Mark Fisher The Slow Cancellation Of The Future

TITLE: Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future CHANNEL: MaMa Zagreb DATE: 2014-05-22 ---TRANSCRIPT--- okay yeah so I’m going to talk today then about um some of the main ideas uh in my new book goost of my life uh which really in some ways runs parallel to or is the other side of the kind of ideas that I deal with in in capitalist realism really um if capitalist realism was about the the complete um takeover of capital of not of culture and economy but also the psyche um then Ghost Of My Life deals with what was thwarted by that the traces of the traces of the outside um the persistences of uh of of exteriority in this in this world completely uh dominated by Capital um but what I’m really what I’m going to do today really is bring you the bad news that you already know um which is uh I’m going to you know talk about music culture and perhaps UK music culture um especially as a symptom of uh temporal uh pathology or a temporal malaise um which can be understood at at least two levels one is a a the level of History itself and the sense of historicity um a newly ubiquitous um sense of the waning of historicity to use a phrase from Frederick Jameson uh you know Jameson’s theorizations of the postmodern which developed in the 80s I think now look increasingly prophetic and you know what was uh what Jameson theorizing in the ’ 80s uh is still a somewhat marginal phenomenon still an ENT phenomenon uh is now ubiquitous to the point of almost the point of invisibility I I would suggest um got to come back to that um what is the bad news you that you already know well that it’s that’s the future has disappeared um the dimension of of oh sorry that I meant to go to the second um the second uh aspect of this temporal m is the experience of time itself uh the phenomenological sense of time uh in everyday life and I think I guess my big thesis the relationship between these two things uh the more that um our everyday life is taken over by the urgencies of what jod Dean calls commun communicative capitalism what Franco baradi B focals Samuel capitalism the more that that these these The rhythms and the disp dispersed attentional economies uh of communic capitalism take over our life uh the more that there is this uh difficulty uh in grasping a sense of the historical moment in which we live um so yeah what sorry so what to come back then so what is the what is the bad news we already know is that the the dimension of the future has disappeared um that in some ways that when marooned we’re trapped in the 20th century still um that what is it to be in a 21st century is to have 2 20th century culture on higher definition screens uh or or you know 20th century culture distributed by high-speed internet actually um so there’s a strange I mean what ought to be a strange sense of repetition of a clotted or blocked time uh a time that’s in many respects slowed down or flattened or gone backwards um where the sense of a a for forward momentum of culture which which isn’t the same as a progress I’m not arguing that what has disappeared as a sense of the Progressive in culture as if somehow um you know ’90s jungle was progressed above Robert Johnson I not arguing that um what I’m arguing is that uh the thing that’s disappeared is a sense of difference or a sense of the specificity uh the sense of culture belonging to a specific moment that is what has disappeared um in the 21st century um so there now a feeling that nothing ever really dies but that’s not good that means that we are um assailed on all sides by kind of zombie forms which persist forever uh by revivals anything can come back um anything anything can come back there’s there’s a kind of what you we might say an excessive tolerance for um the archaic but the but part of the problem is um we in since that the uh the sense of historicity has waned has declined it’s difficult to characterize anything as archaic anymore what does it mean to say something archaic in a situation when practically every feels old um the phrase that captured this for me and which I used at the start of uh ghost of my life from Franco baradi is the slow cancellation of the future the slow cancellation of the future I think which captures um not only that sense of termination but the gradual nature of it of course it’s not that the the future in culture disappears overnight um you know it it uh it Withers it drains away um but it’s at least in terms of music culture and in the UK context I think I think we can we can say that this um this this waning this disappearance this cancellation of the future started to become evident about a decade ago uh and has uh intensified since then and I think in that time [Music] uh our expectations of Music um which I’m treating as as I say symptomatic uh symptomatic and as the most obvious example of this but it’s not as if this only applies to music um our expectations have declined uh and this uh flatting out of time uh has become more naturalized uh I don’t I don’t think we any more EXP expect music to sound like a radical break from the past we expect music now and culture more broadly to be a um you know quite subtle if it’s different it’ll be a a subtle remodulation a subtle reconfiguration that is available