Okay, so we're ready to start and I'm really pleased to introduce you to Mark Fisher. Mark Fisher teaches visual cultures at Goldsmiths College. The title of today's talk is Capitalism and Realist Capitalism. We've been talking about it up until now. Capitalist Realism and the Slow Cancellation of the Future. What we will do is draw on the last two books that Mark Fisher wrote.
Capitalist Realism Indeed and Ghosts of My Life that is coming out in these days. and sort of look at the impact that the naturalization of neoliberalism is having on our lives and imagination and our sense of the future and time and temporality. So if you haven't read it, Capitalist Realism is a very small, beautifully written book that I highly recommend and Ghost of My Life, there's an extract online, but again, it will be out shortly, just within a few days. So I do strongly recommend those. I'm going to pass the floor to Mark, who will speak for some 50 minutes,
and then we'll leave the room for the debate and some discussion. Thanks, everyone. and thank you for Francesca and Guttia for inviting me. And I apologise for speaking in English. I always find it strange coming to someone else's country and speaking in my language. But if I speak too quickly, then it's OK to interrupt me and tell me to slow down. I have a tendency to speak too quickly even for English people. So don't be concerned about raising my attention to that if I start to do it. Okay, so I'm going to start with two epigraphs, two quotations.
The first from Franco Berardi Bifo, who provides part of the title for the forum and say today. it's from Franco's book After the Future that I took the phrase the slow cancellation of the future and what Franco says to explain that is that when I say future I'm not referring to the direction of time I'm thinking rather the psychological perception which emerges in the cultural situation of progressive modernity The cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization,
reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in conceptual frameworks of an ever-progressive development, albeit through different methodologies. The Hegel Marxist mythology of Alf Heben and the founding of the new totality of communism. The bourgeois mythology of the linear development of welfare and democracy. the technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge and so on. My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalisation, and it's very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it, and to look at reality without this kind of temporal lens. I'll never be able to live in accordance with immuno-reality, no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling a social planetary trend.
Okay, so Franco is a generation older than me, but I still feel I'm on the same side of this thing as he is. I grew up with that sense of mythological temporalisation, that sense of movement towards the future. But also, I mean, there's also a sense of the So the sense of being abducted, abducted, or constantly, perhaps not constantly, but periodically surprised by new cultural developments, which even a few months before would have seemed unprecedented.
and partly what I want to talk about today is the disappearance of this sense of surprise two things actually first of all the disappearance of this sense of surprise and its replacement by a sense of repetition homogeneity, pastiche the experience of a kind of flattening out of time so the surprise has gone
and also the sense of the narrative of time has gone the sense of culture being marked and marking time you could say. And this specifically relates to music culture for me, and I guess particularly British music culture. And I guess the fate of British music culture is a kind of case study for me of the effects of neoliberalization. If we think about the great efflorescence of British music culture, and its kind of global effect between the early 1960s and
the end of the 1990s, this exemplifies what I'm talking about by this sense of futurity and constant surprise. This capacity of British music culture at that time to perpetually renew itself, reinvent itself, and to give a kind of experience of the present moment and a sense of what the future might be. Of course this wasn't exclusive to British music culture, I'm just using that as an example. And also something which, obviously being my age in my mid-40s now and coming from Britain, was my taken for granted infrastructure of my experience.
I now see a lot of those things, a lot of the key aspects of that British music culture as part of a broader development I would call Popular Modernism, where the features of of the avant-garde, of cutting-edge aesthetic techniques were disseminated, extended and transformed in a popular medium, via popular medium. And I guess one of the significance of British music culture was it wasn't just about music at this time, that it really was
was about a relationship between, it was about a certain cultural infrastructure, you could say. Art schools, going right back to the 60s, a lot of the major British groups had an art school connection, even groups like The Who, or whatever, there was an art school connection to their work. It was art school, therefore visual art, film, sound in a kind of relationship with one another. It was also to do with the development of public service broadcasting at a certain stage, paperback publishing, these new fields of dissemination. And also, actually critical for me in my development
was the music press. The music press, which has transformed out of all recognition over the last 30 or so years. When I first started reading the British music press when I was about 15, you know, a long time ago, 30 years ago, this was where I first had access to, to, it's where I first saw the French theory mentioned, it's where I first saw the names of Jean Beaudrillard, Jacques Queira, you know, it's unimaginable now. If one was to look at the British Music Press now, the NME, New Musical Express, if you look at it now,
it's incomprehensible to imagine a time when, you know, that paper was engaging in discussions about Baudrillard or Darylman, that simply has disappeared. And with it, I think what has happened is a massive kind of re-stratification of culture in terms of high and low. Lots of ways, I can't even later, that high culture has kind of disappeared in the way that used to exist, but insofar as it doesn't exist anymore, it's now reserved for the elite as it was before the period of popular modernism. And then you've got a popular culture which has been emptied out of the traces of newness and also of experimentalism.
