I think he might have simultaneously loved and hated it. Since it has a lot of potential for good, and can play a helpful role in bringing about an effective "fully-automated" postcapitalist future.
Mark lived in the same time as the kind of AI we call AI now, just a prototype of it: the recommendation algorithm. You're right, it's easy to draw a straight line from then until now, if you adopt a view of AI as algorithms with the same purpose as those that came before it.
He said while not considering that 10 years later we'll still travel with his thoughts through the past that's even further away but nevertheless present.
Because there is nothing new in the world, everything already happened, every though was already though, every word was already spoken, every picture was already painted. It was the same even before the Internet, most people just didn't realize it.
i find solace in the idea that my anxieties have a universal element to them - "Nobody is bored but everything is boring". Fisher's critique of social media and wider technology is not merely platitudinal nostalgia (in fact he speaks against it). His insight is that our unfreedom to feel boredom via constant distraction is today's malaise.
Good point. The same goes for any other kind of negative emotion. Even if you are pissed at a superior or just generally feel unwell due to shitty living conditions, society still obliges you to look hype and fresh all the time. Suffering has been completely divorced from its direct outside causes, dissimulating the social sources of suffering, and it has been turned into something shameful in and of itself, with all the blame put on the individual.
This is precisely what he wants you to realize. There is a blog post called "Anti-Therapy" in which he argues that speaking up about your issues and experiences only enforces the insulating and destructive system unless you contribute to a sort of collective "consciousness-raising" as he calls it. You should not only find solace in realizing your experiences are universal, this should prompt you to examine the social systems around you, maybe even the ones you've internalized. Because if everyone is struggling with a kind of boring culture of modernity, there must be a collective and systemic reason to it.
Boredom forces creativity in certain ways. Boredom forces people to think about their lives and who they are and what they want, and allows the time and mental space to start planning and making decisions, as well as to start constructing stories for those who have writing talent, or constructing games for those who are inclined to tabletop rolepalying games and board games and the like. You start imagining things which could be fun, and that leads to making things. Whereas with the surfeit of already existing MMOs and dram accessable through your phone, that chance to create is effectively alienated, and we're rendered mere cunsumers instead, which leads to its own dissatisfaction, because they're expressions of other people's creativity and not your own.
God he's so intelligent and so able to express what we all sense, the anxiety and the disappointment we all feel somewhere deep inside in terms that are both highly relatable and accessible and also deeply cerebral and engaging. Such a shame he's not here anymore to keep sharing insight to us and hold up a mirror to the world.
@@way2goated I made a new friend via the internet in March 2020, and they later recommended to me Capitalist Realism. I read it that year, and I found it to be prophetic. I just finished watching this lecture, and dipping into the comments, I discover the news of his death in 2017. This is heartbreaking and demotivating. Humanity has lost an important ally. Yet I have this almost dogmatic belief that humanity is still salvageable, and learning that we lack an ally only increases my resolve.
I think the reason why we haven't evolved beyond the 90's is that the 90's achieved the optimal profitability for the culture industry, therefore it seeks to keep cycling it's audience back in to replicate it. In the same way we create monocultures to produce and harvest crops.
I feel it's more so that those who grew up in that period for some reason are stuck in it and want to relieve it, add this with the amount of gen z who also want to go back, and now you've killed forward-thinking ideals and opt for pure nostalgia. In the 90s you had people who wanted to be in the '60s, but they were all a sub group and weren't really the majority, some old styles were rehashed but reworked and modernized. Nowadays, it's like we are all in constant loops of wanting to go back to our correspondent generational time periods because everyone who lived through the 20th century is stuck in it and now doesn't want to push for change. For example, the idea of the old boomer who wants classic '60s rock to come back is so redundant and idiotic to me, because at the time, if you were to play a 1963 song like "Surfin' Bird" in 1967 when everyone was listening to Hendrix, you'd already be classed as a dated person, so why is it now that instead of these boomers wanting to push forward they for some reason want to return back? Even though in their era if they said the same thing they are saying now, people would have shunned them as dated. In 1969 most people were no longer really listening to Elvis, it was now the Beatles, King Crimson, the Rolling Stones... etc. To say "hey let's go back to the 50s where everyone listened to Elvis!" would have seemed backwards as hell.
Profitability has gone down because technology has improved and made music cheap. If we still had to buy cds to listen to songs and DVDs to watch concerts, artists could still make good money
In the 90s many looked to the late 60s early 70s and many now look towards the 50s. Why? Well for the individuality and creativity from the late 60s and early 70s and to the 50s for what good was lost regarding morality community etc. Seems a kind of Wagon-wheel effect is being experienced and the fast we move technologically the much more quickly we move into the new metamodern "network society" transhistorical era. The neoliberal world is giving way to the National Populist view Nationally and the Civilizational Populist view Globally. The deterritorialization has begun within our institution and for a sect of society as we've seen their nonsensical dogmatic virtues (vices)/pillars(vices) on full display. I'm referring to the Hegelian cultists(religion)/woke cultists(religion).
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860): 'As every man possesses a physiognomy by which you can provisionally judge him, so every age also possesses one that is no less characteristic. For the Zeitgeist of every age is like a sharp east wind that blows through everything. You can find traces of it in all that is done, thought and written, in music and painting, in the flourishing of this or that art: it leaves its mark on everything and everyone, so that, e.g., an age of phrases without meaning must also be one of music without melody and form without aim or object. Thus the spirit of an age also bestows on it its outward physiognomy. *The ground-bass to this is always played by architecture:* its pattern is followed first of all by ornaments, vessels, furniture and utensils of all kinds, and finally even by clothes, together with the manner in which the hair and beard are cut.'
@@beingsshepherd synchronistically, i just mentioned A.S. in my comment. worth also noting that Schopenhauer puts music at the apex of all (classical) arts.
'Playful eclecticism,' 'classical allusions,' 'references,' triangles with holes cut out. As an industrial designer, I wish there was something I could say to make us both feel better.
this lecture's hitting me hard, once again I'm drifting through social media-cyberspace at 3 o'clock on a Thursday night. Not so much to be entertained or to relax, just looking for something interesting to fill the void of aimless non-sleeping. Rest in peace Mark Fisher. Would recommend anyone reading this comment to check out his collection of essays K-Punk, for evermore in-depth popculture-analysis
I was put on to mark fisher from his essay good for nothing, no one has or had put my feelings of hopelessness and defeated sadness so perfectly into words…which makes it all the more saddening what happened to him
@@plebjames I’m seriously considering throwing my iPhone in the trash and getting a flip phone. It’s become a literal blight on my life. That being said without it, I wouldn’t have found gems like this lecture. Worth it? Prob not.
RIP Mark Fisher. Although I was only ten when he passed he is one of my greatest influences ever. I’m going to keep fighting to create a world he would be proud of.
@@milos8556 don‘t listen to him. Do what you like to do. Philosophy is life-changing and most people lack the knowledge of how impactful philosophy can be
I was also 10 when he passed away. Truly one of the most insightful cultural thinkers of this century with a tragic early end. We need more such analytical, class-conscious cutural critiques on the left today and I don't think we'll get someone quite like Fisher again.
@@SFDestiny Random internet person here (ie not the person you're asking directly), but I would say maybe DeBord's Society of the Spectacle as mentioned by Fisher in this (if I recall), Baudrillard's extension of this concept into a more semiotic evolutionary analysis (here's a good encapsulation I think, as it pertains to the spectacularization/abstraction of war: www.halliejones.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Baudrillard-The-Gulf-War-did-not-Take-Place.pdf ), Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment as a tension between myth and "rationality" and the overbearing mechanical hollowing of novelty/meaning by an industrialized "culture industry", broadly just critical theory in general. If these are too understandably dry/academic, I really like Adam Curtis' documentaries, most recently with Can't Get You Out of My Head: ua-cam.com/video/MHFrhIAj0ME/v-deo.html
@@Bisquick maybe this: One *could* say, "Let's change course," but instead Fisher & Friends decry, "I was promised a different destination!" This is "surplus enjoyment." It *feels* like action, but it actually disguises inaction.
@@SFDestiny Indeed, no disagreements here, unfortunately I think the cultural vector is the only one where action _was_ offered in potential with the rise and eventual domination of neoliberalism in the 70s and the suppression of class/material politics, and I think Fisher is merely pointing out that even this vector, the one that shapes our capacity to imagine anything at all let alone alternative material social arrangements, has been corrupted by corporate power. Where sustainable action/dissent is inevitably recuperated and politics becomes an essentialized manichean spectacle rather than the struggle for humanity to transcend itself or whatever, so everything becomes a sort of monotonous repetitive rehashing of the past if that makes sense.
@@SFDestiny He is describing a cultural condition which tells us that "nothing can change!", "capitalism is all we have!", "yeah, I don't like it either but this is just the way things are now..." . Fisher isn't creating a positive political project to extricate us from this condition in his lectures, but in his final years he does try to create a blueprint. Check out Postcapitalist Desire and the introduction to Acid Communism.
Fisher has been a real eye opener. Since he uses music as an example: when I was a teen in the 80s we disparaged any music that wasn't new. We had no time for classic rock, for example. All of it was dead to us (in fact, it wasn't that old.) Today, not only do I (and it seems, my peers) wax nostalgic for the 80s but the "classic" rock that we so hated back then. As Fisher says, we have an excessive tolerance for regurgitating and recycling culture. Think about how so called "alternative rock" is now almost 30 years old.
You're braver than most of your generation (which is also mine) to admit that, and I've contemplated the same idea, my conclusion is that insistence on The New, The Next is primarily a teenage trait, I'd go further to say it's predominantly a young man's trait. Linked with the oneupmanship, competitiveness and ego of teenage male friendships. And the Year Zero stance - all Old music is worthless, all new music is intrinsically relevant and essential. In five, fifteen twenty years a male music fan (especially if he's still passionate about music) will grasp the never ending continuum of music past present and future, how those 'new' bands they championed had roots in older music, and how more experimental older music paved the way and often pioneered the same ideas as the latest Innovator but just weren't recognised at the time. All of the serves being returns, across genres, eras, generations, and he will get the bigger picture. An instance on NOW (not your Dad's music) is a teenage conceit. One your Dad may well have postured with too.
I noticed that already in the 1990s. I was teaching at a college and noticed that the 19-year-olds were wearing the same Led Zepplin t-shirts their parents had worn 20 years earlier. Their parents did not wear their parents' Nat King Cole or Elvis t-shirts from the 1950s or Benny Goodman from the 1940s. (There were no such t-shirts.)
@@bostonseeker I’ve definitely noticed this phenomena of young people now seemingly having a rlly deep appreciation for older music that I’m not sure was present in the same way before. Granted, being 17 Idk to what extent that’s true but basically all my friends listen to stuff from the 60s 70s 80s 90s. To some it’s almost like a badge of honour- a signifier of their superior musical taste. Partly I think it’s due to the insane accessibility to music we have now and we want to experience it all but also I think it maybe have to do with what was being said i the lecture about the “oppressive weight of the past” and how it kind of bears down on the present. I constantly see sentiments regarding how everything was better then and how the best has already happened etc etc. And I think this mindset can actually hinder progress in some ways cos some people are so obsessed with say the rock canon (if that’s what you’d call it) that they make it harder for innovation to occur
God, a person with such insight into the current state of affairs has to have it tough. The thing he said about being bored even when we are curious is spot on.
@@wrathford What's interesting is that before his death, he worked on "acid communism", and the unfinished introduction reads a lot more hopeful than his other writings, I can highly recommend reading it
that is a very valuable insight my friend. it's important to remember that we don't ask to be born with certain prescient abilities. but this stops no one from judging everyone's pain by the same metric. depression has been described as feeling the pain of the world within one individual. lastly, imo depression is simply the inability to deceive one's self about the world as it truly is, sort of an inversion of the notion: 'think positively' or that we can indeed choose how we think and what we see given what we now understand about free will. you are either depressed or you're not paying attention, depression or delusion, but some of us don't choose whether or not we remotely view the future, only whether we decide to deny our own vision in deference to society's prescription.
To all the people in the comments opining that Mark Fisher was out of touch, he'd never heard of Burial, Sleaford Mods, Wiley.. etc It might benefit you to take a brief dip into his blog and you'd see that those were just the artists he championed, he was not unaware or completely scathing of contemporary music culture (he wrote for Wire), it's just that here he was commenting on what distinguished it from older musical culture in a certain negative way.
