So, Mark, we've just described the different parts of the film, but I haven't gone into detail. So we'd love to hear you expanding on the handout that we've given everyone with your different sections. Okay. So I'm not going to talk that directly about the film. I'm just going to talk about, I think the sort of cultures, issues that the film feeds into and responds to. And as you see, if you people have got the handout, I'm going to do that under four headings, basically. The first is communicative capitalist sorcery.
The second is touchscreen capture. The third is cyberspace time crisis. And the fourth is digital psychedelia. And one of the interesting things about Nathema, then, is that it is about communicative capitalism. And it's also about the means by which communicative capitalism spreads and propagates. And a further level up from that, it's about the propagation of those means of propagation. In other words, it's about, on a simple level there, it's about the touchscreen technologies, fundamentally, which are the key platforms for the spreading of community of capitalism.
But it is predominantly taken from advertising for those technologies. first of all what do we mean by community of capitalism um well the term uh originates with jody dean's work sorry you okay okay um the term originates uh with the work of jody dean and I think makes a crucial contribution to the critique of the form that power, capitalist power now assumes. And also a corrective, an important corrective to the idea that the proliferation of communication in cyberspace has an inherently liberatory dimension.
um jody's work shows uh that uh the form that capitalism now takes uh is essentially not it's essentially about soliciting communication um and just as in a way just as capital is indifferent um to what it sells so community capitalism is really indifferent to what is being said it doesn't matter what is being said what matters is the sheer volume of volume of communication itself and this comes out in a quote from jody and the handout that i've given you today the circulation of content in the dense intensive networks of global communication relieves top level actors corporate institutional and governmental
from the obligation to respond. Rather than responding to messages sent by activists and critics, they counter with their own contributions to the circulating flow of communications, hoping that sufficient volume, whether in terms of number of contributions or the spectacular nature of contribution, will give their contributions dominance or stickiness. Instead of engaged debates, instead of contestations employing common terms, points of references, or demarcated frontiers. We confront a multiplication of resistances and assertions so extensive that it hinders the formation of strong counter-egemonies. The proliferation, distribution, acceleration and intensification of community access and opportunity, far from
enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite, the post-political formation of communicative capitalism. Okay, so I think what's important about this is that whilst on one level, it seems as if this is sold to us as if we're in a new world of horizontal communication, where powers that be are held to account and also where we have much more power and control and capacity to participate than we once had. But I think, as Jodie brings out in her work,
this is really a form of, not only is this a form of pseudo-participation, it's a form which is, in many ways, inherently defeated by the very form that it assumes. by this very commodifiability, but the fact that this form is in fact the most important form of late capitalist commodity. And actually, I think Jody's work is really anticipated quite strikingly by the work of Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard, whose work from the end of the 60s on into the 70s now reads as a almost shockingly prophetic way.
The third quote on the sheet that I gave you, for a critique of the political economy of the sign, from the early 70s, today consumption, if this term has a meaning other than that given to it by vulgar economics, defines precisely the stage where the commodity is immediately produced as a sign, as sign value, and where signs, culture are produced as commodities. This is clearly anticipating or already seeing the tendency for the move into what we call sort of immaterial labour, for the move into commodities that are essentially immaterial, that acquire their value.
Well, their value is, as Baudrillard says, inextricable from sign value. Excuse me. But this leads on to the really second heading I want to talk under, which is a touchscreen capture. Okay, so we look with lots of ways. We live inside the world that Baudrillard predicted. And one of the astonishing things about Baudrillard's work is how it has moved from being sort of utterly dismissed, particularly by the left, I would have to say. Why are we talking about science, et cetera? Why aren't we talking about proper economics? It's been dismissed and disdained in that way.
Now, practically everything he said being taken utterly for granted, that we have an economy based not on material quantities of things, but on their sign value. But Baudrillard, I mean, one of the striking things then about the striking resonances of Baudrillard's work, not only with today, but specifically with Anathema, is the question of tactility. and Baudrillard's understanding of the way in which power would function in a tactile mode. A few quotes here which I've given you which illustrate this. I'm going to go to the second one in the second section.
