural expression of something that then makes that, its audience more aware of it. And then that produces more things. Then, yeah, more mirrors. Just everyone's producing mirrors. But through that, that's how things move forwards. It doesn't always work that way. And that's where you kind of get this, you get stuck in a hall of mirrors potentially of hauntology but
I feel like it's his what Mark always tried to draw out of culture when he was writing about it was where that relationship was most productive and it wasn't always but recognizing instances where it was and is is the most important thing to do as a theorist or a music journalist or whatever else kind of going back to that question you were thinking which also connects to what Matt was just saying in terms of moving having this hardcore continuum or shock of the new or however you want to describe it and how someone could not necessarily talk about that mode of production but then go into the conditions that surround it maybe something about
Mark's writing which was very powerful was that it would hold a mirror up against something and you could distinctly separate that from something which you could call it poptimism or something which I have a big problem with. I think the way that Mark would write about something is very not poptimist. It would talk about a pop cultural artifact but dissect it quite well as opposed to just have this let's shatter high and low. Maybe that's a way to think about it. But what happens when you hold a mirror up to something? that's the point that I'm trying to determine here because I can see its use as a tool. But, okay, in a culture, we're at a music festival
so it's a good point to discuss. I mean, I've definitely seen this as someone who's been a fan of the hardcore continuum for as long as I can remember. But there's been a shift in terms of the cult of the artists, an age of mandatory individualism, of pathological individualism. But it seems to me that in this current moment it's just been pushed to some sort of crazy, not a conclusion because it hasn't concluded yet but there's, and I mean for you Lisa as well for someone who works quite hands on with individual artists, I mean I think you're aware of this also it's the solution to it definitely isn't this thing that was happening 10 years ago with Bergen techno and having faceless records with just a stamp on it, that's not the solution to the thing and again that's like Margiela like having an anti-logo yeah but again that's a
an anachronistic thing to do because again like the Mark Fisher way of thinking of this would be that we don't want to harken back to something like nostalgia is not the, you'll drown in what did Mark Leckie say? Drowning in the ruins of or miring in the ruins of nostalgia. I mean it's an interesting place to be but I see the current state of things is just this, the individual is more important than the product and I'm aware that I've also said just a few moments ago that the artifact is not the most important thing but this push of the individual is something that I think is possibly having a damaging effect on the scene. I mean, I think there was someone, I don't want to say names of people, but there was someone who said recently on social media, on Twitter, could you possibly be a musician without an Instagram account? Well, I mean, now,
some people definitely manage it. I will say that, obviously, speaking from experience working with musicians, but I think it varies depending on which scene you operate in and what level you're operating at, and obviously at the level that perhaps a festival like CTM cares most deeply about and at a personal level that Mark was most personally invested in, although obviously his interests were wide and varied, it goes back to the whole idea of seniors and of course this was a really important thing for the hardcore continuum and all of that. So I think that that's still super relevant. I'm sorry, I'm trying to get back to what the original question is. even if it might appear on the face of it
that everything is about the individual for an artist or whatever it's certainly not how it works behind the scenes but there are solutions there's a lot of artists associated with Njegi Njegi I'm sorry if I'm not pronouncing that correctly are being represented at this festival I don't think of Njegi Njegi as an individual there's a collectivism that's happening there with that project which is really exciting and considering that a lot of things that happen within this sort of niche end of culture, migrate to the center and generally become standardized. I'm thinking of this quote from Fischer, that, so what can we do now? First of all, it is imperative to reject identitarianism and to recognize that there are no identities, only desires. And that's quite a strong statement where he's talking about more in terms of what the problems with the left. But if we're taking this slightly more microcosm element of the music scene,
I think it would be quite a healthy thing maybe to end this sort of identitarian essentialism, which just comes with you can't be an artist without a press photo or something like that. Yeah, but that's... Yeah, I mean, that's a false narrative. I mean, I've certainly got friends who don't particularly operate on social media and they sell records, tour, travel. I mean, also, you could argue that, like, you know, this idea of a collective is the new idea of an individualism because there's definitely a trend and these collectives do ultimately trickle down to one person. And that's actually that strange market logic. There is like a sad need in that market to have one face.