3:21 "The dimension of the #future has disappeared. We're trapped in the 20th century… What it means to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on hi-res screens/ distributed by high-speed Internet, actually."
Hollywood is another example of the increasing blandness and tight repetition of culture. Another superhero sequel anyone? All safe profits, safe stories, safe....
Also agree 110% about the hijacking of cyberspace by "capitalist cyberspace" and its constant demands on attention. I yearn for the old internet where the purpose was making useful information available and the fluffiest it got was the hampsterdance page. Now it's buried under clickbait, pointless distractions and bullshit of the worst kind.
The interesting part of the superhero surge isn't just that studios are being safe, it's about why we as consumers are lapping them up and making them safe bets for studios. I think we live in a world where we have no certainties, no power, and no future. We're regressing to childhood icons; stories where we know who the villains really are, and that show that they can be defeated. It's depressing!
You're right the internet was built by the US military. I made the common mistake of conflating the world wide web with the internet. I was thinking of the early world wide web of the 90's when the signal to noise ratio of websites created as a labor of love or to provide useful information vs corporate websites designed to harvest your data for marketing or waste your time was far far better.
That Amy Winehouse anecdote really is the best example of hyperrealism in action. Winehouse was, to most people today, more real and authentic than actual soul singers from the 60’s. We live in a world where our ability to recreate authentic experience is BETTER than the authentic experience itself. As Rick Roderick once said “you wouldn’t want to see a T-rex for real. You’d be disappointed after seeing what Spielberg put on the screen.”
I was 15 when thsi man died and blissfully unaware of how important amd accurate his decsriptions of an impending sense of melancholic existential dread that seems to settle in everyday life. As time has gone on it seems people have only become more accepting of commodification of all apsects of life, climate change has become ironically openly accepted but this has also seemed to come with a back ended embrace that we will simply have to live with its condequences. Like capitalist realism a sense of fatility in the societal psyche has put us collectively in a trance we need to desperately snap out of. Rip Mark Fisher and I hope people use his works to peoductive ends and look for solutions to a world with a quickly fading if not already departed future.
@@fuelks Not necessarily. Benjamin, yes, maybe, but Adornos criticism of the culture industry falls quite short from Fisher. Well, Adorno coined the term, but i'd argue his ideas only came to fruition with his students (and people influenced by them, like Fisher). There's a lot more to this than was ever addressed in, say, Dialectics of Enlightenment, even though the topics are similar
It's rubbish. What a boring, moaning man! Music was better back in the day, no feeling in modern music blah, blah, blah.... We've heard it all before. Pure rubbish.
As well as depression some people react to the situation we find ourselves in with slowly, but ever increasing anxiety - resulting in an inability to sleep, and shortly afterwards failure to hold down a job. Probably all part of the plan really.
He is/was spot on. Funny how time works. Time heals all wounds, though some wounds have all the time. What I really love about Mark is although he finished his PhD in philosophy, rather than speaking from a doctoral ivory tower. He bases the examples for his deep thought on something we all (in some way) relate to; contemporary music. And the people/bots in the comments challenging his examples of music are stuck on a autistic loop and have it backwards. *It's not that Mark is trying to be Adam Neely and teach you something about music, but rather, the examples in pop-music he uses (how broad- or narrowminded) serves as a conceptual vehicle to get his deeper point/philosophy across; That of 'the slow cancellation of the future'.* Every comment saying: _"I don't agree with his views on (pop)-music"_, therefore is completely missing the point. It's a symptom of thinking brought to us by the internet, and what I like to call: "Intellectual ignorance". Because of the way how the internet has "informed" us into obtaining our new "knowledge" about things, we have learned to be (rightfully) critical of new information. Thus we tend to default in a 'information comparison contest' which withholds us from a state of: 'Agreeing for the time being' in order to gain a real understanding of the deeper message that the person formulating their idea's is trying to get across.
It was both refreshing and sad to see this pop up in my recommendations so many years later. One of the nice things about a full lecture, as opposed to the more digestible anti-capitalist media we so often see on UA-cam today, is the almost complete lack of loud but vacant opposition. No one whose ideas are molded by the neoliberal hegemony has the attention span required to argue with it. Small mercy.
I disagree with him on the lack of specificity of time in music. It's still there. The problem is most people are not living with the cutting edge of music. Most people don't follow scenes and labels close enough. We see the history of music through it's hits, and a recontextualizing through film and other media. Stranger Things does capture some of the 80's, it probably captures 90's nostalgia for the 80's even more so, and 2010's revival of the 80's more still. How many people were clued into all of those aesthetics at the time? A slim margin that were the creators and aficionados. With the internet more people added to the mythos and context of an overall theme that wasn't as universal at the time as some believe. At most it was a veneer of branding targeted at teenage youth that was as fleeting and given little introspection. Even look at Black Mirror San Junipero for the same thing, memories of the past that never really were. Adult life takes people away from the edge of progress, and puts people at the edge of old problems. People with kids attest to reliving that part of life through their kids, because at some point that is the only way to really get a sense of this specificity. When we look on the now in 20 years, there will be a lot revived that for most was under the radar. Retro 2020 won't really seem like real 2020 at all, and it will be delivered in a more concentrated aesthetic than thought possible. God, just look at every WW2 film after Saving Private Ryan. Same deal. We chase aesthetics and impressions more than the real thing. Today, people simply track progress in a select few industries and loose touch with others. You can't keep up with everything anymore. Almost like there are parallel worlds at any given time on top of each other. Things either move so fast week to week, or are endeavors like infrastructure that stretch for years and meant to last centuries. This is why it feels we are in a zombie amusement park, while at the same time innovation has never been faster. It's simply lost to market fracture.
Wow this rings so true to me. After stranger things came out a lot of my friends became obsessed with the 80s and wished they had grown up at that time. It made them feel sad that they were growing up now and opposed to then, but I didn’t see why I should I compare the mundaneness of my current reality to the hyper romanticised hyper idealised conceptualisation of a previous era. It just doesn’t feel like they’re on equal footing. We haven’t had time to romanticise the present cos the present is now. I am intrigued as to how people will conceptualise the 2020s though- I wonder what cool aesthetics or styles of art we’re largely unaware of that may become a staple of retro 2020s
@@mauve9266 Even Daniel Lopatin's Eccojams are a re-hash of John Oswald's plunderphonics, are a re-imagining of Captain Beefheart's post blues Dadaism. Every new, every niche, stlye of music is a continuation of an existing idea. When the band Suicide took a drum machine and turned it on its head in the late 70s, this paved the way for every single use of a drum machine since. As in Deleuze's phenomenology, new ideas have to come from the inexperienced and naive. Boredom is what gives people an outlet for their inexperience, and the immediacy of all knowledge today is not providing enough boredom. A youth can read about Suicide and drum machines, about Oswald and Beefheart, and then have nothing to create. If you give a kid with no internet access a drum machine and tell them to make music, you may get something new, but we need the modern day equivalent of the innocuous drum machine. I would argue that the modern day equivalent would be something like VCV rack, a free, digital modular synthesiser where there are no rules, there is no visibility as to what has been made with it, and even professional musicians with years of experience in modular environments do not have any ideas in stone on what to do with it. There is hope, as always, but you need to look quite hard to find it. Daniel Lopatin is a particularly good example of someone with current experience in producing new ideas, despite how vast the possible field of influence is today. Arguably even his work is Dadaism; an artform increasingly accepted by popular culture.
curious, the way he repetitively, unconsciously, compulsively lifts and sets down his water glass and water bottle, without ever taking a sip, serves as a kind of visual metaphor for everything he is saying. brilliant.
i think that the second half of the 2010s really saw an emboldened form of what fisher postulates here. in terms of music, we have seen - the fetishistion of the 70s genre, such as in Dua Lipa's 'future nostalgia' or St Vincent's new album. - the popularusation of artists openly, shamelessly emulating musicians that have come before them, for example Declan McKenna's similitude to David Bowie - the continued pervasiveness of britpop groups, such as Oasis or Blur, in the youth culture of today, which contradicts the notion of a distinct cultural heterogeneity as time progresses - the paradoxical main-streaming of a rejection of 'main-stream' music in favour of indie bands from the 1980s and 1990s. i dont think that thus cultural hauntology is just present in music though. it can also be seen in - the universal prevalence of 'vintage' clothing, such as Nike sweatshirts from the 1980s or Adidas Originals attire from the 1990s - the longevity of architectural movements (i.e. modernism) which linger far longer than previous movements - the non-progression of cinema culture, which now exclusively focusses on established properties (i.e. marvel, star wars etc.) - the commodification of 'retro' technologies, such as record players and old radio sets Mark Fisher truly was a prophetic voice
“The paradoxical mainstreaming of a rejection of mainstream music…” that’s interesting stuff. And the thing with Declan McKenna, I hadn’t noticed as I haven’t kept up with his recent stuff lately but after going back and seeing it the resemblance is uncanny
some comments talking about how they wish Mark had heard specific music - completely miss the point. music culture is just one example of the larger issues. one band you think is cool is not at all new in this way that is being described. the effect of this disappearance of time marking is not as simple as new music suddenly not being found. this is a sickness of perception of time itself
Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote in 1978. We can only guess her reaction to the relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics of 2019. No wonder wicked problems like climate change or inequality feel so hard to tackle right now.
The point isn't to solve them. It's not even to want them be solved. It's to want to DO things in general. Society strips that of people, because fixing, dreaming, and doing fucks with the bottom line too much. Appliances used to outlive their manufacturers, and the infrastructure to guarantee that was everywhere. You could learn and teach yourself how to fix all this shit yourself, and if you were good at it make a decent living doing it. People could have widgets that actually worked, and wasn't programmed to self destruct just to force them to buy a new one. "What a tragedy!" Said the Private Sector. "There's so much money we've left on the table!"
I agree with his observation, but to see these cultural developments as inherently negative also indicates we could merely be stuck within a modernist mind paradigm in a post-modern world, and somehow still refuse to let go of this 19th/20th century expectation of something new and groundbreaking every 5 years
I definitely see how this could be a drawback, but I think the argument more hinges on the fact that things *are* happening, we *do* get and have new things, but because of their overabundance and such quick succession there's a lurking feeling that nothing is truly happening. The iPhone and climate change are one in the same; one gets better and better and one gets worse and worse, but how and why and from what precedent we can't really say.
Agreed, and I think this invites a wider discussion of artists today who seem to enjoy the collective entropies of our past echoes as we explore new soundscapes and ideas upon the ground of ubiquitous medias.
If we look at history it becomes evident that every cultural shift was closely assosiated with a shift in the power structure of society. Culture is impotent by itself. The Renaissance was closely associated with a revolution in medieval warfare, but in contrast today every change is confined to the field of high tech, which is profoundly asocial and very distant from the masses. The bourgeoisie completely solidified its power in WW2 and with the defeat of the labor and civil rights movements modern society has been been at a complete standstill since the 80's. And lets be honest, contemporary pop culture garbage is produced through statistical methods and computer algorithms. Even the aesthetic design of cars and planes is completely done with AI these days. So why is anyone surprised that everything is the same?
Economically we are slaves We do not own our money We do not own our future We do not own our children. They can all be legally robbed under a democratic system. The socialists demand politicians regulate the capitalists, but the social policies only benefit the rich. They use minimum wages, worker's rights and labour unions to rob you and enrich themselves. It is no wonder culture stagnates
this is a very salient observation; generally individuals see the world as a series of events that happen to "persons" yet the free floating rationale of corporate algorarithims to maximize capital aqquisition in the shortest possible time frame, steamrollers anything in its path- there is no culture, no political, no artistic, no philosophical, no human activity that can stand in the way of the capability of capital to accrete more capital.
I just started two weeks ago to read his books and it's so eyes opening and I feel his kind of views so much! When I was a teenager in the 2000s I always had a feeling of a lost generation, no unique pop culture, nothing really new... I was jealous about my parents and their popculture when they've been teenager. I know the feeling of a lost vision, no idea what's a good idea of the future, what to believe in, sometimes strong feelings of depression... Mark Fisher was genius, he described that so perfectly! And with every sentence more I read and listen to him, I'm also a little bit more sad he died. Would love to know how he would comment our world now.
scrolling through tiktok while listening to this. theres never a break from consuming information. this is the most advance form of totalitarianism ever
This is just a leftist version of Alex Jones. You are overthinking everything. It's not totalitarianism, anyone can put down the phone at any time, they choose not to. That's the opposite of totalitarianism.
