What do you think about campus realism? Well, I noticed, particularly from working with teenagers, as I did, through a lot of the experiences that I talk about in campus realism, and also from myself, from what was over myself, that now we're in a state where there's forms of depression which arise from the hedonic, not from an inability to take pleasure, but from an inability to do anything else but take pleasure, as it were. Now, Bharati discusses this in terms of phenomena like Viagra. She rightly says it has nothing to do with impotence. It has to do with speed, right?
It's fucking too much faff, seduction. Seduction, erotism, fuck that. You know, let's get on with it. We haven't got time. Come on, I've got an email to answer. You know, like, there's that. And, you know, pornography the same, isn't it? Pornography that is the same. Oh, we can't be bothered with actual sex. You know, it's too much bother. Let's, you know, let's go straight to the meat of the thing, you know. And let's get on with it now. And actually, there's a good piece by Daniel Barrow on the music website The Quietus about pop music of recent years. where he argues that they have this Tao Cruz and people like that. But they have this crazed mega chorus, you know,
that hits straight to the pleasure centers of the brain, like audio crack. I mean, this is part of the same phenomenon as well. Because there's this affective exhaustion, actually, that then we don't have time for erotics in a broad sense, actually. not just erotics in terms of sexuality, but erotics in terms of a kind of immersive enjoyment. We don't have time for that. I think because there's an error in the way that we think about cyberspace, we think of cyberspace as immersive.
well it steals a lot of our time but I don't think it immerses I think it's an immersion and trans inhibitor lots of white cyberspace or cyberspace time as I say we shouldn't just talk about space we should talk about space time the space time of communicative capitalism which is partly why I start with that quote from Sherry Turkle about we're not there anymore we're not here we're in cyber space which means that you know that forms of older forms of collectivity have disappeared even the smallest level of collectivity you could say sexuality itself
you know I don't know suggest that sexuality has to be confined to two people but starting at that level at that level right up to even televisual or radiophonic collectivities and the kind of music collectivities or dancing collectivities that I talked about at the start with in relation to Barry on Rave and as I always say I think the success of television programs like The X Factor are really, on the face of it,
extremely depressing phenomenon. But, you know, actually attests to the fact that actually if you can, what do people want from these programs is a sense of collectivity, a sense that other people are watching at the same time. And, you know, that's what and that's what I think some of the great media manipulators of our time have capitalised on they're able to, again in this strange anachronistic hybrid where you have basically pre-rock and roll style 50s talent shows augmented by SMS texting and all kinds of
cyberspatial satellites but we're still going to have to capitalise on this desire for collective experience because everyone watches it or feels as if everyone watches it and that can't be said of many other things anymore so I think we should be properly dialectical about these things that there is something positive about them that this desire for collectivity does remain but you know in terms of you know what I was saying about pathologies of the digital have we even thought about how bad this is you know have we really thought about it I mean can you how much I mean look let's look at it this way how much did you care about communication
ten years ago okay you know you'd want phone calls now and again wouldn't you I mean you'd like you'd want them you know you'd want letters that'd be kind of nice but you weren't like not every 30 seconds you didn't have a compulsive need to check for such communication, right? No, it didn't really matter that much. And at a level of content, it still doesn't matter that much now. It's only when you're next here that you don't check your mails, right? You haven't checked your mails now for two hours. Oh no, but I haven't got my data services on my phone. I couldn't do it anyway. I didn't need Wi-Fi. you had security, or a notion of security.
Now there is no notion of security. Your jobs are shortened. And I think that's also the main reason why all of us have gone in, or the world has gone into this, checking your email every 10 seconds, is because it's a security thing. I think that's part of the excuse that we make for ourselves. But it's not false either. It's true. It seems to be true. But I have to say that, you know, I've been effectively self-employed for, you know, like, I don't know, four or five years now. And I have to say, in all of that time, really, you know, if I'd have left an email for half a day, I wouldn't have missed out on anything. You know, if I'd only checked emails twice a day, I wouldn't have missed out on anything. And let's face it, if I, you know, If it required me to do it there and then,
I couldn't have done it anyway, could I? Do you know what I mean? I agree. And Berardi is very powerful at bringing out, I think, the extent to which we fall into that belief that unless we're up on things in this ultra-agitated way, then we will fall behind. We won't compete. But that's not actually true. It just seems that way. But the thing is, again, we can't take responsibility for this ourselves too much. that, you know, that this is, you know, we're supposed to be thinking that way. Well, yeah, I mean, it's being in an agitated state, constantly agitated state, and the production of anxiety. This is one of the things that I try and emphasize in capitalist realism, that, you know, that we totally misunderstand ideology,
and Orwell is responsible for that in lots of ways. Or this boring, like, all these boring science fiction totalitarian things where totalitarian regimes are just trying to make you think something, man. You know, like, they're just trying to regiment you and all of that. They don't want, and they want you to have this set of beliefs that you have to stick to. That's not what they want. They want you to be anxious. This is the form of, this is ideal. You know, and that's why I say that I think sort of, this is why, like, the women's magazine is the model of ideological interpolation, right? which is like believe two different things at once. But look, it's okay, you can be any size you want. Here's a diet. How are you supposed to respond to that?