you know that is available and understandable accessible uh only to initiates an officient nardos largely uh it won’t be some gross Sensational shift which uh is is is is readily apparent to to anybody um for baradi the slow cancellation of the future uh clearly is not just a cultural thing it’s also a political thing and of course the the the the sense of The Disappearance of political future the sense of a uh a future which um would be radically different in political terms from today is is is also part of this um but it’s also about um The Disappearance then of uh a a certain linear sense of time I think a certain Narrative of time um with uh where you know time is marked in the same way that space is marked there’s a kind of time marks in the way that there are landmarks um I think this is you know this was how those of us born at a you know in the the same period you know from the late 60s 70s onwards uh you know experienced time as marked by music in certain ways that there was a strong connection between particular periods and and music and it was you know one could periodize music um not only by the year but often by the month um and that’s and the sense of a rapid supersession of styles genres techniques methodologies which went along with that the sense that uh um the sense that uh you know and uh it was really experience of of modernity um uh through popular culture you know a modernity as theorized by someone like Marshall bman has this sense of Perman impermanence has this sense uh that uh you know all the solid melts into air that any particular form uh will uh it’s is temporary evanescent it will be overcome it will be placed it will become obsolete um I I think the way in which we experienced that not now in culture but in terms of Technology you know we exper we the experience of modernity is now in in terms of of smartphones or iPhones that’s where we have the sense of permanent obsolesence uh in terms of culture we have the almost opposite now nothing is there there’s no criteria for obsolescence in culture uh there’s there’s uh as I said before an accommodation towards the um what would previously will be characterized as as as the archaic um but you know part of the problem is there’s no uh effective sense of the Contemporary by which one could you know to which one could compare the the archaic now and that you that’s as I said I think been in place for about a decade so one of the phrases I use is there there are non- times as well as non-places Marco J’s theory of the non-place as this you know the space of circulation of late capitalism which are effectively IND distinguishable one from another um you know airports retail Parks etc etc I think um years time has become like the non-place uh that you know what is what was the sound of 2005 what is the sound of 2008 uh these These Years seem to go seem to fade into one another now uh if I ask you what a sound of 1975 was even if you weren’t alive you probably got you probably got a sense of what it is actually um but and I think what’s characteristic of the 21st century increasingly especially since around 2003 is is that disappearance of that sense of um uh of specificity of cultural time um and you know one of the the lack of distinguishing marks that is to say of a particular period and a sense of the futuristic now belongs to the Past um it has not been updated since the uh since the ’90s really you know uh in the ’90s with um you know genres like jungle you you felt radically unprecedented um they felt like um there’s nothing you could you you’d heard before nor could you have heard it before and there was a feeling that know the future rushing in towards us and we um uh being caught up in it I I think that’s almost entirely gone now the the you know the futuristic when we use the word futuristic with it’s almost the same as the word gothic it it refers to an already existing and established set of gen generic protocols it’s like a font like Gothic font futuristic means it sounds a bit like craft work or something like that it’s not actually futuristic it doesn’t refer to an actual future or indeed a virtual future that is impinging on the present it refers to a um set of ass all the existing associations um which uh you know are now been internalized the way to establish a lot of what I’m saying I think is um is a simple kind of time travel experiment which is if you imagine beaming back anything any music produced in the 21st century into 1994 um I picked 1994 deliberately because it’s 20 years ago and it’s hard for some of us to accept the 1994 20 years ago but if if beaming it back to 1994 what would happen if people heard that music in 1994 um would they go my God this is this is inexplicable I’ve never heard anything like this this isn’t even music um I don’t think anyone’s going to do that I don’t think anyone would do that actually I think the the the reverse will be the case if you beam back music from 2014 to 1994 people are going to say you serious this has coming from 20 years in the future this this doesn’t sound that different from what we’ve got today um and if we and I think that’s of you know thinking of that 20e period uh illustrates the the kind of slowing down a flattening of time that I’m that I’m referring to because if you think