I keep coming back to Fishers lectures. What pains me the most is that i started my university studies (after several years of misguided and failed arts studies) in 2017. For the duration of my studies, Fisher has always been already dead. What makes this even more sad is that he was the kind of a person who would have answered emails sent by students...
Im about to enter an undergrad for the second time in my life in an attempt to try spend whatever time I have left here on subjects I actually find interesting, and Fisher touched my life with his spot on insights. I too find myself going through all his lectures and public speaking and I love the fact that he isn't rhetorical, that some people might call him a 'bad' public speaker, because that means he's not bullshitting you unlike the vast majority of people who do public speaking well.
The idea of our music/media as a distinct marker for years & decades started around 1930 with radio becoming commonplace. It is not an inherent human trait. In fact, this 80-100 year span where culture & history link up in a harmonious feedback cycle is the exception. We should feel lucky that we were able to have that experience. Pre 1930, transmission was in person only. Post 2030, media is too fragmented, where anyone with a computer has their own studio & distribution network. Gatekeeping TV/radio/record companies were rightly seen to be exploitative, but the fact that they released a finite inventory of content per year meant that a few lucky generations can hear a particular song and become magically transported to another time.
I have similar thoughts and observations, but I often wonder, too, how much of this change in how I am experiencing time and history has to do with getting older. (Born in 1970, I belong to the same generation as Fisher.) The older one gets, the faster time seems to pass.
While I'm just nearing 30 years old, I feel like I viscerally relate to how you're sensing time: time seems to pass and lapse in our minds faster when there's nothing "as" new for us to perceive. Like how, for instance--as I felt since I was a kid--a drive back from a vacation seemed shorter than the drive out--the sights on the way back weren't as fresh or staggering; my mind has less to latch onto, so it lapsed more and remembered less, which made time seem "faster". In the same way, living longer--and also/possibly moreso--living during a stagnant period for culture, politics, and social structures...time can easily bolt along without us witnessing or noticing it much. We in a way become calcified and time flies rapid by comparison.
Matt - I think you're right. The amount of novelty, newness, and/or personal significance in a run of experience plays a role in how much time one subjectively feels has passed. I wonder if anyone has done experiments to test this hypothesis, or to try to quantify the effect. I bet there is a body of work along these lines in academic cognitive psychology journals. Time perception is probably an established field of research. It might have a long history. I wonder just how much work of this kind had been done.
@@anonymoushuman8344 maybe my opinion won’t matter to you guys because I’m young but I think constant learning slow down the perception of time passing. I always feel like days are forever and I think it’s my sense of curiosity and constant reading.
Terri - I think you're right. Time often does seem to pass more slowly when the mind is actively learning and engaging new things. On the other hand, it seems to me there is something to the adage that "time flies when you're having fun," and learning can of course be enjoyable. And what about the experience of boredom, in which time can seem to pass slowly because of a lack of things that engage our interest? I don't know how this all fits together, but I enjoy thinking about it and feel that it can be understood. I think exchanges between people from different age groups in spaces like this are good and important. People can learn from each other regardless of age.
Though this lecture is from 2014, watching it in 2021 feels like its something published only yesterday. For me, that is evidence enough of the cultural malaise.
I dunno. When it comes to music, a big part of rapid changes in sound was due to technology. Nowadays we can basically get any sound or effect we could possibly want from any computer. The overall sea of sonic possibilities will continue to expand, but not nearly as fast as it did before. This alone doesn’t completely negate the ideas of the lecture, obviously, but it’s worth considering the factors of the future slowing down other than culture
Quite. The elephant in the room is music technology. Electronic instruments were invented then underwent rapid iterative changes for several decades, it's really not surprising that such a thing would reach its natural limits before receding into a fixed cultural position. Remember that an electric guitar was still a niche commodity even in the 1970s, now we could all have one arrive on our doorsteps tomorrow and everyone's already had a go on one anyway. What Fisher failed to address here is just how relatively peculiar the 20th century was in cultural production terms. The vast majority of humanity lived and died without detecting any significant changes in music, architecture etc. Feudal subjects probably weren't complaining that nobody was trying to invent punk yet. Post-war liberal subjects of the 20th century existed at the intersection of the greatest ever freedom for workers/serfs, rapid advances in music technology, and popular music as the dominant cultural force. People like Fisher made 20th century musical modes their life then constructed elaborate philosophies to explain something which is ultimately quite simple: technology and culture can't progress at the same rate, on the same track, forever. Ironically, it's a rather capitalist way to conceive of art i.e. it must always be progressing and expanding or it has little value. It's typical of post-war optimism in the West (thanks Keynes!) but profoundly ahistorical and untethered. People didn't conceive of pre-modern folk art in this way, there was no urgency for the songs and poems to suddenly sound radically different from one year to the next. Capitalist Realism, innit?
@@cal9784overall I agree, but I think you’re mistaken in conflating the expectation for an ever-evolving culture with capitalistic tendencies. Capital is discrete and has a very real limit, but for culture to “evolve”, it doesn’t have to grow into anything or use resources; it’s just a new paradigm or re-structuring of frameworks. Animals have no end to their evolution, neither can we expect culture to
Maybe we cannot accurately find out if there were major, minor or no changes before we were able to record music since we only have what has survived on paper from those past eras
What we simply call music is a few very different things. Recorded music or performed music, professional music or amateur etc. 1000 years ago the average person didn’t listen to music like we do now, it was a totally different cultural landscape. I do agree though that Fisher seems to only care about the era that he was born into and not think outside of it.
Geez, in 2014, if that's when this talk happened, then Fisher is only saying what would be undeniable in 6 years - that the "future has disappeared." 2020, the Year of Mass Blindness.
It's a beautifully intuitive idea. Future has disappeared because reality has become cyclical. This is clearly reflected in the way of economical structures. By means of eternal inflation, the capitalistic machinery will never come to an end. Reality becomes a snapshot of the same scene that has been seen before except it "feels" different. The young, the middle-aged, the elderly lead the same lives as they lead decades ago. And somehow we still believe that things have changed. The future is clearly suppressed.
The culture is relentlessly boring now and the internet as site or enabler of new creativity has been a massive disappointment, probably because it's mainly just a speeded up communication and purchasing tool, not really a medium, in the same way that hardly anyone made art using the telephone or the credit card. Part of the problem is that the 20th century was just such an explosion of new artistic ideas that they dried up the well. Rock 'n' roll and dance music have played out a series of variations. They're simply not new anymore and have few ways left of being new. In avant garde music and art, where do you go after minimalism, conceptualism and electronic media? In practice, sadly, it seems you go to one hell of a lot of pastiche. For those of us who grew up in eras of youth rebellion, it's kind of weird to see young artists actually aping the productions of their parents' generations in punk or electronica or conceptual art. But all this old artistic newness ran in parallel and hand in hand with the sense of epic societal change. A friend of mine is a writer and comic artist who was active in the 70s and he says his generation thought anything was possible. Art was thought to be part of the revolution, the new way or the explosion of new ways. We have lost that motivating sense of purpose and meaning for our art. It's all just entertainment and you're either successful financially at it or not but can't hope for more than that or anything outside it. It's now clearly revealed as just part of the capitalist status quo.
John Moseley If you don’t think their is any artistic cultural innovation just listen to hip hop. Mark sounds like an old man here, thinking that rock n roll is the tip of the spear
@@cypherpillar9009 Hip hop has not been innovative since the early 2000s at the latest. The trap sound has been around since the 90s. The most "radical" edge of hip hop today simply merges hip hop with other genres, but hip hop has indeed succumbed to the same problems of the rest of music. The last great innovation of american music was footwork, but that's been around since the 90s.
@@cypherpillar9009 Out of curiousity, what part of Danny Brown's music do you consider innovative? He's good, but there's not particularly new or innovative about his work. He adds electronic influences, his samples are interesting, but there's nothing innovative about either of those things at all in hip hop.
19:45 -19:53 is spot on. A thing i try to tell people is that a big difference between now and the 20th C. is that now, because 99% of music is available on demand and practically free (at the moment); it's often taken for granted. That cultural artifact which has no "price" can easily be seen as having no "worth", in terms of subjective or objective value. It's discouraging, if you're the one working to make that artifact.
One thing’s certain the analog world has been relegated to novelty and Gen X are the last generation to experience it as mundane reality, this undoubtedly colors our view of the future.
Really interesting lecture. I often think when watching old Top Of The Pops repeats how totally different 1985 is to say 1979 yet between 2000 and 2006 there wasn't much difference musically or stylistically. I think the effect of the Cold War is another factor in explaining why our arts and culture in the west at that time had such a fantastic forward momentum. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a huge effect on Western music and culture as I believe that from the 1950s to at least the 1980s during the cold war there was a lot of funding put into the arts, and a lot of space created for the arts, as there was a desire to show authoritarian societies (especially younger people in those societies) the freedoms enjoyed by younger generations in the west. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and as the grip of Neoliberalism and monetrism really tightened on western countries this desire seemed to wane.
Here it is not far from the idea that the existence of the Soviet Union ensured liberal democracy, scientific and technological progress and cultural development of capitalist countries in competition with it
Yes, Mark Fisher's observations are indeed compelling! But believe it or not, there was a professor of music at U of Chicago who was somehow able to see, on the horizon, the imminent end-of-cultural-time, from the vantage point of 1967; see Music, The Arts, and Ideas by Leonard Meyer (1967, with 1994 Postlude). (The internet then was only 'gasoline' thrown on the fire that Meyer had already identified.) In the 1970s and 1980s, Stanislaw Lem likewise described an Eternal Present in which we would soon be trapped, and which he characterized as an 'ocean of trash' where 'your pearl will not be found'; see A Perfect Vacuum (1999[1971], p. 85) and One Human Minute (1986) by Lem. Both Meyer and Lem are in turn referenced in this connection in The Chemistry Redemption (2010) by Conal Boyce, who speaks of 'the end of the art-historical time-line' in a way that resonates strongly with Mark Fisher. @Manu Forster, I too was struck by, "The dimension of the future has disappeared. We're trapped in the 20th century… What it means to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on hi-res screens/ distributed by high-speed Internet, actually" (at 3:21).
lately I've seen a couple of these videos predicting "what will music sound like in 2030, 2040... 2100", but it was all just slightly different variations of breakcore. this is also why the 90s futurism seems more futuristic to me than anything we're experiencing today. it seems like we hit the peek of futurism back then and its hard to even imagine anything beyond that. altho it might be a temporary stagnation, perhaps aesthetics such as solarpunk, that go against the exploitative dystopian reality we live in, are the new futurism
the feeling of being adrift in time is something most in the West can relate to, but i think most of the feeling of progress of the 20th century came first from technology changing how we live and how society was organized and then in the latter half in social norms being broken through. we reached a place in the 90s where at least in the most privileged class, one could say or do virtually anything without surprising anyone. all restrictions are off, all markets are open for exploiting.
Maybe I don’t have the best grasp on this concept but I feel like this is even happening with food? For example in any American super market that carries name brand food, the breakfast aisle is half full of cereal that’s supposed to taste like candy or other non-cereal related name brand items. Every food chain eventually runs out of ideas for new items and resorts to selling “item we already have but it’s Cheetos flavored”. Is this lack of innovation the same thing?
it is tough to face the world as it is. we lost a great one with mark. i do wonder what he'd make of the recent acceleration of the cancellation of the future.
Hmm, after hearing the whole talk - he makes some good points, but I think it's a bit too neat. It is too easy to be pessimistic about the present when one reaches a certain age, and I think that can't be left out of the equation.
i had mark fischer's thoughts lingering for quite some time and began to really question 'what happened in electronica in the 90s, really? what was this sweet man so enthused about? what might i have missed from not having an opportunity to go back and suss with full inclusivity of genre, etc?' i had an understanding, some fave artists; though, had not allowed myself to research and hear it first hand. so, i used youtube to create some playlists that would allow me to go back, surround myself in the era, and see how i 'felt' about fischer, the past, the present, and where we might be headed (or not) into the future. those playlists are on my youtube page. maybe they might assist you, as well? idk. it made me a lot happier. they'll be there forever.
I respect Mark so much as a thinker and academic, and I also think his childlike passion for Jungle Music is incredibly cute and endearing. He brings it up literally every chance he gets.