I think summarizes clearly what Baudrillard thought was happening. and solicitation is substituted for the ultimatum mandatory passivity evolves into models constructed directly from the active responses of the subject his or her implication ludic participation and finally towards a total environmental model made up of an incessant spontaneous responses joyful feedback and irradiated contact bear in mind this was written in 1977 but I think it describes our own social field and the communicative that the field of communicative capitalism much more accurately and much more powerful than described the world of his own day in many ways this is the great festival of participation composed of myriad stimuli
miniaturized tests infinitely divisible nodes of query and reply magnetized by a few overarching models illuminated by the code. The culture of tactile communication is in fact burgeoning, the techno-lumino-kinetic space provided by this total spatio-dynamic theatre. It brings with it a kind of contact imaginary, a sensorial mimeticism, a tactile mysticism that grafts onto the universe of operational simulation and multi-stimulation and multi-response like an entire system of of ecological concepts. Okay now what's the stake in this concept of the tactile for Baudrillard? Well partly it's a move for him beyond or plainly beyond the visual and partly the influence
here and one of the thinkers that he repeatedly engages within his work in the 70s is McLuhan and what he's what he's playing on and developing is really opposition between hot and cool media as proposed by McLuhan. In many ways as we enter the era of cool media and hot media are those which simply blast things at you which simply require what he cause mandatory passivity in the quotation I just read. Baudrillard, in common with a clue, and really thinks that that period of... Sorry, some building work going on next door, which is...
Proving a little bit distracting. Okay, so Baudrillard really thinks of that period of communication, of that form of communication, where people are just passive spectators, is over. We're no longer in the era of the spectacles, Baudrillard says, in a number of his writings. We're in the era of participation, where we will will be solicited where our participation will be constantly solicited. Again, we have to remind ourselves that Baudrillard was writing at the time of, you know, still mass media and television, where these forms were really only in their infancy.
I mean, Baudrillard was one of the first, Baudrillard was very quickly onto the implications of reality TV, which you wrote about in the late 70s. And he also wrote about symbolic exchange and death, which is from the source of that last quotation. He also wrote about what he called the referendum mode, the tendency for politics. Well, the question about what degree of influence do things like opinion polls have on the actual results of elections? For Baudrillard, we simply can't answer that anymore because the opinion poll was already itself in a feedback loop with the thing that it is ostensibly representing. And this fusion, really, of reality TV, which poses the same question, how much effect does the camera have on those it is ostensibly recording?
Again, for Baudrillard, we simply can't know because as soon as the camera enters into the field that it's recording, then this question of its influence, the question of the extent to which it is self-engaged in a process of cybernetic feedback with what it is ostensibly passively recording, is an open one, which is unanswerable for Baudrillard. um what's striking about a lot of the the developments of sort of entertainment culture in the 21st century then is the way in which they fuse these two modes that we have um that the reality tv mode um synthesized with the kind of um opinion poll mode um in you know in in sort of the talent competition that which um is classically baudrillardian that we could not have
things like X Factor, Britain's Got Talent, etc., without the audience. The audience is not there simply to observe it. It's not an audience in the old sense. The audience is there as part of the feedback loop. And, you know, I think we are very quickly understood the ways in which this, in a way, urge for democratic participation would be captured by capital. And, and sold back to us. Where, you know, power in a way upsets itself and contracts itself out to us. As it were, why is mainstream culture rubbish? It's our fault. You know, it's our fault.
If we didn't watch it, if we didn't participate in it, if we didn't text or phone in to Big Brother or The X Factor, then these shows couldn't function. And that is plainly true, that, you know, they require our participation. Our participation isn't some optional extra. It's completely fundamental to it. And so what's at stake then partly in the concept of the tactile for Baudrillard, which was in some ways then in his time being used as a metaphor? and tactile is the nature is the notion of the two-way you touch something and when you know when you when you look at something um you remain distant from it you
know your eye is uh uh apart from the uh you know the the object or the surface um at which its gaze is directed this is impossible with touch you know when you touch something it touches you back um and you know this this he this he saw as he says with this tactile imaginary um would be the form of power though he wouldn't himself like doesn't even like the term power because he thinks um that is compromised by these new set of tactile relations um tactility then uh the the tactile unimaginable as he puts it, becomes the the the principal form in which, well I'll call it power, we'll assume under what others but not really him would call sort of late capitalism.