That's what they like to have. I think if you try to resist that, that's interesting. But it's almost like sometimes you'll have a collective and there'll be like collateral for one person to further an agenda. So I'm not completely, as much as I'm not particularly interested in individualism, I'm equally skeptical about this neo-collectivity, especially in a music circuit, but also in other worlds. I mean, think about the hardcore continuum. It was very obsessed with labeling something. And then if you think about the music made in the last 10 years, there's not really a name for it. someone tried to call it deconstructed club or whatever which is of course a dumb term but isn't that queerer or weirder to resist naming it
doesn't that not essentialize it you could think of terms of naming something something with interpolation you are this I think the most important thing that's left out of Mark talking about identitarianism sounds really provocative, especially now. And it's also something that doesn't operate the same in the UK as it does in the US, for example. No, but that term in its original sense was like a label for the right, like a national identitarianism so that you define yourself by... Well, I mean, this comes down to it. So I think the main... There's power relations. You can't just sort of... The sense that we have to react against whatever's in vogue in terms of cultural problems.
In terms of cultural scenes, I mean, it's... It breeds false narratives, as Stephen was saying, in the sense that, I think, for Mark, what was important about using that term was that you shouldn't define yourself in order to appeal to the big other. And in a sense, the right, that's appealing to the state. Well, that's generally how it's perceived. So in left identitarian politics, the radicality of naming who you are, get caught up in making it easier for the state to then identify you. And I think that that rejection of identitarianism has to go all the way down
in terms of like, it's retaining your own fluidity and whether that's, yeah, whether that means that 10 years time everyone's going to be individual artists or it's collective now, those things are sort of by the by it's sort of like how you respond to that cat and mouse game of capture. If you're being captured by a capitalist system and staying one step ahead of that process, I think that's the most important lesson from that. There's never going to be a final answer. You have to adapt every time because capitalism, as Mark would always say, it's virulent and it will always, keeping one step ahead of it is almost an impossible task,
but it's the only task worth fighting for. Well, that's the analogy of the thing, isn't it? Right, sure, yeah. It will absorb everything. And it will, and it's like that. I guess the word is also vigilance. There's no doubt that whatever's coming up next as the new radical way of doing things will be captured sooner or later by market forces. And it's at that point when you have the vigilance to recognise that and move on to the next thing. and that's I think where you get the new from I think that's what Mark mourned when he said that there was nothing new anymore in terms of like I mean I guess it's a reaction to the whole Britpop indie band thing but also the mourning of talking about death of Rave Mark wrote so much about Rave and how it was there was a Thatcherite project especially in the UK
of shutting down those potentials but they have re-emerged elsewhere and it's sort of being able to allow them to flourish which becomes more and more difficult but still that's been the task for I mean Mark would write that was the task for centuries whether it was having a rave or having a fate or talking about the carnival-esque one of Mark's best essays I think was in a collection called Rave I think it was published by Black Dog Publishing it was an essay called Baroque Sunbursts and that's the continuum that Mark sort of draws amazingly in that text is sort of saying that rave is a is part of a continuum that was just lump and proletariat excess the state always tries to shut down but never can i was thinking maybe about also you
know in terms of this like individual defining versus power relation i mean doesn't also say so you know like your question was like can you be nice without having an instagram i mean anyone who's like really in power in this world is quite anonymous they're not if you google them they're not particularly online. And it's just like this weird running man game amongst people like us who are just like forced to like, it's like a pervert watching a boxing match. Can we say then that, okay, so there's interesting analysis going on here in terms of what the cultural moment is, but something that Fisher spoke about a lot was, and again he's talking about it more in terms of cultural politics, but I still think we need to keep it in relation to music, is that there's a massive problem of stasis