There is so many questions I'd love to ask Mark if he was still around, I wonder what his thoughts on hyperpop would be- I would love to hear /read him more on music and and culture more. Does anybody know if he has down anything on UK electronica- I know he was around the scene because whenever Burial gets brought up so does Fisher. If anyone could point me in some direction It would be highly appreciated
It is really nice just to witness intelligent, well informed people talking about ideas. This, the essence of intellectual society, is imperative to the preservation of freedom. Too many people are dumb conformists, too many people are falling victim to the cult of misery. Only the pursuit of our dreams will save humanity.
That epic remark of his "the future has been cancelled" can be understood or even applied in so many ways. In terms of electronic music culture, which had a great run for 20 odd years, is now mostly cancelled, run dry, finished. Yet, even Mark Fisher's suicide cancelled his own future...
It's so amazing hearing what for me was only a ever a vague feeling in regards to arts & culture being expanded upon and put to words so well and easily digestible. So glad this made it to my recommended videos. Sorry to hear he has passed.
Mark was a brilliant mind, but I do think his position on the evolution of music does kind of overlook the role played by technology (although he briefly touches on it here). Throughout the 80s and 90s many of the major new leaps in electronic music, and the limits of what was sonically imaginable were underpinned by recent advances in synthesis/sampling/digital music production/etc. By the time you got into the early 2000s, the technology was so advanced and the possibilities were so endless that it was now possible to make music that couldn't be dated simply by listening to the textures it employed. We'd also explored such musical extremities that the idea of creating something that (due to its sheer novelty) people wouldn't recognize as music started to become a bit far fetched. Even so, there is still plenty of music that has come out since that *could only* have been made in its own particular period and is not simply regurgitating past glories. (Also, as a translator/interpreter/former English teacher, I gotta say that for such a smart guy, here he's really struggling to grade his language for a non-native audience.)
@@_mATTYcruder I think as spatial audio becomes more accessible to bedroom producers and earphone listeners, that could finally open up some pretty novel musical possibilities. Will anyone capitalize on that with something really interesting beyond "The Beatles' back-catalogue, on Apple music, remastered in 360° sound"?
@@liamconlon4375 an expression that reveals the deeper crisis of our predicament. The seeming impossibility of novelty, in music and elsewhere, generates a desperate imperative for novelty, only the same old techniques of subversion are availed of by would-be innovators. Is it possible that the issue is a matter of technological stagnation? Perhaps we've exhausted the sonic potential of certain instruments - the electric guitar and piano, for instance? Or form? Does the conventional structure of what we consider a song only allow for a certain number of moves? Could we even develop an appetite nowadays for something genuinely novel, something we could not presently conceive of?
@@brockjohnson936 I've wondered that myself. As a guitar player I often feel stuck in certain modes of expression, and when I experiment with new techniques or tunings, find it mostly unpleasant to my ear. Same with form -- I'm so attuned to the prominent 20th century forms from pop, rock, and dance that any deviation from it sounds... idk, messy? I'm not sure the problem is strictly technological though. I mean, electronic music is as stuck as any other genre working with conventional instruments. I think the problem is at a deeper conceptual level. I think, somehow, we need to find new ways of musical expression that *build on* or develop the musical ideas of the 20th century. But no one, even Mark Fisher, seems to know how to do that!
@@liamconlon4375 This is why punk (and NY's No Wave for example) are important. When you don't really know how to play and can't read music, your are unfettered from the "right way" to perform. We've seen in it electronic music (Mark Fisher points out Burial as an example) but as you say, many produces stick to the tried and true sound. I think we'll see something new again. Surely, a global pandemic and economic hardship will birth another interesting genre.
One of the sure signs of our times is to see it as extraordinary peculiar. How did music in 1656 sound different from 1670? Another sure sign of our time is to make anything more important than it is - especially in culture and subculture.
I'd never heard of this guy until now, but boy is he on the money. And now I found he committed suicide! FFS, what a total waste for all of us. As he wrote: "the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals." And this was before the *other* pandemic, COVID, which seems to have dropped the average sanity on the planet by about 15%. I don't know where this world is heading, but I just want to say to anyone happening to read this: it's ok we are all here in the little lifeboat that is planet Earth. Find your own truth. For me I find it helps to keep a sense of history: this whole amazing roller-coaster ride has been running ever faster since H.Sapiens evolved 300,000 years ago. None of us is going to get out of this alive, so we might as well enjoy the ride. Each of us can look to deal with our own demons. Begin it now, begin it today, even if the human race as a whole seems for now incapable to deal with its own. There are so many beautiful people who have lived or live today, so many wonderful ideas that have been shared. That can be its own distraction, but through this beach-coming I have found fragments that I have shored against my ruins. I won't name any of mine here, because yours will be different, but your answers are there I promise. OK I will name one: read the one page "Desiderata" as an emergency booster shot, to give some peace of mind against the storm inside and out. Start from there.
Has the argument been made anywhere that Fisher’s analysis on the macro level really kind of stems from or fundamentally concludes that capital can’t actually create a 21st century because a true 21st century would be a century without capital? The innate logic of capital senses its own death and in the interest of its own preservation extends the height of its socio-cultural contribution (20th century/modernism) for as long as it possibly can?
Fisher makes a lot of good points. I wasnt convinced at first, but when he made the comparison of the changes between '74 and '94 and then '94 and '14 I can see what he means. There is a definite slow down of innovation in music. I think South Park sums up this phenomenon with their "member-berries" episode. Everything is recycling old media in place of innovating.
this slow down in music and creativity is bc there is less suppression or repression in today's life, everything is expressed immediately and is not contained inside your psychology or unconscious.
that's exactly what I was thinking when he talked about jungle. altho hyperpop is just a parody/acceleration of late capitalist music, at least it's something somewhat new and different
This is an absolutely brilliant video that manages effectively explicate and use the best of "postmodern" theory to build on marxist foundations to demonstrate the way we ARE using what has happened to the music we can now barely stand to listen to.
Legend. Adding to that from a 2021 perspective - in between the cracks of the global monoculture chewing past aesthetics and spitting it out as revivals and remixes , there *are* some gems and innovative cultural moments (the soundcloud niche scenes for example). Problem is, i feel like even present culture is a ghost - rarely does the art i encounter on the internet really last in collective memory, nor does it manifest loud enough in physical spaces and communities. Then, how do we map our collective experiences, communicate the subtleties of our perceptions between humans ? This is crazy. RIP Mr Fisher
Glad you spoke about the soundcloud scene as I always felt it was a rebellion against the monotony and repetition of culture. Im sure you know about spaceghostpurrp and how eccentric he is , I feel he represents the anti-thesis to Fisher ideas and a beam of hope in hip hop culture and music culture overall. When spaceghostpurrp descended to madness the collective consciousness wept
ive watched this a few times but the line towards the beginning about Jameson's thesis being "ubiquitous almost to the point of invisibility" just hit me
Things started flattening out even before 1994, more like 1988. By that point everything that could have been done in terms of music, auto design, clothes, hair styles had already been done, and done better. We've been in a period of "everything's all over with" for over 30 years.
There is a school of thought that, as a rough guide most things,with a few notable exceptions, have been in a hopeless,irrecoverable spiral of decay/decline since around 1979-of course some people may be more pessimistic.
@@eveglead1913 In many ways this is true, including economic mobility for the average American. By 1979 the stagflation we're still living with now (and forever) was already several years in. I still stick with 1985 & '86 as the last good years frankly because of the music. I know that's not really a good reason, but its still valid. Things were brighter and happier overall. Not everything was completely broken, all at once like now either.
@Pro Tengu hi, no i have not but i have just googled... can't quite see the connection but i'm willing to learn....just going back to jeff waynes eve of the war,that's good....
Hmmm... In one sense today's music is still using the sounds from 1980s drum samplers, in another the 808 wave frequency sounds perfect so anything substantially different would be the opposite of evolution. I think the mistake, which is natural, is in expecting the same rate of "improvement"/change
RIP Mark Fisher, you would've hated generative AI
I think he might have simultaneously loved and hated it. Since it has a lot of potential for good, and can play a helpful role in bringing about an effective "fully-automated" postcapitalist future.
Disagree about its potential. Generative AI can only produce plagiarized spam. We need real cultural output.
@@SolarpunkSeed i agree, was thinkng about this earlier
Mark lived in the same time as the kind of AI we call AI now, just a prototype of it: the recommendation algorithm. You're right, it's easy to draw a straight line from then until now, if you adopt a view of AI as algorithms with the same purpose as those that came before it.
@@adamrmossit’s not plagiarized, it just has no depth
‘What the internet provides is an oppressive weight of the past’ Damn 😧
He said while not considering that 10 years later we'll still travel with his thoughts through the past that's even further away but nevertheless present.
Because there is nothing new in the world, everything already happened, every though was already though, every word was already spoken, every picture was already painted.
It was the same even before the Internet, most people just didn't realize it.
@@PeterT-i1wyou havent listened to his talk have you
@@glupik1234 I'm truly impressed by the intellectual depth of your comment.
i find solace in the idea that my anxieties have a universal element to them - "Nobody is bored but everything is boring". Fisher's critique of social media and wider technology is not merely platitudinal nostalgia (in fact he speaks against it). His insight is that our unfreedom to feel boredom via constant distraction is today's malaise.
Good point. The same goes for any other kind of negative emotion. Even if you are pissed at a superior or just generally feel unwell due to shitty living conditions, society still obliges you to look hype and fresh all the time. Suffering has been completely divorced from its direct outside causes, dissimulating the social sources of suffering, and it has been turned into something shameful in and of itself, with all the blame put on the individual.
This is precisely what he wants you to realize. There is a blog post called "Anti-Therapy" in which he argues that speaking up about your issues and experiences only enforces the insulating and destructive system unless you contribute to a sort of collective "consciousness-raising" as he calls it. You should not only find solace in realizing your experiences are universal, this should prompt you to examine the social systems around you, maybe even the ones you've internalized. Because if everyone is struggling with a kind of boring culture of modernity, there must be a collective and systemic reason to it.
Boredom forces creativity in certain ways. Boredom forces people to think about their lives and who they are and what they want, and allows the time and mental space to start planning and making decisions, as well as to start constructing stories for those who have writing talent, or constructing games for those who are inclined to tabletop rolepalying games and board games and the like. You start imagining things which could be fun, and that leads to making things. Whereas with the surfeit of already existing MMOs and dram accessable through your phone, that chance to create is effectively alienated, and we're rendered mere cunsumers instead, which leads to its own dissatisfaction, because they're expressions of other people's creativity and not your own.
@Pro Tengu Thanks for clarifying that you are a mean spirited troll.
@Pro Tengu Keep proving me right.
God he's so intelligent and so able to express what we all sense, the anxiety and the disappointment we all feel somewhere deep inside in terms that are both highly relatable and accessible and also deeply cerebral and engaging. Such a shame he's not here anymore to keep sharing insight to us and hold up a mirror to the world.
I was never fortunate enough to meet Mr Fisher, but I miss him dearly.
He was my lecturer in 2nd year Uni and I just found out.
You're not alone there.
@@way2goated I made a new friend via the internet in March 2020, and they later recommended to me Capitalist Realism. I read it that year, and I found it to be prophetic. I just finished watching this lecture, and dipping into the comments, I discover the news of his death in 2017. This is heartbreaking and demotivating. Humanity has lost an important ally. Yet I have this almost dogmatic belief that humanity is still salvageable, and learning that we lack an ally only increases my resolve.
How can you miss him if you never met him?
@@boorhaave5880 It is a unique sense of mourning, but it is mourning nonetheless.
I think the reason why we haven't evolved beyond the 90's is that the 90's achieved the optimal profitability for the culture industry, therefore it seeks to keep cycling it's audience back in to replicate it.
In the same way we create monocultures to produce and harvest crops.
Great point. You could also argue that there is in fact nowhere left to go now and that entropy has set in.
I feel it's more so that those who grew up in that period for some reason are stuck in it and want to relieve it, add this with the amount of gen z who also want to go back, and now you've killed forward-thinking ideals and opt for pure nostalgia. In the 90s you had people who wanted to be in the '60s, but they were all a sub group and weren't really the majority, some old styles were rehashed but reworked and modernized. Nowadays, it's like we are all in constant loops of wanting to go back to our correspondent generational time periods because everyone who lived through the 20th century is stuck in it and now doesn't want to push for change.