I guess partly what I was talking about, referring to popular modernism, is then a relationship between, an articulation between the so-called high and the popular. And I guess why art schools were significant in the British context, that's where sociologically that interaction could happen. Because at that time, art schools were where working-class youth would go to have access to resources of high culture. But I guess what was also significant about that moment was that then these members of the working class who had
access to art schools didn't simply reproduce the already existing forms in the already existing arenas. Instead, they used their knowledge and resources which they'd acquired as a result of being in those spaces to produce new kinds of culture and produce new kinds of cultural spaces. And I think that's why British music, why it was able to spread so much and propagate around the world was because of this production of a new kind of space, a new kind of weight for popular culture. And partly what I'm saying then is part of what was important about that period was the openness of what could be popular.
I think when things started to degenerate in this debate was when there was... Well, I mean, let's say we started off with elitism, which would maintain that anything popular was rubbish. You know, I guess Adorno's work on popular music, let's say it would be an example of that, although I think Adorno is more sophisticated than he's often given credit for. But nevertheless, you know, Adorno's idea that, you know, there is the determinant qualities of the popular, let's say. In Adorno's formulation, there's the popular and there's the serious. that's interesting because that's a kind of jump of taxonomy
you could say. The popular is not necessarily opposed to the serious actually but Adorno's construction that's how it was I think when I'm talking about popular modernism I'm saying that there's a challenge to that idea that the serious could also be the popular and that was significant about that moment which I think is now a past moment actually I thought I said I could turn to, this is typical of my talks where I said I would start with two quotes, don't even get to the second quote. The second quote is from Frederick Jameson, about modernism itself.
I mean, so, what drives modernism to innovate, Jameson writes, in a singular modernity, is not some vision of the future or the new, but the deep conviction that certain forms and expressions, procedures and techniques can no longer be used, are worn out or stigmatised by their associations with a past that has become conventional or kidge. let's read that again so what drives modernism to innovate is not some vision of the future or the new but the deep conviction that certain forms and expressions procedures and techniques can no longer be used are worn out or stigmatised by their associations the past that has become conventional or kitsch
my simple claim is that practically everything today is kitsch in Jameson's in the sense that Jameson is referring to here what I mean by that is exactly that it is it's rare to back to this thing I said it's rare to encounter something that does not feel already familiar now and this is I guess one of the paradoxes paradoxes that I want to point to to do with to do with modernity or post-modernity it's worthwhile just pausing on Jameson a moment and just talk a little bit about why I think his work is so significant
so Jameson is perhaps best known still for his theory the theorisation of post-modernism and I guess a lot of my work I see as a continuation of certain aspects of Jameson's work Jameson famously claims that post-modernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism ok so what in simple terms did he mean by post-modernism and why does this matter now well I think Jameson's work if you go back to his work of the 80s you know it's practically 30 years ago it's extraordinarily prophetic I think of many tendencies which even in his own time you could say was somewhat still somewhat marginal but are now dominant to the point where there's almost nothing else but that.
And for Jameson, what defines the postmodern fundamentally, or one of its fundamental defining characteristics, is exactly this sense of collapsed time. And an anachronism, we could say. I could best get to this by way of an example an example I'll give is Jameson's discussion of now a forgotten film a largely forgotten film called Body Heat which I think came out in about 1984 this was a film that starred William Hurt and Kathleen Turner
then fairly big known well known big name Hollywood stars what's significant about this film for Jameson is the disjunction between the alleged setting of the temporal setting of the film it was set in the then present day in 1984 the disjunction between that and the form of the film what it feels like to watch it as well the form of the film is entirely derived from the film noir of the 1930s, according to James. If you look at Body Heat, it feels like that. It feels like you're watching a film from the 30s, and yet, if you look at
the branded goods, the technology, it's clearly set in what was then in the present day. This, for me, this anachronistic temporality of a film like Body Heat is now the dominant temporality of practically everything. Practically everything is like that. And particularly, we turn to music culture. Music culture almost, I would say, almost is too soft. All music of the 21st century could have happened in the 20th. The only difference is the references. So, you know, you might have someone talking about their Twitter feed in the content. You might have something that dates it in the content, but not in the form. The form is familiar. The form is super familiar.