back of 1994 to 1974 the vast Sonic worlds that had that had been born and died in that period the enormous kind of series of mutations that had occurred between 74 and 94 or again between 54 and and 74 the the speed the rapidity the the um the the efflorescence of of of different sounds different Sensations um that emerged in that period since 1994 I don’t think you know I think that that’s flattened out it’s not that nothing at all has happened but I I think it’s hard to make the the case that um almost anything that that that has been produced in it 20 years subsequently was sonically unimaginable in 1994 I think um it’s you know it’s a whole series of Fairly logical extra rations of um of propositions of of of of methodologies that were already in place and part of that means then The Disappearance of of retro I think or The Disappearance of of the concept of retro in the very um in the very universalization of retro um I mean there’s always been as long as there been popular music there’s always been retro Dimension to popular music that’s there’s nothing new about that um I think what is new about the the current moment then is really that the there’s no the the the failure of any alternative to what would have previously been considered retro now we can ask the question retro compared to what what is not retro now I think that just that really I guess follows from what I’ve been arguing so far far um I guess this became apparent to me in the mid 2000s um which I refused to call the nautis although in many ways there a decade which deserves such a horrible name but um was you know was when when I was walking through um I was walking through a Sho in Mar and I heard the Amy win housee cover of um uh a Valerie um by the Indie plots the zutons um and when I first heard it a casual listen I thought it I genuinely thought that this was a a 60s record you know I thought that so I reversed the temporality in my mind what I what I you know I thought that the zoons was a cover of this 60s song you know it’s a production by Mark Ronson Mark Ronson um specializes in those kind of um refurbished sound of the 60s of course if you listen to it closely you know you realized that it’s not actually it’s not 60 sold it couldn’t be nevertheless um that uh that initial response sort of indicates this kind of flattening of of of of cultural time that has occurred so it’s something which had come out um 40 years later uh could sound like you know that could sound sufficiently like something from that earlier period um similar thing happened when I first heard the Arctic Monkeys who have subsequently become even more boring than they were when they started off which is which is some achievement but you know when I first heard the Arctic Monkeys I saw the it’s actually the video for that track you know bet you looks good on the dance floor that when I first saw that I actually did believe that it had come from 1980 um that uh it was some Post Punk group that I hadn’t actually heard um at the time but had somehow been rediscovered and almost everything about the way the video look the way it was shot the clothes they were wearing and of course the music itself um conspired in that kind of conspired to construct that appearance that simulation um and again I think if we if we if we if we actually imag imagine it being played in 1980 that record no problem it could it could it could very well have existed then there’s um um there’s nothing to prevent it being absorbed into actual 1980 um and I I guess the reason I mentioned these things is that for me that that these should obviously been classified as retro these are OB something which s sounds like it could have come out 30 years ago uh or 40 years ago ought to be classified as retro yet they weren they were they were they were CED to us as if they were as as if they were you know part of contemporary music but what is contemporary music then if they if it can accomodate music which um it’s not influenced by the past but which sounds like it really could have come from a you know a historical moment of long ago long ago I mean 1980 in you know in in um 2005 2006 that ought to have been a very very long time ago um I think part of the reason for this is that uh we can see the 21st century in many ways as a disaster for musicians actually that um a lot of the developments uh of the key developments in kind of music culture of the 21st century are not have not been good for musicians ultimately the um the key technological shifts you could say uh to do with consumption and distribution of Music rather than production of Music um now it’s not like again it’s not that 20th century was a an ideal situation for musicians it’s not that you know the days of record companies um advances Etc was uh was a houseum period but in retrospect it it’s looking better and better actually than now um because paradoxically in some ways big Recco companies um you know insulated some musicians from Market pressure actually they gave them um you know the fact that they were record company advances that they could make money from recorded music the fact that um recorded music was a commodity that could actually um yield remuneration um you know this this gave this gave musicians some autonomy and autonomy I think which