Hold these two things at once in your mind as impossible kind of synthesis. And one side you're reassured, it's fine to be what I am. No, no, no, I've got a diet now. These mixed messages are not accidental. Or they might be accidental. It's a very happy accident for capital in a sense that, you know, that someone who's in a constant state of anxiety, constantly agitated, you know, is not able to act in any effective way. You know, and as I said, this is the function of a lot of the surveillance mechanisms or self-surveillance mechanisms which have been brought in under neoliberalism. You know, the ostensible, you know,
why do I have to fit in a 50-page logbook? Why do I have to do an active scheme of work where I fantasise about what I'll be teaching students in 50 weeks' time? In this lesson, 11.15, it's just as ludicrous as any kind of crazed science-fictional Stalinist plan. It's got no relation to any reality that's ever going to happen. Why am I required to do it then? To increase efficiency, my efficiency as a teacher? No, the very fact that I'm filling it in is decreasing my efficiency as a teacher. You know, right? Because, let's face it, if I was just convalescing and just watching TV, at least I'd have more energy to do my actual work rather than doing this. So what is the point of it?
It's to produce this sense of endless anxiety. Like I said, the inspection regimes, if one is to read these documents and try and interpret how one is to deliver lessons properly, you know, it's just Talmudic. You know, it's just Talmudic act of interpretation. You know, and of course the people who are inspecting you are also engaging in the same Talmudic act of interpretation. They don't fully know. They're also in a state of anxiety. They can only guess as to what the, you know, the real meaning of what is really wanted here. But it's a generalized state of we don't know what is really wanted, yet we still have to try and guess what is wanted. this is typical of the mode of
ideology to which we're now subject I think, it's very successful as well and also because it comes dressed as it's for us it's for us as well you know like why you're doing this is for your own personal development you don't want to be static you don't want to be left behind do you surely you want to learn new things about how to do your job don't you and you know But, you know, all of that package is very successful, especially when it is reinforced in popular culture as well. And this, I think, connects, you know, your point with yours as well about this responsibility all the time. You know, popular culture is always, you know, saying, always reinforcing this idea that we could be better if only we put more effort into X, Y, and Z, you know.
But if only, and therapy is a major, that the diffusion of therapeutic logic is a major part of this. All of the above is what I describe as privatization of stress. That's a key kind of process that's happened over the last 20, 30 years as part of the securing of neoliberalism. Of course, we all know about the privatization of formerly nationalized industries, organizations, et cetera. But alongside that has been this privatization of stress where that's part of removing trade unions from the picture. If your hours increase, if your working conditions deteriorate, if your terms of employment become more tenuous, you become anxious.
And you become anxious because of those things. And that is an accepted explanation of why you are more anxious. What do you do with your anxiety? okay you probably go with other workers you'll gang up together and say look we don't think this is fair but why are we why are things getting worse for us that's not what happens now okay those same procedures go on well it's just part of reality it's just part of reality you can't adjust to it you must be ill go to the doctor go to the doctor what will the doctor do well you know if you're lucky you'll get therapy that's probably in the UK anyway, I can tell you from first time experience, you have to have killed yourself or tried to,
or you have to try to kill yourself in order to get therapy on a national health service. More likely, you'll be given some happy pills from pharmaceutical, you know, nicely, kindly provided to you by a multinational pharmaceutical company. You know, and that's a perfect circuit, isn't it? It's brilliant. You know, like, instead of your discontent is your fault, it's okay. You know, corporate capital's on hand to solve it for you, you know, with pills. It seems like this kind of big society that the Conservative Party launched recently seems to really connect with what you're...
Absolutely, yeah. and the whole idea of the face state or the Facebook state. Right, yeah, yeah. Which is then going back to the kind of responsibility to the individual. Yeah, exactly, yeah. I mean, I think there's a shift from neoliberalism into Victorian liberalism in the UK at the moment. No, seriously. From cyber-gothic to steampunk. You know, like, it's ridiculous. Like, they... Actually, I want to introduce another thinker into the mix at this point, who is not very well known, and I think should be better known, is a therapist, I don't know if he called himself a therapist, called David Smail, that's S-M-A-I-L. And Smail wrote a number of books in the 90s and in the last decade.