Now of course one of the key developments since Baudrillard's day is the literalization of of tactility now and this is one of the interesting things about anathema then is that it's um it's dealing with this uh a tactility which is not um figurative one um well perhaps it's more figurative than it appears actually um but where the uh well there's an apparent move but behind beyond the metaphorical into an actual tactility. The tactility of our fingers touching screens, the capacity to directly affect what we're seeing on a screen with our fingers.
um but i i say that this is a more um a rather a less metaphorical form of tactility um but in many ways it isn't um and here's where i think it's worth bringing in um the work of friedrich kittler um and kittler who um i'm sure many of you familiar with his work but I mean one of one strand of it is a is a critique of um the graphic user interface um you know uh particularly sort of uh developed by apple then sort of stolen by windows and the graphic user interface which makes things sort of more user friendly um but also uh
crucially for Kittler, locks people out of the computer. So in the early days when the user of computers was also a programmer, it's then you could really interact with the machinery as it were. Now for Kittler, the more that graphic user interface develops, the less access we have to the kind of machine logics of computers themselves. And the more we are interacting with things which reflect back the world to us that we're already familiar with. And hence this quote that I gave you on the handout, through the use of keyboards, like user
interface, user friendliness or even data protection, the industry has damned humanity to remain human. I think there's a broader issue raised by this here and by the limitations of the kind of tactile imaginary, by the pseudo-participation and the kind of frenzy of communicative activity which we're all involved in or almost all of us involved in to some extent now particularly through social media I think that I think if you see look at the key developments of 21st century kind of entertainment culture whether that be reality tv
or social media, the dominant tendency in those in those media is to is them to act as kind of mirrors. And we can see in a way a depressing tendency where arts, arts and cultures, capacity to sort of take us out of ourselves has been replaced by a function of trapping us in ourselves, of reflecting back, reflecting back ourselves, often in our most neurotic and narcissistic ways. And this would lead me on to the next point, really, which is about the kind of tactile ideology,
which I think emerges in and which as we can see from anathema is more than a question of ideas in in our minds it is it's also a kind of erotics you know the tactile imaginary is one where the screen is broken where the where our fingers reach out and we and we and we enter into this kind of world of liquid interactions. This is very far from the world of actually dealing with actual touchscreen technology. I don't know about you, but I just hate touchscreen keyboards myself. One of the interesting things about Anathema, I think,
is that move from old style keyboards to touchscreen keyboards and the differences between them. I've both got a BlackBerry and an iPad, and I hate using the iPad keyboard. Maybe we can talk about this afterwards. But I also find that the touchscreen, rather than this smooth world of pure interaction that is offered, is kind of clunky and blurry. you know often you know you have to you have to touch in precisely the right place exert precisely the right pressure and actually the world where you're you're engaging on the plane of abstraction via via the um via the old keyboard um rather than apparently engaging
directly with your fingers is crisper and sort of clearer than this kind of blurry mess. Because the problem is, as it were, part of the issue here is the discrepancy between us and the machine. The machine operates using, you know, it needs very clear commands, whereas our fingers aren't that precise. So from its point of view, it must be extremely irritating to have to deal with these kind of clumsy monkeys pouring it in a certain way. And this leads on to this, I think,
important critique of connection, the concept of connection, in the work of Franco Berardi, Bifo. where he makes this distinction between connection and conjunction. Beethel argues that we're in a world dominated by connection, not of conjunction. What is the difference? The difference is that connection forces the things which are to be connected to be formed. well if it requires that the things that are to be connected are formatted in its terms whereas conjunction allows actual difference. Conjunction allows things which are heterogeneous
to be in communication with one another. Connection doesn't allow this. So the next quote then, connection, Ethos says, means a relationship between formatted segments, making desingularized bodies compatible. Conjunction means singular, unrepeatable communication between around bodies. Connection means integration of smooth bodies in a space which is no space and in a time which is no time. Okay, well that leads me on to, I think, one of the key issues which anathema engages with And I think directly, I mean, one of the most important aspects of anathema for me is it isn't just engaging in critique.
It's engaging in, as the autolithic group themselves say, a counterspell. It is itself operating with a different sense of space time than that of community of capitalism. okay so i just want to spend a few minutes talking about what that dominant experience of space time is um i think we live in um we live in times where attention is is besieged um where it is very difficult for us to concentrate on any one thing at any time any one time um where you know, as soon as we're in, as soon as we have smartphones, then we're inside cyberspace
at all times and any place where the signal can reach us. The sort of ideology, or rather, let's, you know, let's put it differently in the terms I just outlined above, the erotics of community of capitalism are then of this smooth, liquid interaction. But that might be how things are for capital. But that's not how things are for us, as it were. Things may move smoothly as messages. But in terms of our phenomenology, in terms of our experience of the world,
It is the opposite. I think this sort of relates to FIFO's point about the distinction between connection and conjunction. We ourselves then are constantly bombarded by competing stimuli. If you've got a smartphone, the smartphone itself, there's multiple possibility, There's multiple platforms that can be open at the same time. If we've got a smartphone sitting in front of a computer, then the possibility for an attentional dispersal is clearly even greater.