For example, the idea of the old boomer who wants classic '60s rock to come back is so redundant and idiotic to me, because at the time, if you were to play a 1963 song like "Surfin' Bird" in 1967 when everyone was listening to Hendrix, you'd already be classed as a dated person, so why is it now that instead of these boomers wanting to push forward they for some reason want to return back? Even though in their era if they said the same thing they are saying now, people would have shunned them as dated. In 1969 most people were no longer really listening to Elvis, it was now the Beatles, King Crimson, the Rolling Stones... etc. To say "hey let's go back to the 50s where everyone listened to Elvis!" would have seemed backwards as hell.
Profitability has gone down because technology has improved and made music cheap. If we still had to buy cds to listen to songs and DVDs to watch concerts, artists could still make good money
In the 90s many looked to the late 60s early 70s and many now look towards the 50s. Why? Well for the individuality and creativity from the late 60s and early 70s and to the 50s for what good was lost regarding morality community etc. Seems a kind of Wagon-wheel effect is being experienced and the fast we move technologically the much more quickly we move into the new metamodern "network society" transhistorical era. The neoliberal world is giving way to the National Populist view Nationally and the Civilizational Populist view Globally. The deterritorialization has begun within our institution and for a sect of society as we've seen their nonsensical dogmatic virtues (vices)/pillars(vices) on full display. I'm referring to the Hegelian cultists(religion)/woke cultists(religion).
@@acropolisnow9466 Civilizational Populsim
As an architect, I can almost seamlessly replace the mentions of music with architecture.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860):
'As every man possesses a physiognomy by which you can provisionally judge him, so every age also possesses one that is no less characteristic. For the Zeitgeist of every age is like a sharp east wind that blows through everything. You can find traces of it in all that is done, thought and written, in music and painting, in the flourishing of this or that art: it leaves its mark on everything and everyone, so that, e.g., an age of phrases without meaning must also be one of music without melody and form without aim or object. Thus the spirit of an age also bestows on it its outward physiognomy. *The ground-bass to this is always played by architecture:* its pattern is followed first of all by ornaments, vessels, furniture and utensils of all kinds, and finally even by clothes, together with the manner in which the hair and beard are cut.'
@@beingsshepherd synchronistically, i just mentioned A.S. in my comment. worth also noting that Schopenhauer puts music at the apex of all (classical) arts.
'Playful eclecticism,' 'classical allusions,' 'references,' triangles with holes cut out. As an industrial designer, I wish there was something I could say to make us both feel better.
Please do mention those architectural references, for us youtube crowd. Thank you very much
Seconded.
this lecture's hitting me hard, once again I'm drifting through social media-cyberspace at 3 o'clock on a Thursday night. Not so much to be entertained or to relax, just looking for something interesting to fill the void of aimless non-sleeping. Rest in peace Mark Fisher. Would recommend anyone reading this comment to check out his collection of essays K-Punk, for evermore in-depth popculture-analysis
I was put on to mark fisher from his essay good for nothing, no one has or had put my feelings of hopelessness and defeated sadness so perfectly into words…which makes it all the more saddening what happened to him
Next time you reach for your phone, just resist that urge and see what your brain does. When I do it, I get a little rush of cognitive freedom
@@plebjames I’m seriously considering throwing my iPhone in the trash and getting a flip phone. It’s become a literal blight on my life. That being said without it, I wouldn’t have found gems like this lecture. Worth it? Prob not.
Rest in Peace, Fisher. The world lost one of its most brilliant minds with you. I hope that you're in a better place now.
I was gonna tell him thatt his audio quality was poor. Looks like the future cancelled him as well. Just as well. Thank you.
He is in the future
RIP Mark Fisher. Although I was only ten when he passed he is one of my greatest influences ever. I’m going to keep fighting to create a world he would be proud of.
bruh what? play sports if you're 15 dont worry about this garbage
@@user-fp8xc8lf3f i just like philosophy lol
@@milos8556 don‘t listen to him. Do what you like to do. Philosophy is life-changing and most people lack the knowledge of how impactful philosophy can be
I was also 10 when he passed away. Truly one of the most insightful cultural thinkers of this century with a tragic early end. We need more such analytical, class-conscious cutural critiques on the left today and I don't think we'll get someone quite like Fisher again.
@@user-fp8xc8lf3f What's your problem? I'm his age too, what's wrong with being interested in this
This man changed my life, Rest In Peace
I have an open mind, but I've just arrived. What should I check out to understand the impact you describe?
@@SFDestiny Random internet person here (ie not the person you're asking directly), but I would say maybe DeBord's Society of the Spectacle as mentioned by Fisher in this (if I recall), Baudrillard's extension of this concept into a more semiotic evolutionary analysis (here's a good encapsulation I think, as it pertains to the spectacularization/abstraction of war: www.halliejones.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Baudrillard-The-Gulf-War-did-not-Take-Place.pdf ), Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment as a tension between myth and "rationality" and the overbearing mechanical hollowing of novelty/meaning by an industrialized "culture industry", broadly just critical theory in general. If these are too understandably dry/academic, I really like Adam Curtis' documentaries, most recently with Can't Get You Out of My Head: ua-cam.com/video/MHFrhIAj0ME/v-deo.html
@@Bisquick maybe this: One *could* say, "Let's change course," but instead Fisher & Friends decry, "I was promised a different destination!" This is "surplus enjoyment." It *feels* like action, but it actually disguises inaction.
@@SFDestiny Indeed, no disagreements here, unfortunately I think the cultural vector is the only one where action _was_ offered in potential with the rise and eventual domination of neoliberalism in the 70s and the suppression of class/material politics, and I think Fisher is merely pointing out that even this vector, the one that shapes our capacity to imagine anything at all let alone alternative material social arrangements, has been corrupted by corporate power. Where sustainable action/dissent is inevitably recuperated and politics becomes an essentialized manichean spectacle rather than the struggle for humanity to transcend itself or whatever, so everything becomes a sort of monotonous repetitive rehashing of the past if that makes sense.
@@SFDestiny He is describing a cultural condition which tells us that "nothing can change!", "capitalism is all we have!", "yeah, I don't like it either but this is just the way things are now..." . Fisher isn't creating a positive political project to extricate us from this condition in his lectures, but in his final years he does try to create a blueprint. Check out Postcapitalist Desire and the introduction to Acid Communism.
Fisher has been a real eye opener. Since he uses music as an example: when I was a teen in the 80s we disparaged any music that wasn't new. We had no time for classic rock, for example. All of it was dead to us (in fact, it wasn't that old.) Today, not only do I (and it seems, my peers) wax nostalgic for the 80s but the "classic" rock that we so hated back then. As Fisher says, we have an excessive tolerance for regurgitating and recycling culture. Think about how so called "alternative rock" is now almost 30 years old.
You're braver than most of your generation (which is also mine) to admit that, and I've contemplated the same idea, my conclusion is that insistence on The New, The Next is primarily a teenage trait, I'd go further to say it's predominantly a young man's trait. Linked with the oneupmanship, competitiveness and ego of teenage male friendships. And the Year Zero stance - all Old music is worthless, all new music is intrinsically relevant and essential. In five, fifteen twenty years a male music fan (especially if he's still passionate about music) will grasp the never ending continuum of music past present and future, how those 'new' bands they championed had roots in older music, and how more experimental older music paved the way and often pioneered the same ideas as the latest Innovator but just weren't recognised at the time. All of the serves being returns, across genres, eras, generations, and he will get the bigger picture. An instance on NOW (not your Dad's music) is a teenage conceit. One your Dad may well have postured with too.
I noticed that already in the 1990s. I was teaching at a college and noticed that the 19-year-olds were wearing the same Led Zepplin t-shirts their parents had worn 20 years earlier. Their parents did not wear their parents' Nat King Cole or Elvis t-shirts from the 1950s or Benny Goodman from the 1940s. (There were no such t-shirts.)
@@bostonseeker I’ve definitely noticed this phenomena of young people now seemingly having a rlly deep appreciation for older music that I’m not sure was present in the same way before. Granted, being 17 Idk to what extent that’s true but basically all my friends listen to stuff from the 60s 70s 80s 90s. To some it’s almost like a badge of honour- a signifier of their superior musical taste. Partly I think it’s due to the insane accessibility to music we have now and we want to experience it all but also I think it maybe have to do with what was being said i the lecture about the “oppressive weight of the past” and how it kind of bears down on the present. I constantly see sentiments regarding how everything was better then and how the best has already happened etc etc. And I think this mindset can actually hinder progress in some ways cos some people are so obsessed with say the rock canon (if that’s what you’d call it) that they make it harder for innovation to occur
I use to think the very last real futuristic sound was a juke/footwork thing of early 2010s
@@ofacid3439 dont remind me that footwork is 10 years old :/ how do you feel about hyperpop btw?
Infecting boredom with anxiety was a mean trick.
God, a person with such insight into the current state of affairs has to have it tough.
The thing he said about being bored even when we are curious is spot on.
In the end it might've been just too much for him. The sheer boredom of it all
He committed suicide. Terrible, but I can see why.
@@wrathford What's interesting is that before his death, he worked on "acid communism", and the unfinished introduction reads a lot more hopeful than his other writings, I can highly recommend reading it
that is a very valuable insight my friend. it's important to remember that we don't ask to be born with certain prescient abilities. but this stops no one from judging everyone's pain by the same metric. depression has been described as feeling the pain of the world within one individual. lastly, imo depression is simply the inability to deceive one's self about the world as it truly is, sort of an inversion of the notion: 'think positively' or that we can indeed choose how we think and what we see given what we now understand about free will. you are either depressed or you're not paying attention, depression or delusion, but some of us don't choose whether or not we remotely view the future, only whether we decide to deny our own vision in deference to society's prescription.
@@wrathford i hope i have the guts to do it when it´s time
To all the people in the comments opining that Mark Fisher was out of touch, he'd never heard of Burial, Sleaford Mods, Wiley.. etc It might benefit you to take a brief dip into his blog and you'd see that those were just the artists he championed, he was not unaware or completely scathing of contemporary music culture (he wrote for Wire), it's just that here he was commenting on what distinguished it from older musical culture in a certain negative way.
totally....there is a whole chapter in Ghost of my life about Burial
Quite frankly, it's my opinion that anyone who's never heard of Sleaford Mods can consider themselves pretty lucky... because they're shit haha :-P
Burial and Sleaford Mods are fucking shit though
Just look these guys up, complete shit, Fisher is right
Schizopantheist or just read Ghosts of my life where he talks about them directly.
3:21 "The dimension of the #future has disappeared. We're trapped in the 20th century… What it means to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on hi-res screens/ distributed by high-speed Internet, actually."
Perhaps early signs that were headed for a simulated world. The year is 3087, and we’re all in VR headsets living in 1998
Cameron Dowse Precisely, lol. Unless capitalism is dealt with, 1960-1990 may well be the peak reference of human culture for future generations.
Hashtagging the word future is exactly part of this problem.
@JJ KK I don't comprehend all this pathos. It seems like nostalgia for an imaginary past. "I was promised Santa, dammit!" What am I missing ??
@JJ KK what are you defensive about? I replied to you as an ally against those bozos. Apparently your dog bites
Hollywood is another example of the increasing blandness and tight repetition of culture. Another superhero sequel anyone? All safe profits, safe stories, safe....
Also agree 110% about the hijacking of cyberspace by "capitalist cyberspace" and its constant demands on attention. I yearn for the old internet where the purpose was making useful information available and the fluffiest it got was the hampsterdance page. Now it's buried under clickbait, pointless distractions and bullshit of the worst kind.
The interesting part of the superhero surge isn't just that studios are being safe, it's about why we as consumers are lapping them up and making them safe bets for studios.
I think we live in a world where we have no certainties, no power, and no future. We're regressing to childhood icons; stories where we know who the villains really are, and that show that they can be defeated. It's depressing!
You're right the internet was built by the US military. I made the common mistake of conflating the world wide web with the internet. I was thinking of the early world wide web of the 90's when the signal to noise ratio of websites created as a labor of love or to provide useful information vs corporate websites designed to harvest your data for marketing or waste your time was far far better.
@Temple of Ridicule Its irrelevant who paid for it. There was a freedom in the space that no longer exists today.
The McDonalds business model has become the standard for everything.