which really pulled together a number of the threads we've talked about today, actually. Smail argues, strangely similar to Metzinger, actually, that there is no such thing as a self in a way that we understand it, that actually what we call the self is really commentary, as he calls it. It's a kind of internalized set of explanations for what is going on in our life world, as it were. But the point is that that doesn't explain anything about why we like what we are. He makes a series of simple moves which nevertheless are devastating to the kind of spontaneous ideology in which we live,
which is to say that, well, clearly, he argues that the most powerful forces acting upon us are not our mummy and daddy, who themselves have been acted upon by, you know, some much stronger forces. You know, the forces of, you know, business interests, etc., power. Power is the key question for him. And, you know, the forces of power operating in society, they're distal, as he puts it. They're not proximal. They're distal. Anything that is in the world of experience that we, as a media experience, is already an effect of these distal forces. and okay now that's in a way it's pretty obvious
I would have thought this you know I guess most of us here will probably think that way however as Smale says actually though the way that therapy operates is on a completely opposite assumption therapy operates as Smale devastatingly puts it devastatingly puts it Thatcher's idea that there's no such thing as society-only individuals and their families is echoed by the practice of therapy, which will focus obsessively on, if you have therapy, it will be about your family and your childhood generally. That's the therapeutic dimension. I had therapy.
I had cognitive behavioral therapy, which is one of the most popular forms of therapy in the UK at the moment. And, you know, I had it because I was very seriously depressed. And, you know, you try anything, really. But actually, so what cured me from depression is partly the underlying story, the backstory of capitalist realism, really, is that, you know, politics saved me from depression, I think, in lots of ways. The recovery of politics. because, I mean, what is depression? Depression is this feeling of heavy responsibility. You know, that I'm, look, it's a double thing. I'm responsible for the miserable state of my life, but I can't do anything about it. Only I can, it's like Kafka's, you know,
short story that before the law, if you know that, you know, the door to the law is only meant for you, but, you know, you don't go through it. But, you know, that's how depression feels, that only I can do anything about it, yet I'm incapable of acting. And, you know, that's... The problem is that therapy does not... Therapy operates with... Certainly cognitive behavioral therapy just puts a positive spin on that. Just as you are responsible, just change your story, you know, and, you know, like... Change it, and you'll be okay. You know, and... That's just what I mean with this reprogram. Yeah. Were you saying that what actually saved you
wasn't a cognitive behavioral reprogramming, it was actually being concerned and getting, you know, things sorted out? You know what I mean? Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. I mean, you're right that CBT operates on that need-and-you-will-believe basis to some degree. But the point is that, I mean, I think there's a difference, though, in that what I was talking about earlier was collective, you know, kind of collective behaviors, not individual ones. The point is that I think that why a lot of the clinical evidence about CBT suggests a very poor long-term recovery is because, you know, at an individual level, it's not as simple as that. You can't just, any more than you, you know, you can become a retail magnate if you just follow what Mary Queen of Shops says on her, you know, BBC Pro.
You know, you can't just reprogram your own, you know, story about yourself. on your own. But this is the point. Smale's argument is, look, ultimately, simple as this, self-esteem is dependent on a public world. You know, unless you're acting in a public world, unless there's a public world which one can refer to, which one, you know, you know, in order to, you know, from which one can derive feelings of approbation or disapprobation or whatever. If you don't have that public world, then you will be struggling.
And of course, we don't have that public world now. That is what has been dismantled. That is what is gone. We don't have that public world. Stress is privatized. It's our fault, but we can't do anything about it. That's not some depressive phantasm. That's actually true. you know we can't do anything about it in the conditions that we live at the moment we're not able to do anything about it so you know there's perfect kind of end circuits aren't there we're endlessly told we're responsible we feel bad about it that makes us sort of depressed feel down in certain ways so we seek kind of either drugs or some kind of therapeutic and you know response to this and like I said therapy is not confined to
the rooms of therapists therapy is widely disseminated, Eva Luz has written a number of books about this Oprah Winfrey has been this major kind of disseminator of the therapeutic world view, it's just down to you you can turn your own life around so yes, this production of stress production of stress is absolutely crucial but I think it's gone over this threshold recently with digital communications you know that and as I say it's whilst the story we will tell ourselves about why we have to check
our emails is that we have to do it for work in one way or another which is not a false story entirely it's also hacked into our libido and I just want to come back to this question of well I forgot what I was going to come back to of trance and immersion, okay we think we're immersed in cyberspace cyberspace perpetually defers at immersion, we can waste like hours and hours on it, but we're not immersed in it in fact it's the opposite of immersion I would suggest in that what is this? We're endlessly driven. And Jodie Dean has written very well about this in her recent book, Log Theory. There's a drive.
The point is that why we're not immersed is immersion requires some kind of stillness, I think, in a way. A certain kind of stillness that this is what you don't have when you're on the Internet. On the Internet, there's this panic time. Maybe it's any movie of this, but as soon as you're opening a page, is this endless weight of network demand falls upon you. And you feel, yeah, you can't just stay on this. Come on, there's lots of other things you can be doing. And the urge to click off onto another page at any time is immense. And so I think we have this, instead of having the now, we have the instant. but the instant is kind of splintered
into these multiple windows at any time, isn't it? And what I mean by instant carrying that sense of like instant coffee or something that's instantly available but of course this strange process happens, isn't it? Instead of living in a moment what happens is the more that things are instant the more that we defer them, as it were and it's fantasy time when we'll actually look at them You know, like, oh yeah, I'll save this for later or whatever. I'll open these 20 windows because the other 18, we'll have time to look at them later. Of course, that time never arrives. But this is the disturbing fantasy, though, that we're subject to. You know, that we're constantly deferring doing things that we...