um so i one way of thinking about this is in terms of speed and slowness i i that um what what we lack now is is a certain kind of um slowness um and that the problem is that things are too fast. Well, actually, I don't think that would accept you. It's more about attentional consistency, really, versus bittiness and fragmentation. What the experience of constantly being distracted, of constantly being a sort of awoken from any kind of figurative or actual
sort of dream state that we're in. The effect of that is this sense of constantly living in a world where everything is interrupted, where nothing is ever finished. I was at an event the day with the music critic Simon Reynolds who was joking about these very small scenes online, they talk about no audience underground. I think in many ways that we're in a case of a also a no audience overground, a terrifyingly dystopian proposition that we're actually living in but which partly because we're living in it we can't see it. A world where no one pays attention to anything ever um or where um conditions where we're paying attention
are extremely rare and a full paradox here is that um you know if communicate if sign value what is sign value as sign value is the value something requires from uh being seen to be seen or being seen to be attended to um you know nothing has value sitting on someone's computer things acquire value via the fact that they've been seen to be seen, via retweets, likes, etc. So the full paradox then is that in a time where lots of resources which were once
scarce, like the capacity to make culture, the capacity to What Brian Wilson had from the Beach Boys, you know, is to make one of the sort of classic albums of all time. That kind of equipment is now available to practically anyone on their PC at home. The capacity to distribute worldwide is in theory available to everybody. um but what is missing though uh what is scarce now is the attention that would make any of those productions matter at all that's that that is the real that is the real scarcity um okay so i think then this opens up the question of um
well what is the alternative to this what is the alternative to this um condition of permanent lateness anxiety harassedness busyness um where we never have time for anything um where um we never um we never can um focus our attention on anything um where the alerts on our phones are constantly operating as alarms, waking us and inhibiting any kind of trance state that we might fall into. Well, I think that's the most exciting things about anathema is that it is directly contributing to a new model of time.
And one of the other exciting things about it is that it does this through the materials of community of capitalism itself. um and the way that it's a fairly simple process that that anathema undertakes which is um de-anchorage um but um famous theory of anchorage um which was you know this was how uh i mean he's talking about advertising fundamentally this is how um advertisers um fix the meaning of images is by simply the obvious method of labeling and text. So text, voiceover, etc.
fixes the inherently polyvalent meaning of meanings, of images rather, in order to sell things. And so what anathema does is de-anchor. And so it takes the, it takes advertisements and de-anchors them from their capturing by capital. I think here it's worth mentioning the theory of capitalism, most famously articulated by Michael Hart and Antonio Negri, but which really goes back to the Italian autonomous tradition
and starting with Mario Tronti. The idea that capital is a parasite fundamentally, that capital likes to present itself as fundamentally necessary, as that without which no social relations, no productivity could possibly happen in the modern world. But the autonomous thesis is that capital is essentially and increasingly a parasite which struggles to convert sort of sociability,
communicative interaction of people into profit. And I think what we've got with, what we get with anathema is with this de-anchorage of this kind of erotic image flow, of this promise of tactile interaction. What we get is the liberation of that kind of desiring ocean of images. liberated from capital itself. And we get a vision of everything.
An important thing is, well, what is capital in many ways? Capital is a form of capture. This comes back to really the first quote from Pignar and Stengas from their book, Capitalist Auschwitz, I know it was influential the production of anathema. A system of sorcery without sorcerers is what Pignall and Stengel call capitalism. But he also described capitalism. What is this sorcery? It is a form of capture. And what is being captured? It is desire. And actually, the problem that the left has had since the 60s, really,
is that the right has been able to claim desire for its own. And one of the key ways in which it did that was via communicative capitalism. I'm sure people remember the famous Apple advert from 1984, which played on Orwell and which showed new Apple computers as being personally liberated from the totalitarian world sort of centralized bureaucracy etc and you know which was a code for ibm and which also had a which we can also be read in a more and straightforward level um that's you know this is one example of the way in which um capital successfully presented itself uh as liberatory
and liberatory of of desire um you know uh this this is this has been the key story of what i've one of the key dimensions of what I call capitalist realism. Why is capitalism the only sort of, held to be the only viable political system? Well, because it's the only one which engages with the plasticity of people's desires, so it is claimed. Desire is a kind of serpent that will destroy any other system. Capitalism, rather than trying to repress desire, then mobilizes it, metabolizes it, makes it fundamentally part of its system in a way that allegedly other systems can't.