they increasingly lack in in the current moment um I mean part of the problem is uh we could say that um a lot of cultural production has been effectively decommodified or um has become a commodity effectively priced at zero whereas uh cultural producers uh the things that cultural producers rely on have been hyper commodified you could say you know they still need gas electricity and housing um just which I return to perhaps the housing is perhaps the principal thing in in a city like London which you can explain um this this this sense of of Malay um but I I think the other dimension of this um in relation to technology is that this new technology doesn’t yield Sensations you could say um in the way that previous forms of technology were music culture um music culture you know when you’ve got um a Wawa pedal whatever you could you could obviously hear that you could when you had Samplers you could hear the effects of Samplers when you had synthesizers you one could hear them um 21st century uh as I say music uh technology has certainly mutated music culture but it hasn’t mutated it in the level of what you what one is actually hearing you can’t really hear this communicative culture um it just facilitates um the distribution the cir the circulation of Music it doesn’t change the actual sound of what is produced um so developing this kind of thought then about why this has happened um why we’re in this kind of uh temporal Mala uh why in particular it’s kind of music culture that uh that exemplifies this um the first and obvious explanation then will be the emergence of the internet and that’s you know that that kind of neatly coincides I think with um the time I’m suggesting when when the future definitively disappeared uh in round about a decade ago you know when the the internet became ubiquitous of course the internet was there before but the the uh the domination of of Our Lives by the internet really only started a decade ago and and this is essentially the argument of Simon Reynolds in in retromania um and for Simon the key thing is the inter what the internet provides is oppressive weight of the past the you know the accessibility since the uh with the with the weight of the past on a uh so easily available uh to us um this makes it harder for for for the new to emerge I think that’s partially true that’s partially true but it’s not it’s not enough to explain everything um another I remark of Simons I think is is perhaps more more telling which is uh where he says that what’s happened in the last few years is that everyday life has sped up but culture slowed down um and it’s this I think it’s this dimension of speeding up that um speeding up and here’s where we come to uh what I said this the outset this this second dimension of this temporal pathology which is you know the the experience of time and everyday life um the phenomenology of time um you know it’s this uh it it for me and this is not so much just the internet but I think cyberspace which is different uh it’s really in the last only the last few years with smartphones that we’re were inside cyberspace you could say uh you know in until smartphones we went to the internet which we accessed through computers that already seems like a gentile age of the uh Jane Austin World a lot far distant from us now um as soon as you know the I think smartphones are not shouldn’t be thought of as objects which we have but as portals into cyberspace which mean that we are that when we carry them around we’re always inside cyberspace and we uh which induces whole set of habituated reflex reflexes um which we have to make a you know deliberate effort to step outside of um but again that we can’t we can’t just see this um this uh emergence of cyberspace uh the ubiquity of cyberspace uh on its own we have to see in the context of um neoliberalization uh and the combination of NE liberalization and post foris like capitalist realism really um and so what I’d rather talk about rather than cyberspace is capital cyberspace I think what we’re inside is capital cyers space um and this you this then has coincided in a country like the UK with the final eclipse of um of social democracy and with it I mean what what does that mean it means um the end of indirect funding I think um for something like music culture uh you know a lot of the uh major developments of music culture in the UK weren’t directly funded by the state it’s hard to think of well there are some examples actually that that um but in terms of uh you know popular music there there was no there wasn’t it wasn’t direct funding by the state that made it possible but it certainly but indirect funding was certainly uh a key factor the example of direct funding by the state would be things like BBC radiophonic Workshop Etc which um where you know they were a part of a kind of Public Service public um service broadcasting remit um but of indirect funding means the Machinery of social democracy itself would mean um things like like you know student grants um unemployment benefit um housing benefit social housing and you know I said earlier probably if you’re looking at a city like London as a as a as a particularly powerful case study here um the situation with housing is probably sufficient in itself to explain almost everything