Well, we're constantly deferring that moment of immersion. in this endlessly hurried state, we're always hurrying away from things. You know, that's pretty worrying. And again, look at it from how things look like in the late 90s or whatever. What do you think is sort of desirable, where you're in a state of perpetual attentional deficit, where you simply can't look. I mean, the quote from Christy Amorazzi about, you know, business managers who can't read a page of texts, you know, it's certainly true of, like, teenagers that I've taught.
You know, the idea of you present them with a page of text, a page, and I don't mean a side of text, I can't read that. I say I cannot read it. Now, you know, the old school disciplinary response to that would be, They can read it, make them. But they really have serious problems being able to hold attention on text for that length of time. And why wouldn't they have those problems? They're plugged into a stimulation matrix. They're not stimulation, they're not. A stimulus matrix. All of the time, they're not in these crumbling disciplinary institutions, to school. Okay, so what are they going to do? Go cold turkey
and go to school and behave like 19th century disciplinary subjects? Of course they can't do that. The way in which they're required to process information outside the classroom is by constant attentional kind of migration. Asking them to concentrate is physiologically beyond them. you know, because it requires I'm not exaggerating, this requires retraining and really, this is a few years ago when I was confronting this and now with smartphones, etc, I think it can only have this can only have intensified as we were discussing in one of the breaks earlier on you know, how would we cope
I mean, you're coping pretty well with sitting here, you know, for this length of time but if you had to sit through, imagine like eight hours of school, how long the school day is, without a phone or something to distract yourself. Just think of the poor kids, no wonder their behavioural uproar and all that. Because the speed of their, the point is that the speed, I think Berardi brings this out well, I mean, you don't have to be a kind of nostalgic kind of, you know, humanist to see that there are, there's no experiment that we're living in. It's an experiment about the limits of the organism. The organism is being augmented. We are cyborg. And it's just totally banal now. We just take it for granted. We can't live without these prostheses.
You know, everything done, how I said, and all of that, is just now part of our everyday life, right? That's just simply true. But then we still have got these physiological limits, which are, well, the question is what they are. And we're experimentally determining that at the moment. We're like lab rats, but without a laboratory technician overlooking the whole thing. Do you know what I mean? Sorry, at the back, yeah. No, it's fine. I would like to take us into a sort of broader field. If we imagine wild success as a society, and we name that as economic democracy, what do you propose as an actionable first step towards that goal? Economic democracy.
What do you mean by that though? Well, it's sort of like the John Lennon quote. Imagine no possession. Okay, right. Okay, now Dan Hines has got good stuff on this, okay? On democracy, right? I think his book is excellent on this. But I think when you try and think about these measures, it's an interesting effect happens. even quite minor reformist measures seem practically unimaginable or inconceivable to be put in place so we're in this paradoxical situation where it seems that you'd require a revolution in order to put reformist measures into place this is preface to what I'm going to say now his ideas are given the media and ideological
ecology in which we live that it's dominated by big business interests, even though people don't accept those interests or are persuaded by them. And that's an important point. Neoliberalism didn't win by persuading people. It won by making itself a reality to which we are subject. And that's the only way things will go. Given that is the case, okay, how can we change this? Which is the question for him of how do we democratise things? And this is, I think, why Heinz's book is important is because it suggests, look, okay, Fordism wasn't that great, that the media institutions at the time of Fordism were top-down, inegalitarian, and undemocratic. Okay, they might have produced better stuff
than we get from, you know, Murdoch Corporation now, but, okay, they still weren't ideal. So, what do we do? So, instead of being nostalgic for that moment, we think about, when we wanted to escape from it, when we wanted to escape from it, What did we want instead of what we had got at that time? It wasn't this. It was something else. So what would, for instance, a democratized media look like? Hind has concrete suggestions. He says it would look like what we need is not democratization of comment, which we've now got, of course, where if you have anything published in a newspaper,
you're required to be subjugated to graffiti underneath it online. But this idea of choice and comment is really a pallid sop compared to what people actually did want. What he argues is what we need is the public would act as media commissioners, not as consumers. Okay, so what would that involve? So he says, okay, what we need is the public to be involved in funding journalists. Okay, in the decision about how to fund journalists. He says a certain amount of money is set aside and you can fund however many hundred investigative journalists. and that what you'd have is you'd have public committees deciding where that money went.