We've heard it all be formed. And that's what I meant by kitsch, this sense of that kitsch is something that is not of the current moment. But I think the problem is then that nothing feels as if it's of the current moment. and that there is a failure not only of the future you could say but of the capacity to muster the present in culture. There are some exceptions to this. Actually there would largely be I think probably the key exceptions to my claims would be television, American television actually. that, you know, series like The Wire or Breaking Bad
actually seem to be a new kind of form that's specific to the 21st century. And also, I mean, something like The Wire, I think, is significant because of its capacity to actually articulate something in that present. I think these are exceptions. I imagine. But, you know, significant exceptions. To a more general condition of Kitsch. you know even high cultures so called high culture is now kitsch it's not, it persists like I say there's experimental culture but it's experimental TMs I put it, it's experimental not in the sense that it's trying out things that haven't been heard but in the sense there are a series of fairly well defined generic traits or characteristics of the experimental
you know if you go to an experimental music festival you won't hear anything new you'll just hear things that are officially experimental there isn't much that you'll hear that you couldn't like I said you couldn't have in the 20th century so this is Jameson's claim Jameson's claim about post-modernism is the tendency towards pastiche the inability to innovate new forms but also more significantly perhaps is the erasure of historicity as such. By which I mean the erasure of a sense of what I was referring to earlier, a sense of the marking, of cultures being marked by time and marking time.
A sense of cultural objects, artifacts, networks, belonging to a particular moment, articulating that moment, expressing that moment, and then being made obsolete via a new president. and a new representation of that present in culture. I think those examples apart that I mentioned just now, we're really missing this capacity to articulate the present. In lots of ways, that means we don't really have a present anymore. That's because our experience, what is it to experience now in the 21st century? It is to experience a culture that is endlessly recycled, you could say. that would already have been familiar to the 20th century.
It was disappeared then as a sense of future shock, you could say. We can easily imagine, we can easily prove this by thought experiment. If we imagine, just sticking on the music example, if we imagine any kind of music being beamed back 20 years, 20 years to 1994, imagine someone in 1994 listening to you've taken this music back in time and you're saying listen to this how are they going to respond to that they're going to go my fucking god I can't believe this the future sounds so different to today they're not going to say that they're going to say instead my fucking god is it really that things sound so much so similar in 20 years time to how they do now so you have to think about the
I think my strong thesis can be demonstrated by this example. And what I mean by the flattening of time. If you think about the difference between 1974 and 1994, all of the different styles of music that had been born and died in that period, then think about 1994 to 2014. Or think even from 1954 to 1974, from Elvis Presley to Donna Summer. You know, that's massive, massive, and a whole world, a whole sonic world have been born and died in that period, many of them. And the same in the next period, but in the 20 years following, not so much.
And still our sense of the futuristic in music will still be what was either produced by Kraftwerk in the 70s, that still counts as futuristic. But it's futuristic in the same way that you could say that the gothic font is gothic. It doesn't mean it. It doesn't relate to an actual future that's going to be different from today. It's just an already existing style. Or that sense of futuristic would be 90s dance music. But essentially 90s dance music has not been superseded by 21st century dance music. It still sounds like it belongs to the same palette. Of course there are things which have been slightly different, but only slightly. And the level of kind of brute sensorial sensation, what it feels like to hear this stuff, it doesn't feel that different at all.
So I guess that's what I mean by the cancellation of the future. The future is now cancelled. But it's also been erased. We don't really... It's not also... The key thing of Jameson, to bear in mind, is that Jameson says, what also gets lost is this sense of a narrative of time anyway. The sense of things... The sense of historicity meaning the sense of specific historical contingency or specific historical location of culture. This gets lost. And I think, as I said, when he was talking about in the 80s it was a phenomenon but there's still something to oppose it to now in the 21st century this is the dominant mode and the dominant form of cultural time
in other ways in 2014 the 60s feel much closer than they did in 1980 let's be clear about this though I'm not suggesting that there's a sense of this cultural progress I think Progress is a political narrative, not an aesthetic narrative. I think to go back to B. Fogel, both senses have gone. The sense of political progress has disappeared, but the sense of an aesthetic modernism has disappeared. Modernism to me then is exactly the same that Jameson says about a certain relationship to the present. That's what validates culture from the modernist perspective.
is a relationship to the current moment. It's that that's gone. So one wouldn't want to say that, you know, 90s electronic music was better than Miles Davis. That's preposterous. What one would say is that, you know, that you couldn't be, you couldn't produce Miles Davis' cool jazz in the 90s and think that that was adequate to the present moment. You know, I guess one of the key, Miles Davis, I think as a key figure of popular modernism, is exactly somebody who refused to stop reinventing himself. You know, who's very, very conscious of what Jameson's talking about. That it's not adequate to keep replacing, to keep replaying your hits from years ago.