I’ve talked about so far the fact that you know it’s so expensive to live in the city um deprives deprives the culture of energy I think deprives the culture of an unstressed or unpressured energy um that you know the the city is exhausted on lots of levels um you know on a fairly literal level but then as a consequence of that exhaustion as a consequence of that U Perpetual kind of business busyness um that um inescapability of uh the ubiquity of urgencies um something which you know is intensified via the cyers spatial environment I think that we again uh we can look back to the G period gab the 60s the spectacle again it seems like some Gentile period you had to put put TV on then or um you know see an advertising billboard in order to be uh commanded or have your nervous system assailed by um the urgencies of capitalism now we now we carry them we carry them around at all times with us um and you know it’s important to remember you know and Del describes communication communication is a command you know this is when when we open up we look at our smartphones essentially being commanded and this is a a weight on our nervous system that wasn’t previously there I think we’re facing these um uh hundreds of commands every day uh which we may well ignore them of obviously we have to ignore them we can’t possibly follow them all um nevertheless the strain on our nervous systems it you know must be telling at some level um but to come back to then to this uh social democracy and indirect funding for culture I mean I think one one particularly important example of this in the UK will be art schools um the role of art schools in um lot of the major develops of Music certainly from the Beatles The Who up to um Post Punk in a the art school was a major institution there again it wasn’t teaching this stuff directly uh it wasn’t teaching people to be in groups and make music it wasn’t about that um but the the the institution um facilitated us that it and which was had a particular kind of class Dimension to it really art schools in in that period were zones where you know working class could go and there was an encounter between um the working class and the kind of established High culture avangard or experimental um experimental art scene and you know that culture was that encounter was highly productive for um for for uh for music culture for for popular music culture uh and really the with the rise of neoliberalism we’ve seen the dismantling of that of that culture and its conditions really the reimon of art schools uh I guess is what I’m talking about there um um you know I guess what you know what would once have happened was you know if you were workingclass kid and you said to your parents I’ve going to Art School they’ say no you’re not you’re not wasting your time doing that could do something useful uh but uh you you know the kid the student had a full Grant had no fees to pay so he said I’m going anyway uh you know with the introduction of high fees and increasingly High fees that that’s then that space of autonomy is not there um which with the result that art schools are now once again as I said dominated by the bouri uh in the UK and you know I think result of what I’m talking about or uh one another time of what I’m talking about is the the stra restratification of culture really um one of the things I’m interested in the why I think music culture was significant in in the period you know from the the especially from the early 60s up to the end of the ’90s um was as a space for what I would call popular modernism and with you know that this Art School encounter as a kind of engine of that where you know experimental technique um methodologies preoccupations um were disseminated extended um and furthered um and popularized you know via VIA music I think that’s why that’s part of the reason that music was important um because music wasn’t music wasn’t just music music was a um a threshold a portal into a whole other you know set of cultural resources really um and that um that circuit has closed down that possibility of popular modernism has closed down um and instead we have a return really to a kind of Kit High culture which is uh it’s kit in the sense that it’s it’s still there it persists um but it’s no longer capable of um of generating uh novelty um of producing the new and a return to a kind of of lumpin mass culture um and you know that space where the these two Fields were uh were disarticulated and no no longer exist in any significant way um you know so with the with the with the decline of the def final decline of final tax on on social democracy and um you know it’s bad enough under new labor in the UK but uh you know in the UK we fell into the uh fell into the illusion of thinking nothing can be worse than new labor until we had the uh old conservatives come back and we found yeah something can be worse than new labor and what’s happened with the the coalition government since 2010 is uh the um the the picking off almost systematic picking off of of of of the last remaining elements of um of social democracy that the the uh you know tax on social housing tax on squatting as well as squatting um the possibility of squatting in a state like London was very important to something like Punk it wouldn’t it wouldn’t