or like a simulation of stasis. He talks about this in relation to the Hillary Clinton's campaign. They did one of these mannequin challenges. It's from an essay called The Mannequin Challenge. But this was something that was symptomatic of left that couldn't resolve its problems. In the same way that the robots in the Westworld when you power them down or take their bat or whatever they do, they just kind of sit there in this sudden pose. But there's something there behind it that is trying to break through. this constant failure of the leftist project which he maligned but still had a great passion for now those stakes are quite high but the thing about this kind of culture in terms of music festivals, nightclubs live music, whatever it is I don't know if the same political
stakes need to be forced onto it you know what I mean? that's something that I think again maybe gets misconstrued in some discussions of Fisher's work is that there's some onus on culture to try and solve problems I mean you're not a politician. You're asking like is it the job of the musician or artist or whoever to solve a problem in society? I'm not sure if it is or not. No, I don't think it is either. I mean considering that we are at like a music festival, I'm trying to like figure out okay what is the function of the artist then if it is to have a function outside of its niche. And I think there's nothing wrong with it, that not being the case. but I've seen this happen again and again and again at these kinds of panel discussions where this sort of onus gets put on the artist or the cultural producer that oh well you know we're all socially engaged now so we have to solve these problems maybe in this specific case
the onus on the artist or the cultural producer like CTM or whatever is to create the conditions that are hospitable to allow someone like Mark to flourish because that's the one thing I think is really significant in some ways is that here is somebody who went on to be really influential and contribute a lot and shaped public discourse. And he came from our world. He comes from this scene. And this is because of his engagement with this sort of thing that had a lot to do with how he was able to reach a lot of conclusions that he did reach.
So maybe that's part of it. It also feels like an extension of what Mark would call the magical voluntarism, right? I think there is a connection between the sense of saying to a depressed person, as Mark would write, you know, you can't just say, get out of bed and go for a jog and, you know, you'll sort your life out. And what's the cultural equivalent of that? You know, go and take over a squat and have a party, and then maybe you'll solve the world's problems. It's like that sort of thinking, that's capitalist realist thinking. That's like that temporal autonomous zone idea of CBT or whatever. Or even if you really want to say, Rave actually is quite a neoliberal idea in that it did break with the centralised market. There were people, I was watching some documentary
about one of the prominent early Rave organisers was a heavy Brexit supporter. And it's like that's important not to romanticize rave too much as well. Maybe that's it. It's like the world is very complex. And as the world gets more intersectional, paradoxically, we get into these more heavily binary choices of yes, no. And maybe that's important when we process judgments about maybe things are a bit more complicated. I mean, like also I was just thinking about, I've been watching a lot of films recently. And I was watching, I was thinking about how filmmakers would think about these kind of problems you're addressing. That's why I'm mentioning it. But if you think about Agnes Varder with Vagabond, or if you think about some Kubrick films like Clockwork Orange getting censored for 40 years,
or even Alan Clarke films like Scum and Made in Britain, they're quite complex films and they don't offer answers. And they're also reflecting a reality. and I feel like the way to censor that is actually doing like that's a progressive doing the state's job of pretending that something doesn't exist. That's like after the 2011 riots, tidying up Mare Street as quick as possible to pretend that it didn't happen. That's like David Cameron saying to Corbyn, just put on your shirt, do up your tie, get on with your job. So from that, can you take that the culture does have a certain amount of a journalistic responsibility then maybe? Journalistic in what sense? Well take a Ken Loach film for example. Pardon?
Journalistic in that it's reporting or? Maybe not, journalistic is maybe not the right way but like a form of documentary, somewhere between documentary and journalism like I'm thinking of a Ken Loach film or something like that, something that's a cold bucket of water over your sense of reality. Because I mean that's another thing that's essential to the K-Punk project was like making making the unthinkable thinkable and being able to stand outside yourself. I don't like to use the word because it's kind of poetic, but it's revelatory about reading the K-punk blog. You must say the promise of rave as well, like being outside of yourself. But that's possibly a false narrative. Yes, because it could be very solipsistic. It could be like a bunch of people in a cafe checking their email. The last time I was in Burgheim, I stood at the back all night just texting my friends.