What was once modern quickly becomes obsolete. The whole of Miles Davis' career and his, you know, numerous reinventions of himself and his sound, bear witness to this being a guiding principle in his work really. So it's not progress, but it is about a sense of fitness to the current moment. And this is fitness in the sense of adequacy, but also a relationship. And this is what I'm saying is largely lacking at the moment. So I guess the question is then, why? why has this happened? What is it that led to
this slow cancellation of the future? And part of the reason I found this phrase so suggestive is this notion of the slowness of it. It's both the terminal quality of it that the future has been cancelled but also it's not cancelled in one guy. We don't experience the future as an event that suddenly just disappears. It's not one moment we have the future, the next moment we have, the next moment is gone. It's that the conditions for a relationship to the future are gradually, systematically dismantling in this period. And using the British example again, it's pretty clear that
that what was at stake there was the installation of neoliberalism. And I think this is one of the things that I guess as I got older, I've become more aware of is the political, institutional, economic and social preconditions for cultural production. As I said, since I was born into this moment, included popular modernism as a key element, I took for granted those conditions. One can't take them for granted anymore because they don't exist. And certainly one becomes aware of, much more aware of, how those conditions allowed that culture to exist in the first place.
Okay, so what do I mean by this? Essentially then, this installation of neoliberalism to the point of total naturalization, that's what I mean by capitalist realism. And capitalist realism can be summarized by another phrase from Jameson, the idea that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Something that's become increasingly true, we can all entertain all manner of catastrophic scenarios about the end of the world now and well, and invited to do so by the apocalyptic nature of the news a lot of the time, particularly in relation to climate. The idea that the world can end, that's always in our minds.
The idea that there was an alternative to capitalism, that has disappeared, even, or perhaps especially among anti-capitalists. I actually think that the formation of anti-capitalism is a symptom of what I'm describing. That the retreat from the positive project of communism to the negative project of anti-capitalism. Not that I'm saying necessarily that communism was the right positive project, but nevertheless it was a positive project. And I think part of the significance of the upper eyes, thinkers of Mario Tronti, etc., was to a positive first, first a movement towards communism. and first the
agency of workers and second capitalism as a response to the insurgency and agency of workers but I think that's historical that's an historical model actually as a parenthesis I think part of the problem with the work of Negley and Hart is that they still assume this model. They stop talking about workers and they talk about multitude instead. However, I don't think there is a multitude. There is no multitude. If there were a multitude, we wouldn't be in the problems that we've got now. The very issue is the impossibility
of a multitude in current conditions, I would argue. That's kind of a side issue. I mean, the key point being then, this sense of retreat, which again went in stages. I think there was, and it's not only about the formal organized left, you could say. It was also about the counterculture that emerged out of the 60s. The counterculture that emerged out of the 60s then had a, and this is partly why this music, the music continues to resonate. The music of the 60s continues to resonate. Why not just because of its qualities, the eternal qualities of creativity? There are no eternal qualities of creativity. It's because there is this residue, this existential residue of a Promethean ambition to radically transform society out of all recognition.
this is what the 60s was about people really thought that everything could be changed everything including key institutions like the family which have been the the renaturalisation the renormalisation of the family is a very key part of the establishment of capitalist realism actually it's no accident that actually existing neoliberalism particularly in the 80s with its key figures actually probably the first key figure of neoliberalism is from the 70s the key moment of the traumatic kind of turning of history
towards neoliberalism is Chile in 1973 the defeat of the Andi government and the imposition by the US back coup of the Pinochet administration. This is a kind of dry run for everything that happened in the 80s in lots of ways, in softer forms in the US and in the UK and here. What I was going to say is, I think if you look at Reagan or Thatcher, we can see that the way in which actually existing neoliberalism always also depends on neoconservativism as well. Even though there's no, the level of entailment,
philosophical argument or position, neoliberalism and neoconservativism are not only incompatible, but actually opposed to one another in lots of respects. Neoliberalism is a kind of amoral market logic. Neoconservativism is a moral position. And essentially neoconservativism is already against the counterculture of the 60s. You have to remember the Reagan, someone like Reagan. Reagan came to early prominence as a reactionary figure at the time of the student protest in the 60s in California. That's how he was a political figure after his career as a shit actor. Many argued that career as a shit actor never ended. Just continued, of course. but the
so I mean I think that actually existing neoliberalism always had this neoconservative side and the neoconservative side was a way of neutralising the damaging aspects of the 60s counterculture this vision of total psychic and social transformation and rejection of all existing institutions there was a way of neutralizing that but the other side of neoliberalism was a way of capturing certain energies from the 60s you could say this is the famous lots of famous stuff now in the 60s led to neoliberalism
I think it's much more complicated than that, like the Boltanski and Giopato thesis new capitalism etc is to some extent part of this I think it's more complicated than that as I say I think the neoliberalism could take on certain aspects of 60s counterculture and set it back as this new form of set it back as a liberation but partly what's significant about that was the way in which neoliberalism was able to figure the left as belonging to a superseded historical moment So the neoliberalism seized control of the narrative of history and said there's only one future now and it's a neoliberal future. The left is consigned to the past. The left belongs to the past. The left is bureaucratic, is top down. The left tells you how to behave.