have been possible POS for for Punk is unimaginable in London today because of the housing situation really um so I think the result of all this then is this embattled sense of time that uh the everyday level the key thing was you know when I think the key thing of something like art school um experiment at that time was that you know that people were there’s a space in the culture where people were freed up from the pressures of work where they could pursue uh projects um where they were going to lead but where the where their imminent logic um LED them not um which which was which was radically open um you know those those those kind of spaces in culture those those those those times um that kind of SpaceTime has radically atrii now you know the experience of what what is to be a student in the UK is to be you know as as elsewhere massively indebted um and you know often working lots of jobs working more than one job so that you know that’s effectively closed out then this space of freedom from work and freedom from the the the immediate pressured time um I think what this also meant is um the end of boredom I think it’s perhaps significant like the um uh we might look up back upon boredom as somewhat utopian proposition now in in many ways that the dialectics of boredom coming out the situationist and going into punk you know what are the politics of boredom the idea of boredom as a kind of existential challenge the boredom presents us with the blankness of death the the the the the ne necessity for us to actually do something it’s a kind of existential injunction um that that’s that’s been eliminated now uh that’s boredom boredom 1.0 no longer exists um uh I’d say we’re now in a period My slogan for this would be no one is Bored everything is boring that um why there’s no what do I mean by that well no one is bored because we’re all inundated by micro stimuli and which seamless micro stimuli so the point of a bus stop where you previously would have been bored where uh now uh what the first thing we do we reach for our phones in order to cover over that the kind of Terror of boredom it doesn’t really get rid of that doesn’t that gets rid of our experience of boredom but it doesn’t stop things being boring um you know I think the particular lure of um of a lot of 21st century culture is this mixture of curiosity and boredom at the same time we’re sort of bored even as we’re curious about things actually is that that kind of engine of um you know as we as we’re kind of in sically drifting through social media uh um at night we’re kind of with some level we’re bored even while we’re kind of curious um but since there’s since there’s no uh reprieve from the the the urgencies of cyberspace that’s what I mean by no one is Bored we we don’t have the freedom to be bored anymore because on another level we’re we’re tethered in we’re kind of um we’re fascinated even as we are bored and we’re distracted from from our own boredom from We’re distracted from the boring nature of things by the fact that we’re always kind of we’re subject to these kind of uh idiotic compulsion and um again I think that this the a lot of beos work on this it’s very important inundation of the nervous system by stimuli um the uh producing this Insomniac State um of uh where where it’s no longer possible to dream anymore and actually a a quite an interesting post on the the plan C website from this anonymous group called The Institute of precarious Consciousness or something like that where they argue we’ve really shifted from an age of of of boredom you know uh to an Age of Anxiety that with fordism the you know the the the previous regime dominant regime in capitalism presented the problem of boredom um you know you’re in a factory for 40 years that’s boring you don’t want to do it um capitalism solved that problem it solved it in a way that always solves everything by via kind of the uh fairy tale geny solution which is okay you don’t want to be bored and make sure you’re not bored you’ll be anxious forever and this this the kind of um that that’s uh that you know that’s this sense of kind of universal anxiety um I think is another thing which prevents us from um from experiencing boredom anymore which doesn’t stop culture being boring culture is boring but but there’s no one who isn’t preoccupied all the time who can access this boredom um so I think what this this calls for then is um you know a politics of of time and um understanding you know these different quantitative experiences of time and how they um and how you know this is the attack um on that unpressured unstressed um that time free of urgencies um uh is part of the uh is part of the domination of capitalism over over culture at the moment and what can almost POS this is a metaphysical level struggle there’s you know there’s one there’s a set of forces that want us to be permanently anxious permanently uh have our attention permanently fragmented um permanently dispersed um and that that is definitely winning that is that that’s the that’s that’s the dominant Force at the moment against another kind of uh sense of time another kind of attractor which is you know where towards this um unpressured expansive um more open sense of time which is now kind of radically fugitive I think it’s very