That Amy Winehouse anecdote really is the best example of hyperrealism in action. Winehouse was, to most people today, more real and authentic than actual soul singers from the 60’s. We live in a world where our ability to recreate authentic experience is BETTER than the authentic experience itself. As Rick Roderick once said “you wouldn’t want to see a T-rex for real. You’d be disappointed after seeing what Spielberg put on the screen.”
Bullshit, a real TRex would probably be more amazing that what we could ever think of.
Amy was more 'real and authentic' because she was actually there at the time and not you know, in the 1960s.
@@remotefaith Well, enjoy!!! the only reality is Your own sense of being, in, with, and within, the entirety of the universe.
He completely nailed it. Even truer today than when he gave this talk.
I was 15 when thsi man died and blissfully unaware of how important amd accurate his decsriptions of an impending sense of melancholic existential dread that seems to settle in everyday life. As time has gone on it seems people have only become more accepting of commodification of all apsects of life, climate change has become ironically openly accepted but this has also seemed to come with a back ended embrace that we will simply have to live with its condequences. Like capitalist realism a sense of fatility in the societal psyche has put us collectively in a trance we need to desperately snap out of. Rip Mark Fisher and I hope people use his works to peoductive ends and look for solutions to a world with a quickly fading if not already departed future.
This is probably the most important lecture on 21st century aesthetics and cultural studies
agreed
You well be right. I’m astonished at how relieved I am to have found this vid.
i can recommend works by adorno or benjamin, considering they've been saying this stuff decades ago
@@fuelks Not necessarily. Benjamin, yes, maybe, but Adornos criticism of the culture industry falls quite short from Fisher. Well, Adorno coined the term, but i'd argue his ideas only came to fruition with his students (and people influenced by them, like Fisher). There's a lot more to this than was ever addressed in, say, Dialectics of Enlightenment, even though the topics are similar
It's rubbish. What a boring, moaning man! Music was better back in the day, no feeling in modern music blah, blah, blah.... We've heard it all before. Pure rubbish.
As well as depression some people react to the situation we find ourselves in with slowly, but ever increasing anxiety - resulting in an inability to sleep, and shortly afterwards failure to hold down a job. Probably all part of the plan really.
He is/was spot on. Funny how time works. Time heals all wounds, though some wounds have all the time.
What I really love about Mark is although he finished his PhD in philosophy, rather than speaking from a doctoral ivory tower.
He bases the examples for his deep thought on something we all (in some way) relate to; contemporary music.
And the people/bots in the comments challenging his examples of music are stuck on a autistic loop and have it backwards.
*It's not that Mark is trying to be Adam Neely and teach you something about music, but rather, the examples in pop-music he uses (how broad- or narrowminded) serves as a conceptual vehicle to get his deeper point/philosophy across; That of 'the slow cancellation of the future'.*
Every comment saying: _"I don't agree with his views on (pop)-music"_, therefore is completely missing the point. It's a symptom of thinking brought to us by the internet, and what I like to call: "Intellectual ignorance".
Because of the way how the internet has "informed" us into obtaining our new "knowledge" about things, we have learned to be (rightfully) critical of new information. Thus we tend to default in a 'information comparison contest' which withholds us from a state of: 'Agreeing for the time being' in order to gain a real understanding of the deeper message that the person formulating their idea's is trying to get across.
It was both refreshing and sad to see this pop up in my recommendations so many years later.
One of the nice things about a full lecture, as opposed to the more digestible anti-capitalist media we so often see on UA-cam today, is the almost complete lack of loud but vacant opposition. No one whose ideas are molded by the neoliberal hegemony has the attention span required to argue with it. Small mercy.
RIP. What a burden to be such a brilliant man in these times.
I disagree with him on the lack of specificity of time in music. It's still there. The problem is most people are not living with the cutting edge of music. Most people don't follow scenes and labels close enough. We see the history of music through it's hits, and a recontextualizing through film and other media. Stranger Things does capture some of the 80's, it probably captures 90's nostalgia for the 80's even more so, and 2010's revival of the 80's more still. How many people were clued into all of those aesthetics at the time? A slim margin that were the creators and aficionados. With the internet more people added to the mythos and context of an overall theme that wasn't as universal at the time as some believe. At most it was a veneer of branding targeted at teenage youth that was as fleeting and given little introspection. Even look at Black Mirror San Junipero for the same thing, memories of the past that never really were. Adult life takes people away from the edge of progress, and puts people at the edge of old problems. People with kids attest to reliving that part of life through their kids, because at some point that is the only way to really get a sense of this specificity.
When we look on the now in 20 years, there will be a lot revived that for most was under the radar. Retro 2020 won't really seem like real 2020 at all, and it will be delivered in a more concentrated aesthetic than thought possible. God, just look at every WW2 film after Saving Private Ryan. Same deal. We chase aesthetics and impressions more than the real thing. Today, people simply track progress in a select few industries and loose touch with others. You can't keep up with everything anymore. Almost like there are parallel worlds at any given time on top of each other. Things either move so fast week to week, or are endeavors like infrastructure that stretch for years and meant to last centuries. This is why it feels we are in a zombie amusement park, while at the same time innovation has never been faster. It's simply lost to market fracture.
Wow this rings so true to me. After stranger things came out a lot of my friends became obsessed with the 80s and wished they had grown up at that time. It made them feel sad that they were growing up now and opposed to then, but I didn’t see why I should I compare the mundaneness of my current reality to the hyper romanticised hyper idealised conceptualisation of a previous era. It just doesn’t feel like they’re on equal footing. We haven’t had time to romanticise the present cos the present is now. I am intrigued as to how people will conceptualise the 2020s though- I wonder what cool aesthetics or styles of art we’re largely unaware of that may become a staple of retro 2020s
@@mauve9266 Might wanna look into the synchronicities 'twixt 2020s and 1920s art and theory. I'm already seeing a few ripples here and there.
@@mauve9266 Even Daniel Lopatin's Eccojams are a re-hash of John Oswald's plunderphonics, are a re-imagining of Captain Beefheart's post blues Dadaism. Every new, every niche, stlye of music is a continuation of an existing idea. When the band Suicide took a drum machine and turned it on its head in the late 70s, this paved the way for every single use of a drum machine since.
As in Deleuze's phenomenology, new ideas have to come from the inexperienced and naive. Boredom is what gives people an outlet for their inexperience, and the immediacy of all knowledge today is not providing enough boredom. A youth can read about Suicide and drum machines, about Oswald and Beefheart, and then have nothing to create. If you give a kid with no internet access a drum machine and tell them to make music, you may get something new, but we need the modern day equivalent of the innocuous drum machine.
I would argue that the modern day equivalent would be something like VCV rack, a free, digital modular synthesiser where there are no rules, there is no visibility as to what has been made with it, and even professional musicians with years of experience in modular environments do not have any ideas in stone on what to do with it.
There is hope, as always, but you need to look quite hard to find it. Daniel Lopatin is a particularly good example of someone with current experience in producing new ideas, despite how vast the possible field of influence is today. Arguably even his work is Dadaism; an artform increasingly accepted by popular culture.
Well said
Wow you tried
The slow cancellation is accelerating mid 2020 ....
and now it's blazing ly fast
@@heatherlynn2695wealth transfer. From swift to BRICS.
curious, the way he repetitively, unconsciously, compulsively lifts and sets down his water glass and water bottle, without ever taking a sip, serves as a kind of visual metaphor for everything he is saying. brilliant.
cheers
cheers
First saw this with the Graeber coffee cup.
He's lining them up, along with the watch band -its a tick thing, I do it all the time in meetings and etc
Great observation.
shocked to learn he died , i loved capitalist realism and his articles RIP Mark.
Mark left too soon
@@gordonrolandpeden3058 :(
i think that the second half of the 2010s really saw an emboldened form of what fisher postulates here. in terms of music, we have seen
- the fetishistion of the 70s genre, such as in Dua Lipa's 'future nostalgia' or St Vincent's new album.
- the popularusation of artists openly, shamelessly emulating musicians that have come before them, for example Declan McKenna's similitude to David Bowie
- the continued pervasiveness of britpop groups, such as Oasis or Blur, in the youth culture of today, which contradicts the notion of a distinct cultural heterogeneity as time progresses
- the paradoxical main-streaming of a rejection of 'main-stream' music in favour of indie bands from the 1980s and 1990s.
i dont think that thus cultural hauntology is just present in music though. it can also be seen in
- the universal prevalence of 'vintage' clothing, such as Nike sweatshirts from the 1980s or Adidas Originals attire from the 1990s
- the longevity of architectural movements (i.e. modernism) which linger far longer than previous movements
- the non-progression of cinema culture, which now exclusively focusses on established properties (i.e. marvel, star wars etc.)
- the commodification of 'retro' technologies, such as record players and old radio sets
Mark Fisher truly was a prophetic voice
👏
“The paradoxical mainstreaming of a rejection of mainstream music…” that’s interesting stuff. And the thing with Declan McKenna, I hadn’t noticed as I haven’t kept up with his recent stuff lately but after going back and seeing it the resemblance is uncanny
Very good summation, ty lol helpful
Spot on🤞🏻
i agree to an extent, but tbf i feel like innovations and progress are happening all around us, u just have to look
"We don't have the freedom to be bored anymore".
some comments talking about how they wish Mark had heard specific music - completely miss the point. music culture is just one example of the larger issues. one band you think is cool is not at all new in this way that is being described. the effect of this disappearance of time marking is not as simple as new music suddenly not being found. this is a sickness of perception of time itself
Indeed! The map *is not* the territory!
Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote in 1978. We can only guess her reaction to the relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics of 2019. No wonder wicked problems like climate change or inequality feel so hard to tackle right now.
You'll never solve either of those wicked problems.
The point isn't to solve them. It's not even to want them be solved.
It's to want to DO things in general.
Society strips that of people, because fixing, dreaming, and doing fucks with the bottom line too much.
Appliances used to outlive their manufacturers, and the infrastructure to guarantee that was everywhere. You could learn and teach yourself how to fix all this shit yourself, and if you were good at it make a decent living doing it. People could have widgets that actually worked, and wasn't programmed to self destruct just to force them to buy a new one.
"What a tragedy!" Said the Private Sector. "There's so much money we've left on the table!"
I agree with his observation, but to see these cultural developments as inherently negative also indicates we could merely be stuck within a modernist mind paradigm in a post-modern world, and somehow still refuse to let go of this 19th/20th century expectation of something new and groundbreaking every 5 years
I definitely see how this could be a drawback, but I think the argument more hinges on the fact that things *are* happening, we *do* get and have new things, but because of their overabundance and such quick succession there's a lurking feeling that nothing is truly happening. The iPhone and climate change are one in the same; one gets better and better and one gets worse and worse, but how and why and from what precedent we can't really say.
Yeah I mean I feel that at least in the space of alternative electronic music there definitely has been massive changes
Agreed, and I think this invites a wider discussion of artists today who seem to enjoy the collective entropies of our past echoes as we explore new soundscapes and ideas upon the ground of ubiquitous medias.
If we look at history it becomes evident that every cultural shift was closely assosiated with a shift in the power structure of society. Culture is impotent by itself. The Renaissance was closely associated with a revolution in medieval warfare, but in contrast today every change is confined to the field of high tech, which is profoundly asocial and very distant from the masses.
The bourgeoisie completely solidified its power in WW2 and with the defeat of the labor and civil rights movements modern society has been been at a complete standstill since the 80's. And lets be honest, contemporary pop culture garbage is produced through statistical methods and computer algorithms. Even the aesthetic design of cars and planes is completely done with AI these days. So why is anyone surprised that everything is the same?
/Depression
Guðjón Ó. Eiríksson Not necessarily depression. Irrational insurrection, Terror. Revolt against the current state of things
Economically we are slaves
We do not own our money
We do not own our future
We do not own our children.
They can all be legally robbed under a democratic system.
The socialists demand politicians regulate the capitalists, but the social policies only benefit the rich.
They use minimum wages, worker's rights and labour unions to rob you and enrich themselves.
It is no wonder culture stagnates
this is a very salient observation; generally individuals see the world as a series of events that happen to "persons" yet the free floating rationale of corporate algorarithims to maximize capital aqquisition in the shortest possible time frame, steamrollers anything in its path- there is no culture, no political, no artistic, no philosophical, no human activity that can stand in the way of the capability of capital to accrete more capital.