we let you control your own lives and this kind of rhetoric of autonomy you know of autonomy of self-determination was kind of crucial to the success of neoliberalism but I mean I think it's important to bear in mind the false nature of those claims that neoliberalism has not enabled people to have more control over their lives, except in very specific and local ways. I'd argue in lots of ways to control. And of course what was, partly why that was, that neoliberalism was,
just technically, accurately, the term neoliberalism describes what it was. It was a neoliberalism that was based on individuals. and so what disappeared was the concept of collective self-determination but without collective self-determination I would argue there is no individual self-determination individual self-determination is usually an illusion in conditions where there can be no collective self-determination because actually what happens is when one's talking about if one wants to evoke again the concept of progress in politics, I would say there is such a thing as progress. It's not guaranteed. Not as Hegelian Marxists of the old school
used to believe that history was going in a certain direction and it was guaranteed to go in that direction. No, it's a virtual trajectory which is obstructed and can entirely disappear at that point. But as far as there is a progress, it is a progress towards collective self-determination and away from tyranny. tyranny and control by a small elite. And what we can see is, with the rise of neoliberalism, by practically any metric, has meant the reassertion of control by elites over society. And partly how they reassert that control is by pretending that we've all got more control than we ever previously had. And I think this is just something false.
just a crude ideological falsehood to distract us from this overall lack of control that we've got and this sense of chaos, powerlessness and depression which are actually overwhelming effects in the 21st century even choice itself the key neoliberal concept just feeds into The increasing choices that we have are largely irrelevant. They amount to largely insignificant choices over consumer preference from an already existing menu of options. When corporations ask you to interact with them, this is what they offer you.
They give you a menu of options and you choose one. and this is a model for the so-called increased kind of choice that we have it's a choice increasingly within a field dominated by the corporate model so I mean I think the key moves of capitalist realism or one of them was the ideological appeal to individuals but the reality of corporate increasing corporate control over and I think that the 80s was the key battle when I think then when this combination of neoliberalism and neoconservativism won hegemony
one ideological one of the struggle for what would count as dominant reality And of course by the end of the 80s we see the collapse of the Soviet Union, no great loss in many ways, few in the left were under any illusion about the Soviet Union by that point. However what probably we underestimated at the time was the impact of when the Soviet the Soviet Union disappeared, the impact that would have on the capacity for social imagination, social dreaming, the sense of an outside. I mean, with the Soviet Union, Soviet Bloc,
there was an alternative to capitalism, albeit a sullied, corrupted alternative that few could believe in anymore. Nevertheless, there was a space of the world, a significant space of the world, that was not capitalist. It might have been worse in lots of respects than capitalism, but it was still there. And I guess the ascendance of China and of a neoliberalised China intensified the sense that even countries now run by the Communist Party are capitalist. There is no alternative. Even the Chinese accept this now. This would be part of the story. And I think perhaps one of the key to sort of get a lot of this across is if you go and look on YouTube, you may have seen this already, is the Apple commercial from the Super Bowl in 1984.
The Apple company was made by Ridley Scott, who had made two years before, and had made Blade Runner, and just before that had made Alien. Two of the really, I think, still less great science fiction films that were made. But then he made this commercial, a very short commercial for Apple, which kind of condenses in a form of capitalist dreaming, that's what advertising is. all of the narratives that I've just put forward are some large elements of those narratives. Because in this commercial what we see is a world of grey drones shuffling around being dictated to by a large screen
with a figure of a dictatorial big brother type individual dominating. Then what we see is a young woman, Ronald, she unlike everything else in the scene is in colour, the colours of apple at the time and she's wielding this hammer, she throws this hammer into the screen and shatters it. And the tagline says something like in 1984 you will see why you know, 1984 won't, actually 1984 won't be like Orwell's 1984 effectively. And, you know, partly this was interesting because it was a form of experimental advertising at the time.
Highly controversial, the nitty-ditty didn't get shown because, you know, it doesn't feature Apple products in any way. It's this form of conceptual, effective advertising that we're now used to, where the product is completely off screen and you're being sold the incidental affective qualities of the product, not the commodity itself. But it's also clearly a narrative about time and freedom, right, and history. Because what is condensed in this figure of grey drones shuffling around, being commanded by a kind of spectacle, is both the idea of the Soviet Union as the outside to capitalism and the idea of kind of mainframe big computers, the old computer industry pre-California, IBM, etc.