Microdosing. I think it comes back to what was the quote you had out about something about desire and identitarianism well that there are no individuals only desirers and you mentioned Westworld I have a whole it's like my favourite chapter in the book to be a shill from it there's a phrase that Mark coins in his essay about Westworld where he says that when these androids are they're not becoming conscious of themselves It's not a form of consciousness raising. They're not... I actually have the quote written right here in front of me. Go on then, do you want to read it? In the TV show Westworld, there's guests and hosts. The guests are the people who travel to the place, the hosts are the robots. It says, the guests exist in a continuous time.
While the hosts are locked into loops, what the hosts lack is not consciousness, but an unconscious, deprived of memory, and the capacity to dream. The androids can be wounded but not traumatised. Right, exactly. So this sense of having not a practice of consciousness raising, but an unconsciousness raising. So in terms of the riots, gaining a consciousness of your place in the world can be a really radical thing, or it can equally lead to violence and disruption. And that's not... I mean, sometimes things end like that, and that's fine. But I think what Mark's getting at in that essay is what has to come with that is a sense of understanding why you are doing certain things that might not necessarily be conscious in the sense of what impact is culture or capitalism
having on you as an individual or as a town or as a society or civilization, that becoming more attuned to those desires and how they are manipulated is far more important, especially now, in terms of understanding or starting to form an understanding of how we can act and react productively beyond just being aware of who you are to the state or this big other. Or even in your relationship to music. Yeah. So in terms of the quote from the We Are Meary, to find ways out is to let the outside in. So restricting yourself to getting out of your head at a rave
is only one side of the battle. It's also having a consciousness of what you let in in the process. and what's important about that and what it makes you feel, and how you can continue to channel that and make that productive in other contexts. Before we take questions, can we just give a round of applause to these excellent three panellists? Thank you. Yeah, I missed a bit, I have to say, the political and critical input of Mark Fisher, which is to me very special in the cultural realm because I think this is still missing no matter if in journalism or in cultural studies or whatever.
So I missed a little bit the political implications and I didn't get at all after your presentation or talk what egress is. I still didn't understand it. Yeah, maybe we could talk a little bit or you could add something, why he is so important as criticising power structures, capitalism, and so on. I think everything that we've talked about, and not explicitly, is implicitly political. I think that's what was so important about Mark's last book, The Weird and Eerie, that there's not a single sentence in there that's explicitly political. But through his analysis of culture, I think he's we don't know what was to come in acid communism that was meant to be his next book
but I feel like The Weird and the Eerie is like a cultural cartography that he's laid out for what could happen next and I feel like there might not be we might not have discussed actual plans of action in terms of seizing the moment but because that's sort of it's doing it I think that's the essence of what cultural production is and the importance of of it is that it might not be this over-intellectualized manifesto of what's to come, but realizing what we're doing and why. But he did that as well, so he did both, no? Yeah, sure. But I mean, I think they're implicitly related, I guess is what I'm saying, is that just because he did them both all the time. I don't think if just, what I'm saying is when there's a moment where the politics isn't
explicit doesn't mean it's not there. And the same with when he was explicitly political, the culture was always still there too. I just want to tell you an anecdote related to this is one of my favorite essays by Mark, partly because I commissioned it, is when he wrote about a Drake album, he did this long review of a Drake album and there was this tweet after this was published and the guy said I have no idea who Mark Fisher is but there should be more Marxist readings of hip hop, so it was infiltration in a way and that actually brings us back to egress so egress as uh an exit or a door as uh matt talks about a lot in his book i don't want to although mark does explain it in his book the word in the area but maybe matt should
explain the concept egress in do you want to contextualize that a bit more in terms of where you're going well i meant that in terms of uh uh it's it's an entry point into something else via from somewhere perhaps unexpected. So you go, if you're a Drake fan and you click on this link because you want to read about Drake and then you're secretly being fed to Marxist theory. Or in this email, Fred, that we had earlier about what Matt said about your work, about your writing, who you've interviewed. You've interviewed William Bennett, then Dizzy Rascal, then Lana Del Rey, and then Lil B. And how if someone clicked on maybe other things you've done, that creates a wormhole. or maybe that's an egress. It's maybe like laying small traps,
which are somewhat, dare I say, subversive or potential in that it disrupts some kind of notion without a capital D or something. Although I would actually say that, although I do agree with this concept of egress, back in the day, and I think even Mark would have admitted this, although I hate to say that kind of thing, we would have called it rhizomatic 10 years ago. And he was a Delusian too, so. Yeah, I guess that's where we started talking about the Fisher function. It wasn't so much Mark writing about his own individual position, but how he fitted into all of these different spheres. And yeah, we've kind of gone over a bunch of them in terms of the blogosphere, music journalism, his political writing, writing for national newspapers and political journals.
