I can hardly remember a time when there was such a thing as a weekend, or when I had a filofax and I thought about whose name I would add to my address book. I suppose I do my job better, but my job is my whole life. Or my whole life is my job. When I move from calendar to address book to email to text messages, I feel like a master of the universe. Everything is so efficient. I'm a maximizing machine. I'm on my Blackberry until 2 in the morning. I don't sleep well, but I still can't keep up with what is sent to me. Two. Then, in the elevator to the 62nd floor, I started to think about the deal I was supposed to be brokering,
the Abraxas buyout of MCL Parnassus. I hadn't given any thought to it for days. But now, as soon as I tried to recall any of the specifics, the whole subject became a blur. I kept hearing the phrase option value pricing model in my head, hearing it over and over. Option value pricing model. Option value pricing model. But I had only the vaguest notion anymore of what this meant. It was like waking up after a dream in which you've been speaking a foreign language, only to find out that you don't speak the language at all and barely even understand a word of it. Three. In the 1990s, Prozac culture was intermingled with a new economy. Hundreds of thousands of operators, directors and managers of the occidental economy
took innumerable decisions in a state of chemical euphoria and psychopharmacological lightheadedness. But in the long term, the organism collapsed, unable to support indefinitely the chemical euphoria that had sustained competitive enthusiasm and productive fanaticism. The acceleration of information exchange is produced and is producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind. Individuals are not in a position to process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognise, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious.
The necessary time for paying attention to the fluxes of information is lacking. The consequence is in front of our eyes. Political and economic decisions no longer respond to a long-term strategic rationality and simply follow immediate interests. On the other hand, we are always less available for giving our attention to others gratuitously. Our attention is always besieged and therefore we assign it only to our careers, to competition and to economic decisions. And in any case, a temporality cannot follow the insane speed of the hyper-complex digital machine. Human beings tend to become the ruthless executors of decisions taken without attention. Four.
In the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow, and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him. Five. Our network devices encourage a new notion of time because they promise that they can layer more activities onto it. Because you can text while doing something else, texting doesn't seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome. It's magical. Six. The swipe card doesn't work. The machine senses anxiety, you're sure of it. It knows the card is not yours. You try the card again, nothing, same red light. The card isn't yours, but you should have access to the building.
You had to borrow someone else's card because it's only possible to get swipe cards between the hours of 9 and 1, and you are working at these times. Someone is behind you. You feel uncomfortable. Will they notice that the card does not belong to you? You try the card again. Again, nothing. Red light. Your phone rings. You struggle to get it out of the bag. By the time you have it, the call has gone through to the answering service. You see that the call has come from another of your employers. A familiar anxiety grips you. What have you done wrong now? But you have no time to worry about that at the moment. You try the swipe card again. At last, the green light comes on. You're through the door. Rushing that down the corridor, which floor were you supposed to be on?
You rifle through your bag until you find the documentation. You should be on this floor, but at the other end of the corridor. You'll walk towards the room number, but suddenly your progress is blocked. There is a no-entry sign, an office that cuts the corridor in half and through which there is no access. It's a nightmare topology. Every time you seem to get close, another obstacle appears. You'll have to go out of the corridor, down the stairs, and up the next set of stairs, facing a number of swipe card access doors on the way. By now, the five minutes you hope to have before you start is evaporating rapidly. By the time you reach the room you're heading for, you're already late. You log on to the computer, or you try to. The logon is rejected. You try again, no luck.
Then you remember, you're trying to log in using a login from one of the other institutions that you work at. It's difficult to keep track sometimes. You remember the correct login. Quickly scan one of your email accounts. See an email from an administrator. later. Have you filled in your bank details form? Yes, you filled it in, you think, weeks ago. But of course you can't be sure. Maybe you only thought you'd fill it in. Have they lost it? Flash of anxiety. Will you not be paid this month? Last year when you filled in all the same forms that you have to complete again this year, you were not paid for a whole 50-hour contract until you pointed out the mistake. Will the same thing happen again? But there's no time to worry about this now.