It's dream work and condensation. These two things are condensed together. They all belong to the past. The Californian ideology will come, and this is what the future will be. And this is what happened. You know, if you look at a piece of 80s social prophecy, then that is it essentially that does predict the world in which we now live, we're dominated by Apple but what is it to live in that world? is it a world where we really are more free than we ever were before where we have more autonomy? no it isn't that world at all it's a world where we're more anxious than we ever were before in lots of ways and I guess the big headline
for one of the big headlines for my explanation of the decline of popular modernism and therefore the slow cancellation of the future would be the installation of anxiety into all areas of social life and a certain new experience of time but it's new it's new at the phenomenological level at the level of what it is to experience it but in a seeming paradox that very newness is what also means we don't have any new culture the music critic Simon Reynolds puts it this way that in the 21st century
everyday life is sped up but culture is slowed down another way of looking at this is that boredom has disappeared but that means no one is bored but everything is boring that would be the slogan boredom is a kind of luxury now you practically you have to be a kind of you have to be super disciplined in order to experience boredom what do I mean by that? well you have to withdraw yourself from your smartphone in order to be bored part of the significance of the smartphone is this constant feed of low-level stimulation
which prevents boredom, prevents encountering boredom. So at the very points when we used to be bored, you know, if you're waiting in a queue, you're waiting for a bus, that's when, or, you know, the very moment when someone just said, oh, I've got to go to the toilet or something like that, the very moment someone does that, what do we do immediately? We immediately reach for our smartphones. So any vacant or empty time is immediately filled in by the smartphone. And I think there's links to one of Bifo's key ideas, really, which is the inundation of the nervous system as a result of what I would call capitalist cyberspace. And I use that term deliberately because I want to distinguish capitalist cyberspace from cyberspace and stuff.
we don't know what cyberspace would be like if it was in a world not dominated by corporations so let's leave that aside actually let's talk about actually existing cyberspace which is a space dominated by corporations and we have to also bear in mind then I think the way in which the experience of modernity has been taken over almost entirely via communicative capitalism to use Jody Dean's phrase. Okay, what do I mean by that? Well, Marshall Berman has put all the solid melts into air. This gives a kind of account of classic modernity. You know, the phrase from Marx, all the solid melts into air, I mean, that's, the experience of modernity then is always this kind of,
on the edge of this existential abyss. Because the modern doesn't, the experience of modernity is not an experience of a fully constituted totality, which is the modern. The experience of modernity is of constant obsolescence. What it is, is to feel that anything that we now have will be made obsolete by future developments. That does persist, but it only persists in a limited way now. We don't feel that in relation to culture. On the contrary, we feel that any culture from any element of the 20th century can come back and be presented to us as contemporary now. But we do feel in terms of technology, we do feel that the technological upgrade in the sense of inbuilt obsolescence, this is the Apple model, this is the Apple business model.
You know, the Apple business model is based on the idea that you won't have one iPod, you'll have many iPods. And of course that's not because they make it. One, there's two things in there. One, they build them so they'll collapse after a certain amount of time. Two, the nature of constantly updating technology means they don't want to function anymore. Always being able to upgrade or update our formats. And as we know, upgrading seldom means improvement. Upgrading is crucial to this sense of panicked commodity time, you could say. Even if the commodity is free in a certain way like iTunes. The sense that things are always about to be upgraded, that any particular form that we've got will be made obsolete.
But it's now banal, this isn't banal. And it lacks the aesthetic dimension that was previously there with modernity or modernism. You could say modernity is this experience of obsolescence. Modernism was a relationship to that, an aesthetic relationship to that. We don't have that aesthetic relationship anymore. We're just subordinated to it. And this means that what characterises that then is this combination of anxiety and boredom. or not boredom, anxiety and boring. In lots of ways, the 21st century is a banal dystopia, you could say. Even 20 years ago, if we'd have shown pictures of the future to people of London,
worse than anywhere else in Europe, or certainly at a more advanced stage of psychopathology, is, you know, if you look at whole carriages of people in London, you know, it's completely enthralled by tiny screens. This banal mutation that has happened, the production of the boring cyborg, we've all become boring cyborgs now. We're all cyborgs, all attached to our mobile phones, but it's boring. You know, it's not the cyborg as a figure of alterity, as it was imagined by people like Donna Haraway in the 80s, or in science fiction or whatever, or in Blade Runner, as I mentioned earlier, the cyborg has become normal and has become utterly born. And this form of technology then, this dominant form of technological regime,
I should say, rather than technology itself, it has involved this refashionisation, which is partly a reference to Deleuze and Guaiterli in the notion of the face that captures him. It's no accident that Facebook has the name for one of the dominant aspects of this regime of subjectivity. But it's not only that, it's also reality TV, etc. This reduction of culture back into a series of mirrors which reflect radically individualised people competing with one another. This is the dominant form. If there was a 20th century form, it is reality TV, and it's that. and to reality TV then it's
capitalist social relations as a thing of entertainment you're all on your own you may form temporary alliances with others but essentially you're competing against other people and there's only one way out and that's why the Hunger Games is good I think, that's why the Hunger Games is probably important as a series of films because it actually captures more than anything else what it is to live in 21st century in lots of ways but I mean Can I just start bringing it to the end? Yeah, well, you can take down. Okay, yeah, I'll just bring it towards the end. So I guess what I'm saying is then, I just want to focus in on this question of time, politics of time has been crucial to everything I've said so far.