And also I will just say one thing that we didn't mention that he did do as well is he also made these pretty great installation pieces that started out as radio shows, but they were basically text, they were spoken word narrative overlaid with music, and they were semi-autobiographical, theoretical, vaguely fictional, all tied together into an actual artwork. So he was a producer of culture in that way as well, not just metaculture, but maybe that's metaculture culture. Because they were always about something, but he did that too. And I don't think he had any sense of boundaries in terms of that.
It was how it all fit together. And I think that's what he wanted to, that was what was so important for him to push in other people. I think I remember his, maybe it was a blog post where he talks about first time reading Simon Reynolds and reading that Simon will be reviewing an album and then talking about Nietzsche or and for him seeing those two things accessible in something like the NME having these multiple worlds or yeah these doorways where you see other worlds where these things sit side by side just so comfortably that was part of the encouraging your imagination other worlds are out there and they're ready for access and that we should encourage each other to explore them
because then who knows what might happen politically I think it's also like in terms of not being like overly didactic or telling someone how to think also treats them more like an adult and lets them think for themselves and when you have something which is so just telling you what to do or like really heavily presenting your position it kind of treats the viewer or audience a bit like an idiot or that they don't know and I find that quite regressive and that's kind of what can be coming out of so-called populism or whatever but I think maybe with Mark Fisher you tackle populism in a more maybe using the egress or something like Alice in Wonderland, Wonderhole
egress not regress thank you I think it's a question comment but you said that you're a bit skeptical of this return of collectivity. And, yeah, well, not like that, but I have seen the last couple of days a little bit. Kind of the naivete we used to have about the network, it's now applied to collectivity and rave. And, you know, it's almost kind of like the new, the way it was the network was fetishized. now it's been fetishized the rave, the collective and I think it's even more dangerous than like fetishized a network so I don't know if you can have something
to say about it or like where why is that happening or I really don't have a lot I just have seen it through some lectures and some comments and I only really identify it now during this festival that it's this fetish with. Are you saying that a fetishization of the collective and network in rave can be a dangerous thing? No, no, no. The same way that the network was fetishized and kind of have a very naive attitude with it for 10 years and then now there is a backlash. That same attitude has been applied to collective culture raves like, you know, people talk about all those cool aspects of collectivity but never say like solidarity or
you know more like serious stuff you should address when you talk about the collective so I don't know what you think about it it's just something that I have seen the last couple of days here well I think if you yeah maybe it's like you can distinguish between like collectives and then being in a network and then say networking because there's been this weird conflation between being in a network in this more progressive or isomatic way and then social networking as this kind of platform tool or like neo-collective collectives we see in music can you be in a collective without thinking collectively? When people get very taxonomical
maybe that's what I'm skeptical of. It's not enough that you're in a collective you have to do more. but that's what I was talking about earlier, about this presenting. It could just be an appearance. Yeah, I think that collectivity was especially important for Mark, I think, but it comes back to that same question of capture. Mark would always push that... I think there's one of my favourite lines in Capitalist Realism, that now I obviously can't remember, where he talks about the crisis that we have been presented with requires a collective subject and always has, but this collective subject has never emerged and been instantiated. And I feel like what Mark meant by that is that sense of,
yeah, well, I mean, yeah, talking about solidarity. There was one of my friends back in London. We do these 4K punk parties every January. My friend Natasha Eaves, we had a workshop at one of them, and she had this phrase. She said that what's needed is a solidarity without similarity. which is just my favourite phrase ever in terms of that kind of collective politics that it's not taxonomical if that's the word it's a sense of the multiple of society of community that resists capture and being reified then it becomes fetishised fetishised I think is the same thing as reification I threw a party for a few years in Berlin called CTFO