But I think that it's very important to sort of overcome this. and to have a anti-capitalism or I prefer a vision of post-capitalism, you know, which is about desire and which is also about saying that capitalism, precisely, it captures our desires. It doesn't express them. It captures them and it also projects desires which it can't possibly meet. You know, as I say, the smooth, liquid world of tactility
presented in the adverts that are sort of sampled and montaged in anathema, this is very far from the actual world in which we live. You know, very far from the harassed harassed and permanently anxious state in which most of, in which as I argued earlier, we find ourselves most of the time. But what, so what we get anathema then is with this de-anchorage of this desiring ocean, which capital feeds upon and which it captures, is this vision of another kind of experience of time. And what's also important about this, I think, is that
the anathema film is just as modern, just as technological as Capital itself. Because one of the sort of fatal oppositions that I think anti-capitalism has fallen into is really being allowed to be allowing itself to be seen as anti-technological and as anti-modern. So that confirms the notion that the only possible modernity is that of capitalism. um and what and the only place for modernity then would be this world of permanent busyness um and you know what i've also called business ontology where uh ultimately it's it's business which determines um what is most important um in life um culture and art um so
this uh that is why i'm talking about a sort of digital psychedelia then that within the the sort of technological means that are currently used by communicative capitalism can be used for different purposes which are immersive which are which allow this time of a kind of simultaneous attentional focus and drift both of which are kind of blocked out by community of capitalism. And as I say, I think the power of anathema is that it doesn't really talk about this,
it actually does it for us. And I think I'll leave it there for now. I'm sure you've suffered enough with it now. Thank you. Inevitable Skype glitches and connection problems which fully illustrate Baradi's point, I think, actually. I think maybe people have some questions if you've got some time. Yeah, cool. I just have one I prepared earlier. I'm really interested in the aspect of anathema that's kind of about language and this kind of loss of language and then a kind of regaining of language,
taking control, and also the kind of mute aesthetics of the whole thing that these advertisements are kind of rendered mute and it becomes a kind of seductive yeah, it becomes a seductive aesthetics that kind of, they bring out the kind of dark element I suppose of that there's definitely an eerie edge to it and in your book, Capitalist Realism you kind of speak a bit about teenagers that are drawn into that spend all their time online that are always hooked up to the Matrix and that they have a kind of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a pathology of late capitalism, which is a term we actually used in our catalogue, pathologies of the present. So that was kind of interesting to reread and come across that.
And you kind of described the term, you used the term postlexia to describe these kids. Yeah. And they spend all their time with this capital's image-dense data, which I suppose is exactly what anathema looks at. And you quoted Deleuze and Qatari, that capitalism is profoundly illiterate. And also mentioning Bifo in After the Future, he kind of talks about how people are desensitised by this streamlined semi-circulation, and they kind of, I can't remember if I made this up or if you read it, but anyway, the kind of, because I wrote about it a while ago, about the kind of loss of language when you're that desensitized, you can't articulate so well. I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit.
I don't have a question there. It's kind of chapped all in there. No, no, okay, it's fine. I mean, I think, yeah, I forgot about all those chain stuff, actually, which is, I think, highly relevant to anathema. Well, I think, you know, I'm somewhat ambivalent about that post-lexical thing in capitalist realism in that it's not simply something that's just bad, as it were, that they are young are post-lexical. I mean, what to me was bad about that was that they were caught between two things, that they're still sort of in a world where they're judged by standards of lexicality
or lexical performance and still required to do that, when effectively they're operating outside that world. And this is producing this crisis of, one of the factors that's producing the crisis of institutions, that what institutions are operating with outmoded disciplinary lexical criteria, when the students themselves are much more directly plugged into the way that late capitalism itself operates. But that is itself ambivalent in that being directly plugged into something may mean, yes, you're very effective at functioning in it. But also you can't really see it.