Now, you both are aware, I think my response to this is double. I'm sort of thinking, okay, well, if that happened, things would really change a lot. At the same time as you're thinking, well, is that conceivable that would ever happen? you know, because I mean the value behind of this is that the very fact of people engaging in these decision making processes would reveal to them what they already know people already know the confected nature of the media reality in which they live yet they sort of, because they're not involved in its production you know, they're still subject to it you know, like you know, if you do work in a media
you are somewhat demystified and effectively this is to draw everyone into working in the media and also the other response you might get when you face these proposals is oh wouldn't everyone want more stories about Cheryl Cole and this kind of thing well maybe they would but I mean I think that I agree with Hyde that that's actually unlikely that once people, you know, got an active role in deciding what sort of media that they got, at this level of commissioning where they were choosing what, you know, what journalists would report on, I think that that would change their attitude. I mean, I think a lot of the toxic aggression online is to do with feelings of just helplessness and impotence, actually, that, you
You know, that people feel they've got... This is what people offer, isn't it? You have no real control over your lives. You have no real control over the economy or the media. But you can comment on our pieces. But, you know, this is not any effect. No wonder people get sort of aggressive and antagonistic in a useless way, really. And he suggests the same, really, process could be applied to funding of science as well. because of course the funding of science now is massively governed by the interests of the military etc and big corporations again the very fact that if people were taking part, if the public were taking part in these decision making processes which are
largely opaque to them now, the very fact they were taking part in them, hind thinks, would immediately have this demystifying and democratising effect so I don't know I think that's one I think that is one line through the question is how plausible we think that is in the current situation whether that would happen given the level of vested interest against that kind of thing is so massive wouldn't it again be very positive for corporate interest and so on to after such interventions that we could harvest the interests of the people and capitalise that as well.
Yeah, but they're already doing that. They're already doing that. In a sense, the old autonomous story was the proletariat which drove everything, that capitalism was, you know, all the innovations of capitalism weren't response to the the actions of the proletariat, etc, etc. That might continue to be the case in some way. But I think it would shift a power balance away from how things are now. Part of what Heine is arguing is that the public isn't just the same as our population. We don't have a public anymore.
The conditions for... We never had one either. That's the good thing about Hyde. He's not saying, oh, it was wonderful, this old public which he once had, you know, property-owning men in the Victorian era or whatever. No, it wasn't good then. There is a teleological process, actually, that we can go back to enlightenment and democracy. What is that progress? It's away from barbarism. Barbarism is, you know, the rule by the wealthy and powerful. I mean, I think that we're still deep in barbarism. That's what we have to remember. We think of ourselves as we're sophisticated beyond all that now. But, you know, can we imagine the perspective in 50 years' time on this current mess?
People look back, how do they accept this? You know, how do they accept this massive swindling? You know, the poor and the most disadvantaged in society are required to pay for the, you know, something that, a swindler that's that obvious and on that scale, how do people accept that? Only because we, you know, we accept that we're still in a totally barbarian, you know, a barbarian world where, you know, egalitarian objectives are pretty impossible to pursue, where the interests of the wealthy and the powerful are unassailable, and lots of ways. But there's a period of reaction and restoration, and that's how things look in periods of reaction and restoration.
But what's interesting about the moment that we're in is that the reaction is troubled, isn't it? It has been troubled. Much as it's trying to have in every sense business as usual, usual, it's struggling now. Even in the heartlands of neoliberalism, like the UK and the US, we're seeing militancy emerge. And I think part of what's happening there is this conversion of depression, or disaffected feelings into political anger. And a kind of reverse of everything that was necessary for the installation of capitalist realism in the first place,
which was precisely the opposite. That effects that would previously have been directed politically were turned inward, or denied political articulation. And that whole, as I say, that whole explanation for why you are feeling down was denied to people. So, I don't know, but I think those suggestions are good ones. But I think also it's about, okay, what are we replacing trade unions with if we think trade unions are superseded? I don't think they necessarily are superseded. you know that's as i say if you want the um biggest single explanation for the emergence
of capitalist realism is the demise of trade unions um now okay why is why is it difficult for trade unions now not only because of an aggressive political project against them it's because of post-warism, because of globalization. You know, that because the nature of the capitalist commodity change now is much more complicated than it was. But does that mean that the work of solidarity is inconceivable? No, I don't think it does mean that. But what it means is that we need some kind of imaginative leaps in terms of what form these organizations would tame. Now I don't have the answer now, but that's the sort of thing we have to be working on,
isn't it? Like I say, we can't think that we'll immediately have the answers to these things. Because everything has conspired against us even thinking about us posing the questions never mind about the answers. But now, I think G.J. is right when he says we shouldn't just act all the time or think we can act immediately. But we need to do something. That something can be theoretical production, as much as it is actually going out into the streets. And also, like, fictional production, imaginative. What do we, how do we picture this world that we want to live in? This is really hard when we try and do that. And I think the, one other thing we can talk about capitalist realism is the diminishing horizons of something like science fiction.