chill the fuck out and yeah it was queer it was very diverse, there was a lot of different people there, wildly diverse but I never really said that, it was just hi this is a party it's called CTFO, there you go here's the person playing, sometimes people will play it unannounced it was actually deliberately not labelling itself for that, that itself was kind of a political stand as opposed to being like, you know, you go to a club now, and it can just be like the Ten Commandments of like, I will not be this, I will not be that, and you're like, well, where the fuck did you come to a club in the first place? Because like, you know. Maybe that's why, I mean, I understand that that maybe speaks to then a shift in how like
club culture can be of like, who's coming now doesn't have the same interests as people coming before. but again if you're like it gets very religious and like you know like you are this you're that i will just just talk about the idea of networks and the fetishization and maybe the what could be problematic about about this this sort of like evangelization of of uh communities and blah blah which by the way obviously communities are great fantastic yes pro communities but also uh i like I think that maybe a helpful, for me anyway, way of thinking about an ideal network is like computer decentralization. I.e. if it's a decentralized network, then if half the nodes, half the computers on the network get taken away somehow,
the rest of the network doesn't fall down. And oftentimes what ends up happening, if the central server falls down, then the entire network collapses. So you want it to actually be a robust network. and maybe that's also just a definition problem like what do you mean when you say network what do you mean when you say community what do these words actually mean I guess it depends on how you're going to define these things I mean I guess in terms of network it makes me think in like art discourse maybe 10 years ago there was this phrase networked painting and it was looking at not necessarily the painting itself but the kind of artist amongst each other and who hangs out with each other and then that's kind of a problem because
it's not really it just actually goes back to like individual net worth then of like are you hanging out with the right people i mean yeah i like you said like of course pro communities pro people being together but then like what is that community what are you know i think it's very important for us to question what that is without being labeled as a problem or like like it's a a valid question. And if you're not questioning yourself with these questions, then... Yeah, I think that's the same vigilance that comes from when Mark talking about identitarianism, I think, that often gets lost. I think that's precisely... You have to be vigilant of what you are defining yourself as and then what you will be defined by others as an unfortunate product of that. You always have to be vigilant. It's also kind of a comment, maybe addressing what has been said before
when it comes to rave culture, etc. I just think that it's important sometimes that there is a differentiation made in the sense of how are raves being done and created. When we speak about collectives, the factor of sharing tasks and designing and thinking about these spaces collectively is very different than having a rave in a club. So that's sometimes something that gets a bit forgotten when we speak about fetishization, etc. Of course, you have raver's shoes in Prada and Versace. and yeah it is happening it's a reality however the resistance and the resilience of still organizing events in a collective shared manner is still it creates the potential for non-assimilation by bigger structures and it is a
mode of resistance because it is hard and potentially you won't be doing it for a living you do it like as a side thing and that's also where a lot of resistance can come from is to not have to depend on certain actions and certain things you do in these modes solely on those to survive. So I just kind of wanted to introduce that. And I mean, I was just very curious about the idea of acid communism. I guess it's not the biggest topic around here, but in a certain sense, I feel that what Mark is doing when he's talking about culture is a psychedelic experience of going into the fractals of contemporary culture and expanding that fractal and somehow bringing an analysis of what is going on from there, hopefully maybe also establishing potential connections to what may be to come.