You have a room of 70 students waiting to be taught. Such is life in the UK's bloated and overfunded public institutions. Seven. Then there is this colossally huge searchable public domain, which is now at your fingertips. There are methods to track where the eyeballs of the users are going. There are intellectual property problems in revenue. which interferes with scholarship as much as it aids it. There is a practice of rag-picking with digital material, of loops, tracks, sampling. There are search engines which are becoming major intellectual and public political actors. There is collective intelligence. Or if you don't want to dignify it with that term, you can just call it internet meme-oose.
But it's all over the place, just termite mounds of poorly organised and extremely potent knowledge, quantifiable, interchangeable data with newly networked relations. We can't get rid of this stuff. It is our new burden. It is there as a fact on the ground. It is a fetter company. Okay, so I've started with a sort of montage of quotations there from a number of texts. The first one was from Sherry Terkel's recent book, Alone Together, the second half of which is devoted to a kind of series of reports, phenomenological reports really on people's engagement with new communications technology
and its particular emphasis on young people. The second quote is from Alan Glynn's novel The Dark Fields which was recently adapted into the film Limitless. I mean, it's not a very good novel. but it's a timely novel for a time of no time, actually. And part of the interest of the novel, for me, lay in its resonance with the third quotation, which was from Franco Berardi's book, Precarious Rhapsody. Rhapsody. It's striking how, in fact, Glenn's 2001 novel tells practically the same story
that Berardi is now telling. That, according to Berardi, in a provocative hypothesis, the dot-com crash was caused by a kind of failure of psychic infrastructure. It's not It's not that first of all there's an economic crash, then there's a depression for Berardi. It's that the crash happens because of the psychic infrastructure cannot withstand the pressure that was put on it. Another sort of echo between these two texts was the law of drugs, limitless. The book, as it was then called, The Dark Fields, is really about a new smart drug which was called MDT.
And this drug basically allows people to perform at greater speeds, to understand things which they couldn't understand, and basically to work faster. The main thing that this designer drug provides is the ability to do more work in less time. another interesting effect the section I quoted you was after he the lead character realises maybe he shouldn't be caning this drug quite so much maybe there might be a few downsides of massively speeding up your nervous system and your neurology to this degree so at that point the massive deal that he suddenly found himself working on
becomes not only incomprehensible but boring In order to find high finance interesting, you have to be on one drug or another really. The next quotation came from a novel which came out at a similar time as Glimms, which is a more celebrated novel, which is Jonathan Franzen's novel, The Corrections, and the corrections, which Varady argues is really one of the most important of the early 21st century for capturing, really, the American Depression, a kind of cyber depression. The sixth quote was from some idiots
not too far from here. And the seventh one, the last one, was from Bruce Sterling's recent address at Transmediale, called A Temporality for the Creative Artists. Really what I wanted to register today, I suppose, was a sense of disappointment. A sense of disappointment when we think about the expectations of the 90s and the reality of actually existing cyberspace, really. When one thinks back to the mid-90s, when the virtual futures conferences were happening,
in a sense, much of what was predicted at those conferences has become part of everyday life, has become taken for granted. But there's a sense in which, since then, Everything has changed, but nothing has really happened. There's a sense in which technological upgrades have taken a place of a kind of cultural development. And what I want to suggest really is that there is a correlation between these two things. That the kind of technological capture that has happened in the last decade is directly responsible, directly responsible, not in itself, but is a major part of a kind of cultural slowdown.