very hard to get hold of that uh in in particular in in a city like in a city like London which I think London is a kind of doubling that like everything’s block clotted um Anyway by the fact that everything’s um so difficult overcrowded um expensive um it’s like you know it’s like cyberspace in physical form in lots of ways and then on top of that you’ve got the actual experience of cyberspace and everyone um tethered and transed by their by by their phones as a means to escape it but also to kind of perpetuate it um so you know one of the things that I I sort of posit then in the book then is what what what do what do leave us with in sens in a situation where it seem that nothing new can ever really happen anymore um what what do we do where the future is terminated uh what do we do um the important things to stress here then is not to take um is is not to adopt a too easy too easily nostalgic perspective um where we say well yes everything was great 70s ’ 80s 90s now things are really bad um although I think you know Nostalgia is easily criticized um when uh the opposite is far less criticized which is you know a credulous certain credulousness about the present actually it seems to me more of a problem than Nostalgia actually uh is the is the and you know given the immense weight of the kind of PR industry branding Etc um and their role in in deliberately producing this waning of historicity I think it can’t be under underestimated um you know they uh they this Force which guess you know the problem with Nostalgia the C in a culpable sense would be that makes us overrate the past but I think that the problem we’ve got is overrating the present in lots of ways and underrating our own dissatisfaction with it which we’re invited to do which we’re pressurized to do in lots of different ways um so what rather than invoking an actually existent past and comparing it with with the present I think it’s I think the the point of from which we can criticize the current moment the point at which it can be found wanting is by the is in terms of the Futures that were projected from the 20th century not the actual existing past you know that it’s the the shocking difference between uh what we thought might have happened um and what what actually has happened which can be revealed by that experiment suggested what we be back something in time um and in the face of that I think we’re almost off but it’s an opposition between a certain kind of politicized Melancholia and uh depression actually it’s not not necessarily not that nice a choice at the moment but I mean okay what I mean by politicized Melancholia politicized Melancholia would be a refusal to adjust to the the present moment refusal to adjust to this to say I can’t accept this fundamentally what I feel when I turn on the radio actually I turn it on I I sort of quite like this you know whatever track it is sort of quite like it but it’s not acceptable you know this uh this uh this I can’t adjust to the fact that this sounds like it could have come up 20 years ago it isn’t just boring rock music now it’s dance music as well whatever that um I you know you can’t adjust to it and uh even if it’s going to carry on forever I think uh I’m gonna refuse to adjust to a uh refuse to adjust to a time when it’s when it’s acceptable for um for things to be so anistic the alternative to that I think is is is a kind of just depression is a kind of naturalized depression where we just accept that um nothing new is ever going to happen but it’s not a problem anymore um and and you know and often the this logic of depression uh takes over where not even people say well you know nothing new is going to happen now so what did anything new ever happen in the past anyway you know it’s kind of overrated things weren’t really that new ever before we start bargaining ourselves down not only about the present but about anything that’s ever happened before so I you know I just this is you know that then that’s part of the overrating of the present actually in C in certain ways is that that those Tendencies um so one of the things I explore in the book then is these um strange of of melancholic maladjustment um as as one strategy for this ref refusal of a present which is not really a present a refusal of the failure of the future uh and you know one of the threads that I try and pull on is this is this longing this yearning for a future in conditions where the future can’t be delivered um and you know and what I guess I think that is that is the authentic articulation in the present is not one can’t by force of will alone create a sense of the future um we have to accept that conditions which allowed a sense of Futurity you know have really been attacked and it’s voluntaristic um action can’t put that right have really been attacked they really radically deteriorated um yet uh you know if we’re not to aede if we’re not to completely submit to this this present where the future has disappeared um you know what remains is is a certain set of longings um yearnings Etc and it’s a kind of fidelity to those yearnings and longings that is one of the things that I track in in in the book really um okay we I’ll leave it there if uh that seems a point good point to end that’s okay okay well thanks [Applause] everybody