The main recurring theme here is technocracy. It's amazing because I don't think I ever hear any so-called leftist thinkers ever mention it.
nobody tell him about videogame remakes
I just started two weeks ago to read his books and it's so eyes opening and I feel his kind of views so much! When I was a teenager in the 2000s I always had a feeling of a lost generation, no unique pop culture, nothing really new... I was jealous about my parents and their popculture when they've been teenager. I know the feeling of a lost vision, no idea what's a good idea of the future, what to believe in, sometimes strong feelings of depression... Mark Fisher was genius, he described that so perfectly! And with every sentence more I read and listen to him, I'm also a little bit more sad he died. Would love to know how he would comment our world now.
What books have you read/started?
@@mariesoph2 Capitalist realism. I can highly recommend it.
scrolling through tiktok while listening to this. theres never a break from consuming information. this is the most advance form of totalitarianism ever
I’m pooping on a toilet right now, it’s advanced af
Bro just delete toktok lmao not that advanced
@@xyui8434 i need to consooooom
This is just a leftist version of Alex Jones. You are overthinking everything. It's not totalitarianism, anyone can put down the phone at any time, they choose not to. That's the opposite of totalitarianism.
@@neomcdoom choices dont exist we are externally controlled not internally controlled
I keep coming back to Fishers lectures. What pains me the most is that i started my university studies (after several years of misguided and failed arts studies) in 2017. For the duration of my studies, Fisher has always been already dead. What makes this even more sad is that he was the kind of a person who would have answered emails sent by students...
Im about to enter an undergrad for the second time in my life in an attempt to try spend whatever time I have left here on subjects I actually find interesting, and Fisher touched my life with his spot on insights. I too find myself going through all his lectures and public speaking and I love the fact that he isn't rhetorical, that some people might call him a 'bad' public speaker, because that means he's not bullshitting you unlike the vast majority of people who do public speaking well.
Great to hear someone giving such a broad and articulate insight on something felt by many - not too many, of course.
Disagree I think most people feel it they can’t articulate their feelings
Or film, or literature, at least in english speaking countries
The idea of our music/media as a distinct marker for years & decades started around 1930 with radio becoming commonplace. It is not an inherent human trait. In fact, this 80-100 year span where culture & history link up in a harmonious feedback cycle is the exception. We should feel lucky that we were able to have that experience. Pre 1930, transmission was in person only. Post 2030, media is too fragmented, where anyone with a computer has their own studio & distribution network. Gatekeeping TV/radio/record companies were rightly seen to be exploitative, but the fact that they released a finite inventory of content per year meant that a few lucky generations can hear a particular song and become magically transported to another time.
I have similar thoughts and observations, but I often wonder, too, how much of this change in how I am experiencing time and history has to do with getting older. (Born in 1970, I belong to the same generation as Fisher.) The older one gets, the faster time seems to pass.
While I'm just nearing 30 years old, I feel like I viscerally relate to how you're sensing time: time seems to pass and lapse in our minds faster when there's nothing "as" new for us to perceive. Like how, for instance--as I felt since I was a kid--a drive back from a vacation seemed shorter than the drive out--the sights on the way back weren't as fresh or staggering; my mind has less to latch onto, so it lapsed more and remembered less, which made time seem "faster". In the same way, living longer--and also/possibly moreso--living during a stagnant period for culture, politics, and social structures...time can easily bolt along without us witnessing or noticing it much. We in a way become calcified and time flies rapid by comparison.
Matt - I think you're right. The amount of novelty, newness, and/or personal significance in a run of experience plays a role in how much time one subjectively feels has passed. I wonder if anyone has done experiments to test this hypothesis, or to try to quantify the effect. I bet there is a body of work along these lines in academic cognitive psychology journals. Time perception is probably an established field of research. It might have a long history. I wonder just how much work of this kind had been done.
@@anonymoushuman8344 maybe my opinion won’t matter to you guys because I’m young but I think constant learning slow down the perception of time passing. I always feel like days are forever and I think it’s my sense of curiosity and constant reading.
Terri - I think you're right. Time often does seem to pass more slowly when the mind is actively learning and engaging new things. On the other hand, it seems to me there is something to the adage that "time flies when you're having fun," and learning can of course be enjoyable. And what about the experience of boredom, in which time can seem to pass slowly because of a lack of things that engage our interest? I don't know how this all fits together, but I enjoy thinking about it and feel that it can be understood. I think exchanges between people from different age groups in spaces like this are good and important. People can learn from each other regardless of age.
Though this lecture is from 2014, watching it in 2021 feels like its something published only yesterday. For me, that is evidence enough of the cultural malaise.
RIP to a real one. Nobody is doing analysis like this anymore and it's sorely-needed.
The future is better protected than the past. -Chris Marker, La Jetée
I dunno. When it comes to music, a big part of rapid changes in sound was due to technology. Nowadays we can basically get any sound or effect we could possibly want from any computer. The overall sea of sonic possibilities will continue to expand, but not nearly as fast as it did before.
This alone doesn’t completely negate the ideas of the lecture, obviously, but it’s worth considering the factors of the future slowing down other than culture
Quite. The elephant in the room is music technology. Electronic instruments were invented then underwent rapid iterative changes for several decades, it's really not surprising that such a thing would reach its natural limits before receding into a fixed cultural position. Remember that an electric guitar was still a niche commodity even in the 1970s, now we could all have one arrive on our doorsteps tomorrow and everyone's already had a go on one anyway.
What Fisher failed to address here is just how relatively peculiar the 20th century was in cultural production terms. The vast majority of humanity lived and died without detecting any significant changes in music, architecture etc. Feudal subjects probably weren't complaining that nobody was trying to invent punk yet.
Post-war liberal subjects of the 20th century existed at the intersection of the greatest ever freedom for workers/serfs, rapid advances in music technology, and popular music as the dominant cultural force. People like Fisher made 20th century musical modes their life then constructed elaborate philosophies to explain something which is ultimately quite simple: technology and culture can't progress at the same rate, on the same track, forever. Ironically, it's a rather capitalist way to conceive of art i.e. it must always be progressing and expanding or it has little value. It's typical of post-war optimism in the West (thanks Keynes!) but profoundly ahistorical and untethered. People didn't conceive of pre-modern folk art in this way, there was no urgency for the songs and poems to suddenly sound radically different from one year to the next. Capitalist Realism, innit?
@@cal9784overall I agree, but I think you’re mistaken in conflating the expectation for an ever-evolving culture with capitalistic tendencies. Capital is discrete and has a very real limit, but for culture to “evolve”, it doesn’t have to grow into anything or use resources; it’s just a new paradigm or re-structuring of frameworks. Animals have no end to their evolution, neither can we expect culture to
I was a kid when he died, I just read his book capitalism realism, I pictured his voice to be much deeper, its my first time hearing him
It's *Capitalist Realism
nitpick
@TTFPouyii ? i dont. get it
How about 1000 years ago, when music rarely changed every hundred years....
That’s a good point. I wonder when exactly it started to become such that you could distinguish music even just by the decade let alone the century
1000 there was no industry. But the real change was the music notation system.
Maybe we cannot accurately find out if there were major, minor or no changes before we were able to record music since we only have what has survived on paper from those past eras
What we simply call music is a few very different things. Recorded music or performed music, professional music or amateur etc. 1000 years ago the average person didn’t listen to music like we do now, it was a totally different cultural landscape. I do agree though that Fisher seems to only care about the era that he was born into and not think outside of it.
Brilliant, true, and sad.
Geez, in 2014, if that's when this talk happened, then Fisher is only saying what would be undeniable in 6 years - that the "future has disappeared." 2020, the Year of Mass Blindness.
A shining beacon. Pure intellect. We are wandering around fields of inhumanity hailed as achievements of humankind.
It's a beautifully intuitive idea. Future has disappeared because reality has become cyclical. This is clearly reflected in the way of economical structures. By means of eternal inflation, the capitalistic machinery will never come to an end. Reality becomes a snapshot of the same scene that has been seen before except it "feels" different. The young, the middle-aged, the elderly lead the same lives as they lead decades ago. And somehow we still believe that things have changed. The future is clearly suppressed.
The culture is relentlessly boring now and the internet as site or enabler of new creativity has been a massive disappointment, probably because it's mainly just a speeded up communication and purchasing tool, not really a medium, in the same way that hardly anyone made art using the telephone or the credit card.
Part of the problem is that the 20th century was just such an explosion of new artistic ideas that they dried up the well. Rock 'n' roll and dance music have played out a series of variations. They're simply not new anymore and have few ways left of being new. In avant garde music and art, where do you go after minimalism, conceptualism and electronic media? In practice, sadly, it seems you go to one hell of a lot of pastiche. For those of us who grew up in eras of youth rebellion, it's kind of weird to see young artists actually aping the productions of their parents' generations in punk or electronica or conceptual art.
But all this old artistic newness ran in parallel and hand in hand with the sense of epic societal change. A friend of mine is a writer and comic artist who was active in the 70s and he says his generation thought anything was possible. Art was thought to be part of the revolution, the new way or the explosion of new ways. We have lost that motivating sense of purpose and meaning for our art. It's all just entertainment and you're either successful financially at it or not but can't hope for more than that or anything outside it. It's now clearly revealed as just part of the capitalist status quo.
John Moseley If you don’t think their is any artistic cultural innovation just listen to hip hop. Mark sounds like an old man here, thinking that rock n roll is the tip of the spear
He liked Drake.
@@cypherpillar9009 Hip hop has not been innovative since the early 2000s at the latest. The trap sound has been around since the 90s. The most "radical" edge of hip hop today simply merges hip hop with other genres, but hip hop has indeed succumbed to the same problems of the rest of music.
The last great innovation of american music was footwork, but that's been around since the 90s.
debt grips listen to Danny Brown if you want just one example of undiluted hip hop that is innovative
@@cypherpillar9009 Out of curiousity, what part of Danny Brown's music do you consider innovative? He's good, but there's not particularly new or innovative about his work. He adds electronic influences, his samples are interesting, but there's nothing innovative about either of those things at all in hip hop.
19:45 -19:53 is spot on. A thing i try to tell people is that a big difference between now and the 20th C. is that now, because 99% of music is available on demand and practically free (at the moment); it's often taken for granted. That cultural artifact which has no "price" can easily be seen as having no "worth", in terms of subjective or objective value. It's discouraging, if you're the one working to make that artifact.
Thank god we have these recordings.
One thing’s certain the analog world has been relegated to novelty and Gen X are the last generation to experience it as mundane reality, this undoubtedly colors our view of the future.
Really interesting lecture. I often think when watching old Top Of The Pops repeats how totally different 1985 is to say 1979 yet between 2000 and 2006 there wasn't much difference musically or stylistically. I think the effect of the Cold War is another factor in explaining why our arts and culture in the west at that time had such a fantastic forward momentum. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a huge effect on Western music and culture as I believe that from the 1950s to at least the 1980s during the cold war there was a lot of funding put into the arts, and a lot of space created for the arts, as there was a desire to show authoritarian societies (especially younger people in those societies) the freedoms enjoyed by younger generations in the west. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and as the grip of Neoliberalism and monetrism really tightened on western countries this desire seemed to wane.
Necro-futurism. The electric vampire.
Here it is not far from the idea that the existence of the Soviet Union ensured liberal democracy, scientific and technological progress and cultural development of capitalist countries in competition with it
It's the McDonaldsization of art and culture...
No one loved Jungle music more than Mark Fisher.
I really didn't expect him to have such a high-pitched voice
Yes, Mark Fisher's observations are indeed compelling! But believe it or not, there was a professor of music at U of Chicago who was somehow able to see, on the horizon, the imminent end-of-cultural-time, from the vantage point of 1967; see Music, The Arts, and Ideas by Leonard Meyer (1967, with 1994 Postlude). (The internet then was only 'gasoline' thrown on the fire that Meyer had already identified.) In the 1970s and 1980s, Stanislaw Lem likewise described an Eternal Present in which we would soon be trapped, and which he characterized as an 'ocean of trash' where 'your pearl will not be found'; see A Perfect Vacuum (1999[1971], p. 85) and One Human Minute (1986) by Lem. Both Meyer and Lem are in turn referenced in this connection in The Chemistry Redemption (2010) by Conal Boyce, who speaks of 'the end of the art-historical time-line' in a way that resonates strongly with Mark Fisher.
@Manu Forster, I too was struck by, "The dimension of the future has disappeared. We're trapped in the 20th century… What it means to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on hi-res screens/ distributed by high-speed Internet, actually" (at 3:21).