So there are a number of senses of this phrase, no time, that I want to bring out. The fact that we have no time, as a number of those quotations were supposed to bring out, that we are endlessly harried. because we're tethered to mobile communication devices at all times. I think in terms of what I just talked about, in terms of the progression of technology, we can perhaps see four major thresholds. The first had already arrived at the time of VF conferences, which was electronic mail. People had that, but it's still a novelty, and you still come into university to check your email
at that time typically. Not that many people, in the UK at least, had email at home. Then the next big threshold shift was the arrival of broadband. After that, I think the next one I draw attention to in this trajectory at least, is iPods which I was astonished to read in Simon Reynolds' new book Reclamania that iPods really only came to the fore in 2005 that really seemed such a short time ago but they've arrived they've changed the
they seem to have changed everything but only at the level of consumption and distribution, not the level of content of culture. It's almost the opposite. The more things change at the level of consumption, the less they change at the level of production and the production of content, so-called. What I want to draw attention to is then two kind of speeds, as it were. The ever-increasing speed of communicative capitalism, as some have called it, and the slowing, retarded or psychical time of culture. And I think how we can grasp this is by thinking
that the very fact this conference is happening at all shows you how much cultural time has slowed down, as it were, in a sense. But the difference between 15 years, 15 years, is the time between, roughly, the Beatles' first record on punk, or between punk and jungle. That's a vast time in terms of music, cultural history. But if we just look back to 1996, into cultural terms, not a lot has changed, actually. I think the key thing that we've found, and that a number of those texts are registering.
The only thing I've noticed over the last few months was really a growing sense of a kind of digital communicative malaise. A sense that we're deep into this stuff and that we didn't necessarily know what we were getting into. A sense that comes out both in Sherry Turkle's book and Alan Glynn's novel, that it's like we are the subjects of an experiment which no one is consciously really conducting. What is the nature of this experiment? All I think is to see what a kind of electrolabidinol parasite can do to you. What do I mean by this electrolabidinol parasite? I mean, who really cared that much apart from teenagers about communications
10, 15 years ago? It might be nice to get a letter once a week. You weren't checking if you got a letter every 30 seconds. You weren't obstructed from enjoying any other activity by checking if the letter had arrived. I'm trying to oppose this. I think the difficulty here, the problem that I think we've got is how do we criticise this? How do we have any kind of position in relation to this is not reactionary. And actually, posing the question in that way raises a whole set of other issues.
Why should attacking a certain kind of technological development automatically seem as if it is reactionary? Who has got control of time here? And how have they got control of it? Why are we so ready to accept the story that technology delivers modernity. When actually, if you want to look at it, in terms of the question of cultural determinism rather than general issue of determinism that Jim was talking about, if you want to talk about cultural determinism, it's pretty clear that from the last decade alone that technology in itself or changes in technology aren't enough on their own to deliver new culture. So this for me is the problem now.
Given that this parasite, this communicational parasite, a form of very low level jouissance, very low level, but nevertheless which is capable of destroying all other forms of enjoyment or tainting it. How do we get rid of this parasite? That's the question. A good example from Sherry Terkel's book of what I mean by this. She describes somebody... She says that a number of the people she spoke to found that they were unable to resist texting whilst driving. If a text comes in and there's a red light flashed on their phone,
they're unable to not know what this message is. And come on, we can't disdain these people as if they're not us. We might not be checking our texts whilst driving, but we want to, don't we? A recent anecdote of mine, I often find I'm sitting there, I know it's socially unacceptable to look at my phone, but nevertheless, I put the phone under the table and feel the relief of clicking. I don't know what messages I've got, but at least the phone does. This has taken us over in a quite dramatic way, I think.
Partly my strategy then is to dystopianize. Think back to before this had taken over your brain to this degree. where you couldn't enjoy anything. You can't enjoy sexual contact. You can't enjoy watching a film. Because of this power. What does it give you in return? I think that's the real kind of shock of the Sherry Turkle anecdote. People have always risked their lives for things that they enjoyed. But to risk their life, 140-character SMS texts, which they pretty much know is going to be banal, This is the death drive Dorothy, but it's not as Nick Land imagined it. It's the banality of the inferno which we're in, actually.
But actually, he serves it well, because it's more difficult to identify it as the serious problem that it is. and of course there are political issues here to say the least and partly what this is partly what is behind my book Capitalist Realism which is really in a way the disappointed story of someone who had been hyped up by the sort of Landian euphoria of dissolution that we experienced in the 90s, and particularly at Warwick.