What does this mean? It means it's a kind of jamming of the social brain, you would say. The key ideas of neoliberalism is the idea that creativity is equally distributed in time and amongst individuals really. That everyone has this capacity to be creative and what blocks it is state regulation, socialists, bureaucrats, all of this kind of thing. And so if we remove those things, if we remove bureaucracy, if we remove meddling social democrats with their social housing policies and all of that, if we remove that, we just leave people to themselves, then their natural creativity will flow out.
that's just this ideological smokescreen that conceals the fact that actual creativity needs preconditions and one of the things it simply needs is time and what we most don't have now is time and if you think about actual creativity when it occurs often occurs when the brain is idling which isn't the same as the brain being idle in not doing anything, but it's where it's not already occupied. And often, to go back to those examples I gave earlier, often people get their ideas while waiting for a bus, or while lying in the bath, or whatever. Because their brain was somewhat liberated from
urgencies, and this is perhaps a key term I want to introduce, urgencies. now there's barely a moment in our lives where we're not assailed by urgencies what is a smartphone if not an urgency field what we have to bear in mind with social media is it's basically a whole series of commands you can ignore those commands if you want but your nervous system still has to feel them at an unconscious level if not a conscious level I mean, we used to get commands all the time, but they were somewhat discreet, I mean discreet in a sense, spaced out.
They were on advertising billboards, they were on television, you could turn the television off, etc. It didn't carry these urgencies around with you. I think we need to do a kind of a diastole of understanding of what a smartphone is. You don't have a smartphone. A smartphone is our means of interface with capitalist cyberspace. So when you have a smartphone, you carry capitalist cyberspace around with you at all times. And that's unprecedented. You know, all of this ostensibly bleak stuff, Gideobor, Society of the Spectacle, that's like Jane Austen you know it's like a genteel you might as well be talking about the 18th century with a smartphone what you're talking about is a it's better to more seem like
the face sucker from Ailey that it's basically a tension attention sucker and drainer which is very whose capacity to drain our resources our attentional and energetic resources is massively reinforced by enormous propaganda coming from capitalist corporations telling us it's great to have one and also reinforced by work, conditions of work one of the things I haven't mentioned is post-forwardism of course, capitalist realism another way of looking at it is simply a combination of neoliberal ideology with post-forwardism In post-Fortism, their meaning and the simple level, the experience of precarity, radical proscariousness.
But I think this extends beyond merely being about casual work. Of course, the casual and temporary work has increased enormously in the period that I'm talking about. It's more that even those people in supposedly secure employment also feel much more precarious than they used to. It's partly because we all have to sort of, if you're an academic, you have to compete for students now. The effect of marketization, so-called pseudo-marketization, is one that deprives, let's say, lecturers of confidence. because they feel that situation is precarious, that we have to constantly be marketing ourselves,
we have to market our programs in order to compete for these students, etc. Which if we don't get them, we'll be removed. So that's just one example of many, but just the way in which the sense of precariousness is now dominant, you could say. And part of what I'm arguing then is that another aspect of, is against another aspect of new liberal mythology, which is that, related to that thing I just said about creativity, just it manages if we allow it to, is the idea that security breeds indolence, you could say. That it's only if you remove security from people that they'll be creative. This is a total myth. I guess that this is the power of the British example for me, the British music culture example
is that it's quite clear that their music culture happened because people had time to do it. When they were at school, instead of doing their courses, or alongside doing their courses, they would also form groups. Why could they do that? Because they didn't have four other jobs, like students are required to now, in order to fund their education. Why is that the case? Because they had student grants to live on, they had no fees to pay, they could claim an employment benefit in the holidays, they had social housing to live in, if they didn't have social housing, they could squat in London, and any number of these things which were the actual preconditions for creativity in that era,
which neoliberalism is a project to have removed those. So if we think about it now, contrast that, Contrast the acres of time which those kind of art students of the 60s in Britain had with any of us now. That's the significance of the smartphone thing, is that we're constantly in this urgency field now. and where things flip as well. Part of that is the characteristic of post-forwardism is the experience of the continuity between work and enjoyment. Okay, why do we have smartphones? Part of the reason we say to ourselves,
well, because they're leisure objects, we're told, they're enjoyable. But also, if we're with our partners or whatever, and we're checking our messages, what's the excuse for doing it? well I have to check it for work I have to check it for work and maybe workers want to contact me and it's not that you were just making that up it's not a lie, it's also true but it's also false because it's a compulsion it's a libidinal compulsion we have to check the phone and that's what I mean about banal mutation boring, we're mutated our nervous systems are rhythms of time our micro behaviours in terms of a whole new kind of interface a whole new way of cutting up the human nervous system has occurred via smartphones in the last few years. That's only five years, let's say, where this relationship between the fingers and our eyes and the screens determines a lot
of our subjectivity. But that's boring. It's radical in the sense that it's a whole swathe of the population have been changed for this form of behaviour. It's also boring. It means that people are much more constrained in a series of, in a culture which is increasingly kind of repetitive, homogenous, etc. So that is the link then between what I was saying at the start and the big claims about the end of the future and also the end of the present and the kind of onset of naturalisation of capitalist realism. That we are inside this urgency field. And what does that mean? It means that, effectively, this is a relationship to dreaming.