It's the denuded nature of science fiction actually over the last 20 or 30 years. You know, that's still in cyberpunk. You know, still in Blade Runner. You know, what has science fiction generated as a plausible future world, or not plausible, but any sort of future world since those, since that day, you know. it's that time, that mode, nothing you know, it's kind of significant that people like William Gibson or Sterling you know, Bruce Sterling, a sort of who's treated from science fiction altogether even at cyberpoint form and said, you know, Gibson's saying I don't write science fiction anymore, just write about how things are now and actually there's an essay online a few months ago
by Bruce Sterling about atemporality, which is in a way re-describing a lot of the phenomenon I talked about earlier on, that's sort of saying, well, that's how things are now, we've just got to face it. I think that a kind of diminution of dreaming, of social dreaming, you could say, the dreaming of counter-possibilities, of counter-worlds, this is also a symptom and a cause of capitalist realism. That, you know, we need this kind of production as well, production on this level, because it would at least have the effect of denaturalizing this world in which we live and also suggesting something that we could struggle towards.
But I think in terms of some of the things I've talked about, I think we need to have collective refusal of these mechanisms of anxiety production. okay like um no we're not doing self-surveillance anymore right no we're not doing it but this this this is what let's look i think in terms of teaching you know as i say in co-operative realism the stories old um jurassic you know tilting effective forwardist tactics of one one day strikes school teachers totally stupid who cares we're university teachers one day out oh dear the whole economy grinds to home no what what actually happens is the management of the colleges and universities go great, it saves our wage bill this month. Who really cares?
But what they would care about was if you said, okay I'm not filling in, I'm not participating in any inspection, we're not taking part in it, we're not doing any external examining, we're not engaging in, we're not feeding you statistics, we're not engaging in these, we're not filling in these log books, self-survating, not doing any of that. The point is that the institution would run along perfectly happily in terms of the consumers. If you're talking about a college or a university, as if the students would care if you've not filled in your log books or you've done your duties to managerialists. No, they're not going to care. But the managers would care. And, you know, because it makes their life difficult
And these are the kind of things that I think these kind of strategies. I think the point is that one of the difference between trade union type conflict and anti-capitalist protest was that the antagonism is located in the workplace. We need to get back to that situation where antagonism is where people work, not something that they do outside work as it were. Isn't there a problem with the fact that there are no work? At least not for me. There is only management and no work left. I work all the time but I'm also unemployed all the time.
But I still feel better if I've been doing one day of Facebooking because then I think that I've managed my work somehow in a way that makes me feel a bit better. I haven't really met anyone. No, no. Is it quite true there's no workplace at all? I mean, I do take the point that's an important one and a difference. That it's not, I mean, the analogy isn't going to completely work with those old Fordist conditions. Okay, but there is work, and there are managerialists, I think. right and I think we have to force the difference really force the difference between the two that now the point is not against management per se
we need managers right we just don't need managerialists which is management for its own sake and for the increase of wealth of managers and also managers serve this function of as I say anxiety production I think this is where someone like Negri is effectively right that in lots of ways this managerialist capitalist class is just a parasite on processes which could continue better without them and I think it's forcing how we can do that is forcing this question that managerialists don't help us do our work better they make it more difficult for us to do our work
but you know except that you're right that when you're when we're dispersed in space when we have short term contracts or zero hours contracts or whatever that you know the conditions for this kind of thing are much harder but you know like trade unions didn't come out of platonic heaven as it were they didn't they emerged out of people's thinking about what would you know how could they could better their situation in those conditions of 19th century industrial capitalism. You know that we need to be thinking in the same way don't we? That's not that these are difficulties now but does that mean
it's insuperable and nothing can be done? Well that's what capitalist realism is telling us right? But it may well be true but also I don't know have we tried everything out or what? And that I don't think we have tried anything out but also this time that we're coming into is a different time you know that when I was finishing the book I was kind of thinking just as the bank bailouts were happening what is the point of writing this book capitalism will end before I finish the book didn't quite work out like that but that but it doesn't mean nothing happens And something massive did happen there. Something massive did happen in 2008.
And, you know, now we're in this moment of where history can start again, I think. I don't think there's a lot we could have done before 2008 in lots of ways. It wasn't just errors or mistakes or we got things wrong, we could have done things better. You know, everything was set up against us at that point. now the situation has changed and I think that is an opportunity and you know once in a lifetime one those of us older than most of you I don't know if it's worse for you or me either to endure it longer you've only ever seen it what's worse I don't know but you know this
this is a space so what I mean is the kind of, if you start thinking about it now, there's a chance for that being effective in a way it wasn't five years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There is like a widespread like escapism that we all devote ourselves to. Yeah. And I am thinking, like, is this always negative? Or could that entail that, like, something new would come out of that? I mean, that's my hope, you know? Because you need this escape.