And then he sort of crashed back down into the kind of shocking banality of the first decade of the 21st century. Yeah, you know, we were offered up the Arctic Monkeys, Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Adele, You know, this is atemporality in a most banal way. This is music that could have been made 30, 40 years ago. There's always been retro. But what's unique about our period is there's no longer even an issue that these things are retro. They're presented to us as if they were contemporary. partly because, unlike in the 90s,
when we saw all kinds of horrible, conservative, cultural developments starting to coalesce, you know, lads, mags, and a horrible alliance with kind of Britpop and the like. At that time, there was a clear kind of opposition, a clear alternative between that kind of restoration culture and a kind of contemporary futurism. Those alternatives have faded at the cultural level, I think, in a subsequent period. And capitalist realism comes out of that.
Really, yes, I'm saying that the kind of exciting, albeit dark capitalism, evoked in the sort of text of Nick Land, is nowhere to be seen, at least not in the West. Instead, we have this banal capitalism, dominated not by a kind of ever-mutating digital dance floor culture, but by the neuroticizing mechanisms of social media or social networks. Actually, if you read Sherry Turkle's book, you can see the astonishing levels of pain and anxiety
that in particular adolescents and teenagers endure because of the ubiquity of social networks. The performance anxiety involved in non-real-time activity. And the painful plaint of one of the teenagers who Sherry Turkle speaks to saying, yeah, maybe one day I'll be able to have a conversation. But not now, because real-time causes too much anxiety. And Turkle reports that it's typical for teenagers for teenagers to spend up to an hour composing an SMS text message of 140 characters
just to ensure they get the right level of nonchalance. Yeah, but I just briefly talked about the political damage but I didn't really elaborate on that. Of course, I think the broader background to all this is the, something that comes out well in Framson's novel, The Corrections, the switch from Fordism to post Fordism, something that really happened at the end of the 70s, beginning of the 80s, the switch away from that is to say, workforce dominated by men largely, working in manufacturing, expecting to be able to work in a stable job
for 40 years of their working life. The dissolution of that world into a world of what Baradi and others have called precarity, post-Fordism. Short-term contracts, no guarantees, and also the disappearance of a kind of social welfare net to protect you. and the digital media or digital communication media have clearly played a major part in intensifying the pressures of precarity in creating a situation where it's archaic to even talk about a workplace now
as soon as you have email then you no longer have working hours as soon as you have a smartphone, then the whole world, including now, including soon anyway, even when you're on a plane, the whole world is your workplace. This is what I mean by the kind of banal inferno of communicative capitalism, really. Now, Sterling's recent talk on atemporality, where he's talking about really the end of the future, is something that William Gibson has also been talking about. So, Sterling invokes a kind of opposition
between what he calls collapsing Gothic castles and for very chic, you know, picking through the ruins. He talks of his sense of atemporality as being beyond the end of history and also being beyond post-modernity. But it strikes me, actually, that if you compare Sterling's recent texts to Jameson, what Jameson was writing in the mid-80s, or indeed what Leotard wrote in the late 70s, or Baudrillard, Baudrillard really the unacknowledged prophet of that time, I think, in many ways. What they were writing, it's actually very similar to what they were writing back then. Sterling's supposedly new vision of atemporality
seems to me just a restatement of postmodernism. And I guess the difference between postmodernism and Sturding's atemporality is that sense that there's no novelty to this anymore. When Jameson was talking about postmodernism, the features of postmodernism, which included, strikingly for Jameson, Jameson, retrospection and pastiche as major kind of stylistic traits, but when he was talking about that, he still had a sense of a modernist culture which you could contrast with post-modernism. I think Sterling's atemporality in some sense comes
after post-modernism, but only as a kind of exaggeration and intensification of the features of post-modernism. Now, as I just mentioned there, one of the things that Jameson talks about, and if you go back to his work, one of the things that's most precent about it is the emphasis on pastiche and retrospection, on what he calls the nostalgia mode, which isn't psychological nostalgia, but a kind of formal nostalgia. An example he gives is the forgotten film now, Body Heat, which was set in the then 80s, the contemporary period, but which felt like a film from the 40s.