And I was just wondering if maybe there could be some thoughts about the connection between asset communism and his writings and readings of contemporary society through music and cultural production. Thank you. On the point of asset communism, one of my favorite writers is this American literary critic called Leslie Fiedler. and in one of his books he creates this dichotomy where he says that hallucination is the sort of dialectical opposite of nostalgia or remembering and I feel like that for me is maybe the most general sense of I think what Mark was hoping to do with acid communism as having written about hauntology and this sense of stasis and stuckness and having diagnosed
that I think what was to come next was this sense of of how we can hallucinate again, how we can dream again. How that relates to culture, more specifically I think it comes back again to this essay that I mentioned before the Baroque sunbursts where this, I think Mark saw this that notion of hallucinating as not being a not like a hippie fetishisation or a callback to the counterculture but as a as a psychedelic continuum that has always been there not necessarily through drugs as well it was always worth emphasizing that Mark was not a drug taker and he always, it was I think one of his, he had a post called Psychedelic Reason
on the K-Punk blog where he talks about it's not a case of getting out of your head with assistance from a substance but getting out of your head just your own cognitive faculties of being able to find a way I think he might believe that we have everything already at our disposal but the potential of how we can think is limited by capitalist realism and rave culture, but also, yeah, the carnival, the fates. He saw as this continuum of an outlet and an egress, a place to channel that excess that we don't necessarily know where to put, that's been sort of closed off and boundaried from everyday life. So I think the importance of putting acid with communism was finding a way to make that sense
of psychedelic cultural production become a more explicitly like a psychedelic political production of imagining new alternatives. I don't know if that answers your question at all. Thank you very much. I was a bit following on from that into some things you said before. Could you maybe elaborate a bit more about the potential, the importance of dreaming, how that's maybe related to your own practice and maybe also how Mark Fisher would frame it because also you wrote the quote when you commented on Westworld that androids, they're deprived of the capacity to dream and also hallucination is like a form of dreaming, daydreaming. And there's also tomorrow, Bernard Stiegler will be talking and Transmediale, who also recently wrote about computational capitalism, bringing out the thesis
that we have so much media input that we lost the capacity to produce or to kind of so much retention that you can't pretend anymore from within to the outside. So how would you see that reflected in Mark Fisher's work and to get out of this kind of responsive mode? Because sometimes talking about capitalism or structures, it's almost as if you would self-victimize and don't get out of this responsive problem-solving mode of something that has already been problematized and so on. Yeah. I think one of the most explicit points that Mark writes about dreams is in capitalist realism. And he talks about a sense of capitalist dream work. So dream work coming from Freud of being the sense that dreams are just this kaleidoscope of various experiences and visions and sensations that have no connection to one another.
But in the experience of dreaming it, it all seems to fit together. And that sort of work that the mind does unconsciously to make sense of something that is nonsensical. And Mark would apply that to capitalism in the sense that a capitalist society is full of holes and faults that the system itself glosses over. and doesn't want us to become aware of in a sense. So part of one of Mark's projects was a Facebook group called Boring Dystopia. I don't know if people are familiar with that. That was drawing attention to the fact that, yeah, we live in a boring dystopia. It's not all horror and degradation. It's boring stuff like self-service checkouts that don't work properly. And all these technological promises that were sort of meant
to make everything so smooth and everything's a bit shit. And it was his way of drawing attention to that as a way to, when you're aware of those things, you know, then you can imagine, well, you start with, you know, you pick a small hole in something like that, like your experience at the supermarket, and that can, you know, you can widen that hole and you can then, you know, dream replacements. That hole is a practice for finding the faults in things and finding better ways of doing things, not just in a sense of smoothing out the capitalist production, but actually smoothing out how we can think and then act on our thoughts. Well, with that, I'd really, really, really like to thank Matt, Lisa and Stephen for joining me on stage.