What do you mean by escape? Why is it about escape? You know, like, you watch this television series, like, for hours on end. You can't get out of it. You get this, like, feeling that something is happening. but you know that it's not. And even if their lives in the TV changes, your life doesn't change very much. When you come out, you get the exact same place. That's why I felt like I was watching that. No, but I mean, the thing is, I think part of the problem is there's increasingly less escapism. That's part of what I'm saying. The sort of impulses that we used to have to escape now go into being embedded even more deeply into the neurosis of our everyday lives. So instead of escaping to some fantasy counter-world,
we escape into bloody Facebook or whatever. And actually, if you read this book by Sherry Turkel, it's very quite moving about how difficult young people find this Facebook world. The level of stress they're under, and it's constant performance anxiety. It's really quite poignant moments when almost none of them can cope with real-time telephone calls. Also, she notes in the book that real-time telephone calls, probably all of us now regard them as this unacceptable intrusion. Now, I'm not going to phone them up. It's an intrusion. Why do we think that? Because we ourselves think that way. Oh, the phone rings. Oh, God, who's doing that? And if it's the landline ringing,
you know it's like either your parents or someone trying to sell you something, isn't it? but you know why can't they cope with that because they they're used to this delay with things like SMS or even you know Instant Messenger etc where they have time to compose their response she says that what they'll do is they'll spend all their time they'll spend hours trying to get 140 character text, the right level of nonchalance into this 140 character text. It seems to me that if these kids were escaping more, their lives would be better.
The impulse that went into escaping has gone into this depressing production of this depressing performance of a neurotic identity, which there's no escape from. And that's what I think that's also why the echo of reality TV itself. reality TV is part of capitalist realism, I think. The whole foreclosure of the fictional as such, or the symbolic as such, in favour of this depressing notion of competitive individualism, which was pushed by reality TV, which is as depressing as it was compulsive. You know, please bring back escapism, and I would like to completely agree with you that there's always some, that if there's, you know, there's always something in some potentially utopia
a recuperable utopian dimension in actual escapism. But that's the nature of the cyberspace time prison in which we're in, is that once we would have escaped, now we're going to look at photographs of ourselves on Facebook. You know, it's the... As you were saying earlier, we can't formulate anything. We can't, like, escape and retreat and then formulate... No, exactly. Something to give back, you know, an alternative. Because we don't have time. I think the extent to which we don't have time is we underestimate this. Because we deny our own time. We deny it. We don't have time. There's plaintive anecdotes in here about our children who just wish that their mother would one day
just look at them. When the mother picks up the child in the car, the child is desperately hoping that one day the mother will look up first at the child instead of be sitting there looking at messages the whole time. And of course, we can't sit in judgment. We are that mother, right? You know, in some way or another, we can totally understand that. Yeah, sorry. I just want to do the point about this, like, talk about William Gibson. Yeah. And, like, I think there's a big flaw that, like, new romances are, like, view of today's world. Yes. Because if you look at the Lassenger-Tarys' view of capitalism, I think a big point is that it's not only deterritorialisation but also re-territorialisation so there is actually, we are producing things but the speed
has increased of capitalism the rate of consumption at least that's how I think of it but I mean the point of it is that capitalism isn't totally distributed it isn't totally devoid of substance so I think that's what we have to realise that there is actually some things, material things, and that's also an important point like with the Los Ingotari. It's a material strata, it's something physical that we can attack. Okay, so how do you think, for instance, what sort of physical things can we attack? Like the things we spoke about in this whole lecture. I mean, the construction of individuality is created by architectonics, by physical structures
in the world. Yeah, so basically, well, it's a very general statement, but there is some things, physical things that we have to change. Okay. And I just wanted to make that general. No, I think this point about the, you know, this is absolutely crucial, I think, this thing about re-territorialization as well as de-territorialization. I think it's like, that we have to change some ideological or idea, but it's actually a nature. We have to do something physically. Yes, well, I think the two are tied up. I think we can't do one without the other. There was an interesting comment on the news a couple of weeks ago here in Stockholm where the architect school burned down. And the first statement from the architect school was, we will ensure you that we will rebuild the school as it were.
I think then physical structure and so on. What is this that we ensure you, instead of saying, fucking hell, this is a great time. We can change architecture by changing the school. to whatever it might be, right? But nobody even thinks, well, let's outsource it, let's sell it to IKEA immediately. You know, let's rebuild as we want, as it always was. So there's some kind of a feedback loop in this also of wanting it to remain, since we are so fucking keen on keeping our jobs. Yes. I mean, if we change the organisation, if we change the institution, it might be that I'm on the street. So we have this in university world, as we all know, the economy of the university is shrinking. So what do we do? We decrease the time that we spend with the students.
Yes, and have more of them. And have more of them? And keep our own jobs? Yeah. And try to do the same education for less money? Yes. Very rarely I see somebody saying, okay, then let's change the whole story around. Right. And then we wonder, aha, so you are a philosopher teacher or critical political science? and the first thing you do is you maintain the structural proposal of your organization instead of trying something else out, right? Well, that's it. And I think that's partly that the advantage that capital has got over its opponents is that the opponents exist in a Fordist mentality, whereas capitalism exists in post-Fordism. You know, so like particularly with university labor,
we're desperately trying to protect something which is gone which is the forwardest conditions of security etc for academic work those conditions have gone, they'll never come back and the more that we try and protect them the weaker our position will be so exactly, we need to think ahead not for how we can install things and that is to do with I think that Berardi and you know the Italian autonomists and Negri you're writing about, it's about precariousness. Like, precariousness was originally a good thing. Like, people said, like, it's good to be precarious in the 70s. Why? Because you could drop out of work for months, go, fuck you, I'm not working until you can drop back in again. Now, that precariousness has been reversed.