This strange disjunct where effectively all of the formal elements of the... I have no time left, that's interesting. But I'll wrap up quickly. All of the formal elements screamed out a different period, but the fact that they came from this different period was not acknowledged. This seems to me typical now of the whole range of culture, indeed of practically everything. But one thing that Jameson never really talks about is why retrospection or pastiche becomes such features. I think we can sort of hazard two guesses based on his work. One is the psychological motivation.
At a time when all certainties collapse at the sort of economic and political level, then he's gonna reach for older forms of culture as a form of reassurance. But there are also cognitive difficulties. Jameson's suggesting, as it were, that modernism, first of all, confronts the unmappability of the contemporary world, the capitalist city, can't really be conceived of in terms of the categories of ordinary phenomenological experience. And this cognitive problem only intensifies in a sort of hyper-digitalised world. And again, I think that would link back into this previous thing
about the psychological motivation for forms of culture which are reassuring. Okay, so what is the why out of this? I'll sort that out really quickly. Well, I don't think... One thing is going back is always a strategy of defeat. Part of what's underlying what I'm saying here is really that who is it that owns the sense of time in which we live was neoliberalism. or neoliberalism did own it until 2008. Neoliberalism could say, look, we own the direction of time. When you talk about modernization, you're talking about movement towards neoliberalization. After 2008, that claim is now somewhat ludicrous.
Sterling notes, he thinks there's no new ideology about to come in to take over, to get us out of this situation of atemporality about which he writes with such ambivalence. and that probably is one of the striking features of the moment in which we live. There have been collapses of ideological systems before, of course, many times in history, but usually another ideology could be helicoptered in to take up, to kind of take over. And, of course, that's what happened in neoliberalism itself. When social democracy collapsed, it was on hand. Having prepared the way for 30, 40 years, it was on hand to take over. There's nothing like that now, even though neoliberalism has collapsed. There's a credible political force with ongoing forward momentum.
It's still got lots of inertial energy, or non-energy or whatever, but it can still carry on, even though it's dead. We've watched enough zombie films to know that. But that's what's striking at the ideological vacuum. There's nothing there ready that's convincing. But I think the challenge for us, I think, at this time, is to come up with this alternative. But I think it would have to be via precarity. Who wants to go back to work in a factory for 40 years? Who wants to go back to a situation in which, well, the conservative front bench quite clearly might want to go back to a situation in which women are not in the workforce, as they made clear the other day.
The other week, it's women's fault. If they hadn't entered the workforce, then none of this would have happened. But if we don't want to go back to that, okay, precarity, as Berardi and others have pointed out, was originally a positive term. Okay, we'll go to work when we want to go, not when you make us go. And that seems to me the challenge. How do we get the precariousness that we wanted in the first place? Partly that's practical measures, I think. Instead of being able to pay for an hour at a time, people should have to pay for half a day. If I have to go in to teach somewhere for half an hour, it doesn't only take me half an hour to do it. If I'm only going to teach for an hour, it doesn't only take me an hour to do it, quite plainly. But there's a broader problem of winning back time, I think. And this might involve a sort of quasi-Foucauldian ethics
of the self and discipline. How do we win back time for projects? How do we actually escape into trances again? Because I think these technologies are actually trance inhibitors. The way that we thought about cyberspace in the 90s, maybe, was as a kind of space of immersion and trance. But this isn't the smartphone cyberspace. As I was trying to emphasize before, it's the opposite, actually. With communicational parasites, they stop us every time. And how many times have you done this? You're actually enjoying something more. You might be reading a book you're totally immersed in. Well, not quite totally now, because Mr. Parasite is there to grab you out and say, check me, check me.
And so it's a question that I think, how do we articulate this in a way that is not technologically reactionary? And of course there are other uses of digital technology available apart from communicative uses. And maybe we can look towards a kind of digital psychedelia in a way, which would involve a dilation of time instead of this constantly harried sense of time in which we seem to be required to live at the moment. and since I've gone over my time, I'll stop there. Okay.