This is where I sort of want to end up, really. Part of how you can see the succession of what I talked about, you could say, in the 20th century, first of all, there was the discovery of the unconscious, you could say. Discovery of the unconscious. Unconscious had always been a motor for so-called creativity and a resource, obviously. But there was a kind of reflexive acknowledgement of that in the early 20th century by the influence of Freud and of the surrealists. He explicitly talked about the unconscious as a resource. Then capitalism moves in quickly, moves into this kind of dreaming. It then metabolizes this dreaming in the form of advertising, in the form of Hollywood, etc., etc. It's the second phase. The third phase is the elimination of dreaming as such, you could say. It's like a form of, it's a cultural equivalent of the kind of ecological crisis.
that the dreaming resources this is partly what I'm saying the dreaming resources that were built up in the 20th century have now been used up we don't have them anymore and this is why Inception is the great symptomatic film of the 21st century really Inception kind of sums up everything I've said really in lots of ways I guess one of the interesting things about Inception is the lack of technology in it the technology that you when is it set? is it the future or some alternative present or now? you can't really tell but I think it's really essentially about the phenomenology of community of capitalism in lots of ways, what it's like to be on that it's not really about dreaming at all but the impossibility of dreaming, you could say and it's certainly about the lost unconscious it's really
one of the bleakest phenomenologically or formally it's one of the bleakest a highly bleak film I think, in terms of it's almost the inversion of Hitchcock you could say with Hitchcock you had films which were ostensibly naturalistic, but which drew upon the kind of landscapes from surrealism, de Carico, etc. With Inception, you have a film which is ostensibly about dreaming, which it looks like it takes place in boring hotels. The whole of the film practically takes place in boring hotels. It's astonishing. This is an image of the total depletion of the unconscious, you could say. There is no unconscious left anymore. and some of the most depressing scenes in the film imagine most of you have seen it
some of the most depressing films when we see this unformatted unconsciousness it looks like what it is boring CGI and there's no alterity to it no strangeness about this space anymore it's just a kind of awaiting awaiting kind of more development awaiting the building of yet another kind of non-place yet another kind of corporate space which could be anywhere in the world kind of thing. And also I think what's significant about Inception then is this notion, is this sense of constant identity. There's about five boring dreams to choose from, all of them generically familiar, kind of Hollywood tropes. All of the levels in Inception are completely stereotypical.
But you can't even settle into any of those because they're interrupted by another one. And this is what our experience of everyday life is like now. our capacity for projectile time to be absorbed in something is always deferred and is taken over by these urgencies which assume total control of our consciousness until then we get another embedded urgency on top of that I think we all know this just to get this concrete we start off doing some task and we get an email, we deflect it onto doing that task. Well, we probably can't finish that because we might get some simultaneous message coming in off another screen or off the same email, which supersedes that previous one.
It's also something we don't really want to do, but that then becomes the next urgency. So we get lost in this embedded field of urgency, one after the other. And there's capacity for a time where we can be absorbed, where we're engaged in this open-ended experience of time, an experimental experience of time, where we don't know where it's leading us, this is always deferred behind these immediate kind of urgencies. And this then is, just to conclude then, is then a certain experience of kind of collective dream time, you could say. That what was available previously was a kind of collective dream space, which was much more open, lucid where experience of time was kind of thick and absorptive.
The inception model of dream time is a time based on anxiety dreams you could say. And the whole of the social field increasingly resembles an anxiety dream in which we are corralled by this set of urgencies without end. and I think that this is in those conditions when we're constantly assailed by these chains of urgencies, it's no wonder that we don't have the capacity to absorb ourselves either in the production of the new or in the absorption of the new item and that's where I'd like to sort of end it for now so much thank you