But look, you know, I don't want to go back to a stable job, actually, in that way. You know, that's, um, but what we want is conditions where things are on the side of the precarious worker, rather than everything's exploiting a precarious worker, which is a situation now, because part of the dimension of what you're describing is the way in which workers with quasi-foughtist conditions are set against precarious workers. That happens in these institutions all the time, in the sense that you get, well, look, what's the threat over the foughtist workers is that, oh, well, look, if you don't work, you'll be precarious. You don't comply, you'll be precarious like this. And what's the hold over the precarious workers. If you work here for 15 years in these really bad conditions,
maybe, maybe you'll be able to aspire to become like one of these older kind of fossilized fortists. And while that dynamic's in place, it's kind of hopeless, I think. Instead of like, okay, what do we do? How do we all become precarious in a way that is advantageous to us and not to capital. And it's words like flexibility. They were our words first, and they were stolen by them. Of course we want to be flexible. We want to be, on our terms, not yours. And this is what the struggle has to be about, doesn't it? Not reconstituting those things which we wanted to escape from in the first place. And as I say, it's the question of what we did, what did we want when we wanted to escape, if it wasn't this?
I think this activist sense of what did that do for anyone else in the entire rest of the world who were, you know what I mean yeah yes and I also think the tendency towards you can see there's a lot of things in the UK at the moment tendency towards fighting the police or whatever or getting in a situation where this is the case I mean that's also equally an effect okay the police aren't the enemy they're just the servants of the enemy which is you know so if you don't go to the enemy don't go to the servants of the enemy go to the actual enemy itself and see what you can do about that you know what I mean if you're ending up and scuffles with the servants of the enemy
the enemy is pretty happy about that you know in lots of ways I was thinking about what you said about history and its potential to begin or to start, and how this might relate to lack or consistency of escapism and nostalgia, where we started out. Because it's a little bit sad when you think about it, 1985, by your turn, it's long, it's quite some time now. Yes, yeah, yeah. He wrote it in 58, wasn't it like that? The reverse? 84. Oh, 84, yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah, 48. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe that's the one I wrote.
And then you have 2001, a space odyssey. Yeah. Sad. And these kinds. And then you have Fukuyama, which is a different kind of... Yes. Yes, but I think that... Science fiction where he claims that this is... This is Hegel's absolute... We all believe him, though, don't we? The point is that at some level, we all believe Fukuyama is right. We all believe that there's... That, you know, the tendency of history is towards capitalism and that, you know, once we've got into this mess or this state, we can't really get out of it again. I mean, I'm not saying we believe at every level, but at the level of a certain, you know,
kind of political unconscious, we believe it. And, you know, if we start off from that, we've got to start off from the fact that accepting that is what we do believe. And then, you know, all this whole matrix of measures that we've talked about are steps that we need to be undertaken from here. You may be interested in the problem of history, since you set out speaking about nostalgia being devoid of its original content, replayed somehow, reenacted. I mean, I brought up Fukuyama because the book you wrote echoes from a different perspective.
It does, yeah. That very claim. It does, it does. that this is the end of history because its entropy is here. So that's why I also got I had to think twice when you reinstated the concept of history saying that now it could start or is it restarting or... Yes, well I mean I don't accept the situation as described in the book really. I just think that there's a it isn't a step though, acknowledging that that's how we do think or that's how things have been made to appear. Isn't that a step towards actually getting out of it? Speaking of science fiction as a means of speculating a possible utopia, I think it's quite common that you situate a possible utopia somewhere in history,
whether it's a science fiction, a futurist utopia, or it might be one. We had this joke with a friend the other day that when we were kids, we were playing as it were in the old days. Yes. The game where you meet and you say, let's pretend we were in before. Yeah. And that this is also a utopia because you have to speculate. But I think we also need to conversely to, and this is partly what I was trying to do with Sam what I was saying today, is to dystopianize our own time. That's what I mean about this. Have we really thought how bad it is, this thing about intentional deficit? they just think about everything you do now everything you do is tyrannized by this digital twitch
you know like everything you can't you can't settle to anything we're all like junkies at some level like it's really you know this is not dystopianizing the present is also a backdoor route to the utopia as well I think do you know what I mean I think that that's part I guess I'm better at dystopianizing I think than at that maybe we should dystopianize tomorrow and we have been spending now three and a half hours with each other well thanks for staying this long I'm very impressed that you can put up with this for this long and especially in this heat as well so thanks everybody and it's been a really good discussion from my point of view we start at 10 o'clock tomorrow
and we meet in the cafe and continue into deep dystopia What time did you say? 10 o'clock. Is it a morning session tomorrow? That's not, I mean I have to get...