The more that we rely on something, the more it fades into the background, the less we can see it in a way. And that's the kind of basic to the theories of McLuhan, I think, the ways in which the technologies in which we most depend are those which we have the least understanding of, as he puts it, you know, a fish can't see water. But it's actually McLuhan, in that passage from Antioedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari just talk about capitalism as illiterate, they also talk about McLuhan. And yes, I think they're anticipating this move into exactly this kind of… I mean, libidinal engineering is another phrase I would use. What is PR and advertising? It's
not simply about a message that has been communicated. It is about the engineering of desire itself. But it's clear that there's still some minimal role for text in that. There has to be some minimal anchorage. In a way, this is what we can see what is the parasitism of capitalism now, we could say it is in that minimal anchorage. As it were, all of this stuff is circulating, proliferating, etc. The capital sort of has to re-anchor it. How does it re-anchor it? Does it by,
well it's partly sigilistic, but what I mean by that is sigils, brand logos, but also by But also, you know, text still plays a role in that kind of anchorage. And then it's an open question, I think, about how we escape this. Do we escape from language itself? Is it language that's the problem? Since capital, despite being illiterate, still needs some minimal form of language. or is there an escape from outside language in a certain way?
And like you say, I think a lot of mathemiden is wordless and the words that do appear are glossolalia, nonsense. So I'm not sure that I've got that, just as you haven't got a question, I'm not sure that I've got an answer, but I hope that's some response. It's an interesting response. I might just think, does anyone have any questions that they want to ask? I'm just a little bit curious, Mark. Sorry, just picking up on that last point. Where can I stand? You can probably go around the stairs. Hi. Just picking up on that last point. I actually did transcribe the Fred Moten counterspell today because I wanted to read it as opposed to listen to it.
And again, that's kind of really curious because, I mean, they said, and it's true, it's very hard to follow. That's the last little spoken word bit at the end. It's very tricky to follow, but then if you actually transcribe it and read it, it makes this kind of, you know, almost sort of expansive sense. and it seems to suggest that it's these kind of contradictory forces of play, like this sort of negation of, you know, negation of what are behavioural norms or societal kind of conditions without realising it themselves that bring forth a new language.
that in itself is the counterspell. I don't know if I'm explaining myself clearly, but it seems to not be... That's a problem. Yeah. It doesn't seem to be anti. It seems to be that it's in the contradiction itself that some kind of notion of escape or maybe even expansion, you know, some, some, a different sort of movement out of enclosure actually occurs. Okay, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm not fully sure how the,
how I think the Moten sort of piece at the end fits him with the rest of the film. Obviously it carries, it can be seen as carrying a lot of weight because it's the only piece of non-nonsensical sort of language in the actual film itself. So it can be read as the key to the whole film, I suppose. Yeah, but at the same time, I mean, it's so difficult to follow unless you read it, I think. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I haven't got a very strong response to that, I think. I mean, to be honest. I mean, mainly because, I'll tell you why,
mainly because, you know, I just was interested in, fundamentally sort of was more than interested, kind of seduced and entranced by the de-anchored, non-linguistic quality of the rest of the film, actually. I almost didn't want it to be re-anchored in anything at the end, if that was what the Moten was supposed to be doing. I don't think it was supposed to be doing that. Yeah, so that's why I guess I've, I sort of leave that out of my response to the film in a certain way, which may not.
Maybe just that I've, I've not properly processed that yet. that, that dimension of it. Because I'm so seduced by the early part of the film, I don't want to hear words again at that point. Can you hear me? Yeah, I was just yelling out but I wasn't sure if it was going to work. I was just wondering maybe that that last text functions in a similar way to how you're analysing the film as a whole in that it's sort of, it is de-anchoring because you can't actually follow it really. Like you have these sort of key things come out of it that you can attach to something, but they're actually not, it's not coherent as a whole. So maybe it's as a text functioning a similar way as how you spoke about the images being
taken kind of using the seduction with seduction, that kind of, yeah. I don't know. I understand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've only seen it once. So maybe it's a... Introduction to another Baudrillard term of course. You know, I think, you know, that it's time to, as you've probably picked up from today, it's time to definitely reassess Baudrillard and look like a him, I think. I mean, for somebody who's writing this 30, 40 years ago, it has an astonishing grip, I think, on the quality and phenomenology of life today. Yes, and we keep in mind that you didn't make the film, so you can't tell us every
little detail about it too. No, no, no, exactly. I didn't make it. But you've given a really amazing analysis of it. And I think maybe we're done. So thank you so much, Mark. That's been really great. Oh, thank you. Thank you everybody there. I can sort of see in a blurry way.