He would of loved Carti
lately I've seen a couple of these videos predicting "what will music sound like in 2030, 2040... 2100", but it was all just slightly different variations of breakcore. this is also why the 90s futurism seems more futuristic to me than anything we're experiencing today. it seems like we hit the peek of futurism back then and its hard to even imagine anything beyond that. altho it might be a temporary stagnation, perhaps aesthetics such as solarpunk, that go against the exploitative dystopian reality we live in, are the new futurism
Really interesting talk. I'm definitely going to read Mark Fisher.
thanks for the recommendation Chuck Klosterman
"The past was dead, the future was unimaginable."
George Orwell - 1984
@@DaanDaanDaanDaanDaanis a g!mp
the feeling of being adrift in time is something most in the West can relate to, but i think most of the feeling of progress of the 20th century came first from technology changing how we live and how society was organized and then in the latter half in social norms being broken through. we reached a place in the 90s where at least in the most privileged class, one could say or do virtually anything without surprising anyone. all restrictions are off, all markets are open for exploiting.
Maybe I don’t have the best grasp on this concept but I feel like this is even happening with food? For example in any American super market that carries name brand food, the breakfast aisle is half full of cereal that’s supposed to taste like candy or other non-cereal related name brand items. Every food chain eventually runs out of ideas for new items and resorts to selling “item we already have but it’s Cheetos flavored”. Is this lack of innovation the same thing?
it is tough to face the world as it is. we lost a great one with mark. i do wonder what he'd make of the recent acceleration of the cancellation of the future.
This being already 10 years ago and still so current reveals everything of what he (so eloquently) is saying
svaka cast MaMa, imali ste uglednog, pametnog i zanimljivog gosta.
Hmm, after hearing the whole talk - he makes some good points, but I think it's a bit too neat. It is too easy to be pessimistic about the present when one reaches a certain age, and I think that can't be left out of the equation.
It's called a Panopticon. And it's on purpose.
i had mark fischer's thoughts lingering for quite some time and began to really question 'what happened in electronica in the 90s, really? what was this sweet man so enthused about? what might i have missed from not having an opportunity to go back and suss with full inclusivity of genre, etc?'
i had an understanding, some fave artists; though, had not allowed myself to research and hear it first hand. so, i used youtube to create some playlists that would allow me to go back, surround myself in the era, and see how i 'felt' about fischer, the past, the present, and where we might be headed (or not) into the future. those playlists are on my youtube page. maybe they might assist you, as well? idk.
it made me a lot happier. they'll be there forever.
So nervous until he could jump head first into how cool jungle music is
I respect Mark so much as a thinker and academic, and I also think his childlike passion for Jungle Music is incredibly cute and endearing. He brings it up literally every chance he gets.
“We’re no longer bored, but everything is boring”
There is so many questions I'd love to ask Mark if he was still around, I wonder what his thoughts on hyperpop would be- I would love to hear /read him more on music and and culture more. Does anybody know if he has down anything on UK electronica- I know he was around the scene because whenever Burial gets brought up so does Fisher. If anyone could point me in some direction It would be highly appreciated
ua-cam.com/video/ogDs9IUIr0c/v-deo.html
Not quite what you asked for, but here's some electronic music from him (:
My heart breaks that the weight of what he was fighting was too much. My whole academic career is in his honor. No person has ever been so inspiring
It is really nice just to witness intelligent, well informed people talking about ideas. This, the essence of intellectual society, is imperative to the preservation of freedom. Too many people are dumb conformists, too many people are falling victim to the cult of misery. Only the pursuit of our dreams will save humanity.
Wish he was still here
That epic remark of his "the future has been cancelled" can be understood or even applied in so many ways. In terms of electronic music culture, which had a great run for 20 odd years, is now mostly cancelled, run dry, finished. Yet, even Mark Fisher's suicide cancelled his own future...
sounds like your invitation to some fun parties over the past few years suffered the same sad fate
It’s crazy how this just gets exponentially more prescient every year lmao
It's so amazing hearing what for me was only a ever a vague feeling in regards to arts & culture being expanded upon and put to words so well and easily digestible. So glad this made it to my recommended videos. Sorry to hear he has passed.
he committed suicide
oh fisher you were so right now i understand why you didn't wanted to see what is coming at the end of the cancellation of the future
Mark was a brilliant mind, but I do think his position on the evolution of music does kind of overlook the role played by technology (although he briefly touches on it here). Throughout the 80s and 90s many of the major new leaps in electronic music, and the limits of what was sonically imaginable were underpinned by recent advances in synthesis/sampling/digital music production/etc. By the time you got into the early 2000s, the technology was so advanced and the possibilities were so endless that it was now possible to make music that couldn't be dated simply by listening to the textures it employed. We'd also explored such musical extremities that the idea of creating something that (due to its sheer novelty) people wouldn't recognize as music started to become a bit far fetched. Even so, there is still plenty of music that has come out since that *could only* have been made in its own particular period and is not simply regurgitating past glories.
(Also, as a translator/interpreter/former English teacher, I gotta say that for such a smart guy, here he's really struggling to grade his language for a non-native audience.)
thats a very reasonable thesis. got me , for the first time in my stinking life, thinking..
@@_mATTYcruder I think as spatial audio becomes more accessible to bedroom producers and earphone listeners, that could finally open up some pretty novel musical possibilities. Will anyone capitalize on that with something really interesting beyond "The Beatles' back-catalogue, on Apple music, remastered in 360° sound"?
Real music has gone underground. The censorship and easy digestibility has stagnated mainstream music
has this not always been the case
I disagree. I think "underground" music is as, if not *more*, affected by what Fisher talks about.
@@liamconlon4375 an expression that reveals the deeper crisis of our predicament. The seeming impossibility of novelty, in music and elsewhere, generates a desperate imperative for novelty, only the same old techniques of subversion are availed of by would-be innovators. Is it possible that the issue is a matter of technological stagnation? Perhaps we've exhausted the sonic potential of certain instruments - the electric guitar and piano, for instance? Or form? Does the conventional structure of what we consider a song only allow for a certain number of moves? Could we even develop an appetite nowadays for something genuinely novel, something we could not presently conceive of?
@@brockjohnson936 I've wondered that myself. As a guitar player I often feel stuck in certain modes of expression, and when I experiment with new techniques or tunings, find it mostly unpleasant to my ear. Same with form -- I'm so attuned to the prominent 20th century forms from pop, rock, and dance that any deviation from it sounds... idk, messy?
I'm not sure the problem is strictly technological though. I mean, electronic music is as stuck as any other genre working with conventional instruments. I think the problem is at a deeper conceptual level.
I think, somehow, we need to find new ways of musical expression that *build on* or develop the musical ideas of the 20th century. But no one, even Mark Fisher, seems to know how to do that!
@@liamconlon4375 This is why punk (and NY's No Wave for example) are important. When you don't really know how to play and can't read music, your are unfettered from the "right way" to perform. We've seen in it electronic music (Mark Fisher points out Burial as an example) but as you say, many produces stick to the tried and true sound. I think we'll see something new again. Surely, a global pandemic and economic hardship will birth another interesting genre.
Time was music,
Music is money.
Now was the future,
The future is the past.
One of the sure signs of our times is to see it as extraordinary peculiar. How did music in 1656 sound different from 1670? Another sure sign of our time is to make anything more important than it is - especially in culture and subculture.
I'd never heard of this guy until now, but boy is he on the money. And now I found he committed suicide! FFS, what a total waste for all of us. As he wrote: "the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals." And this was before the *other* pandemic, COVID, which seems to have dropped the average sanity on the planet by about 15%. I don't know where this world is heading, but I just want to say to anyone happening to read this: it's ok we are all here in the little lifeboat that is planet Earth. Find your own truth. For me I find it helps to keep a sense of history: this whole amazing roller-coaster ride has been running ever faster since H.Sapiens evolved 300,000 years ago. None of us is going to get out of this alive, so we might as well enjoy the ride. Each of us can look to deal with our own demons. Begin it now, begin it today, even if the human race as a whole seems for now incapable to deal with its own. There are so many beautiful people who have lived or live today, so many wonderful ideas that have been shared. That can be its own distraction, but through this beach-coming I have found fragments that I have shored against my ruins. I won't name any of mine here, because yours will be different, but your answers are there I promise. OK I will name one: read the one page "Desiderata" as an emergency booster shot, to give some peace of mind against the storm inside and out. Start from there.
Mental health needs to be politicised
Good on you mate, nice rave very inspiring, Goodluck to you
beautiful comment
Great writing in that comment
Has the argument been made anywhere that Fisher’s analysis on the macro level really kind of stems from or fundamentally concludes that capital can’t actually create a 21st century because a true 21st century would be a century without capital? The innate logic of capital senses its own death and in the interest of its own preservation extends the height of its socio-cultural contribution (20th century/modernism) for as long as it possibly can?
Endless, endless, endless dialectics.
@chris evans """an idealised past that never really existed"""
Fisher makes a lot of good points. I wasnt convinced at first, but when he made the comparison of the changes between '74 and '94 and then '94 and '14 I can see what he means. There is a definite slow down of innovation in music.
I think South Park sums up this phenomenon with their "member-berries" episode. Everything is recycling old media in place of innovating.
this slow down in music and creativity is bc there is less suppression or repression in today's life, everything is expressed immediately and is not contained inside your psychology or unconscious.
South Park? I can’t get past the infantilism. Something about adults speaking baby talk is like nails on a chalkboard.
RIP Mr. Fisher you would've loved Hyperpop
that's exactly what I was thinking when he talked about jungle. altho hyperpop is just a parody/acceleration of late capitalist music, at least it's something somewhat new and different
This is an absolutely brilliant video that manages effectively explicate and use the best of "postmodern" theory to build on marxist foundations to demonstrate the way we ARE using what has happened to the music we can now barely stand to listen to.
Legend. Adding to that from a 2021 perspective - in between the cracks of the global monoculture chewing past aesthetics and spitting it out as revivals and remixes , there *are* some gems and innovative cultural moments (the soundcloud niche scenes for example). Problem is, i feel like even present culture is a ghost - rarely does the art i encounter on the internet really last in collective memory, nor does it manifest loud enough in physical spaces and communities. Then, how do we map our collective experiences, communicate the subtleties of our perceptions between humans ? This is crazy.
RIP Mr Fisher
yeah i see lots of potential newness online but a big question is how we now drag that newness out of the internet and into materiality in my eyes
Glad you spoke about the soundcloud scene as I always felt it was a rebellion against the monotony and repetition of culture. Im sure you know about spaceghostpurrp and how eccentric he is , I feel he represents the anti-thesis to Fisher ideas and a beam of hope in hip hop culture and music culture overall. When spaceghostpurrp descended to madness the collective consciousness wept
ive watched this a few times but the line towards the beginning about Jameson's thesis being "ubiquitous almost to the point of invisibility" just hit me
wish his dude had lived long enough to listen to SOPHIE
i was searching for this comment. RIP to them both.
the intersection of my interests. god rest.
he could have heard Product!
Even Charli XCX is somewhat showing what pop music could be
She's dead?! She had such inventive music! Why! Why why why? A fall? That's what takes such a visionary? Insane.
Watching this in October, 2021
crazy
Things started flattening out even before 1994, more like 1988. By that point everything that could have been done in terms of music, auto design, clothes, hair styles had already been done, and done better. We've been in a period of "everything's all over with" for over 30 years.
There is a school of thought that, as a rough guide most things,with a few notable exceptions, have been in a hopeless,irrecoverable spiral of decay/decline since around 1979-of course some people may be more pessimistic.
@@eveglead1913 In many ways this is true, including economic mobility for the average American. By 1979 the stagflation we're still living with now (and forever) was already several years in. I still stick with 1985 & '86 as the last good years frankly because of the music. I know that's not really a good reason, but its still valid. Things were brighter and happier overall. Not everything was completely broken, all at once like now either.
@Pro Tengu Anyone else here feel the same way Pro Tengu does on '80s music? Be sure to add your thoughts.
@Pro Tengu nope
@Pro Tengu hi,
no i have not but i have just googled...
can't quite see the connection but i'm willing to learn....just going back to jeff waynes eve of the war,that's good....
Hmmm... In one sense today's music is still using the sounds from 1980s drum samplers, in another the 808 wave frequency sounds perfect so anything substantially different would be the opposite of evolution. I think the mistake, which is natural, is in expecting the same rate of "improvement"/change