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Heck yes Epoch Daddy! You, plastic pills and acid horizons are putting out some of the best content I've found in the last year or so, proud to support.
I LOVE THE VIDEO! (side note gets me thinking if there's a way to make these sorta idea more accessible to people to people who don't know what stuff like neo liberal market fundamentalism means, its sad that this has such a barrier of entry!)
Mark Fisher is my new favorite philosopher, I mean I know of him before. But thank you for this complete introduction to this man who wasclearly before his time, than you for being a door for my future exploration and a being on the road to Meyer endless quest for knowledge and thirst to curiosity.
@@bigfat4172 why? because it would lead to resignation and the feeling that you can't do nothing about it? maybe... But I think it lifts off weight of you.
@L3nny666 yeah basically, as someone with depression that thought isnt particularly comforting personally. I think most peoples depression is circumstantial and there is probably many possible "roots" of depression which requires individual solutions and strategies. Fisher's point is that, among all things that can cause despair, it's obviously incorrect to exclude labor, work, and prevailing ambient ideologies from what could be few of many causes of an individual's depression. Obviously nobody should feel shame or guilt over their depression, or feel it is merely to do with some unique individual failing on their part. But I think people should be supported and empowered to face their own individual situations and know there at least some things that can be done.
I grew up under stranger circumstances, and rarely ever comment on anything, but I really feel this 'death of the future' deeply. I was born in '99. I grew up in rural Mississippi, not ever knowing that touch screens existed until my family moved in 2010. I was enamored by space, watched anything space related that happened to be on TV. I was convinced that it was our future to explore the vast and seemingly endless cosmos. After the move, I got to see the future, I got to see where we are really headed, and disappointment soaked into my soul.
Man i feel that. I used to be excited for space and the future as well, games like Mass Effect for example. I used to dream of being able to go to the moon or mars one day and see the Earth. But as I got older I realised the future isn't going to be space and lasers and robots. It's going to be climate change, financialism, technocracy and inequality. We're going to have to remember that this wet rock is all we have and all we will have for a home for the forseeable future and take care of ourselves.
I'm a fair bit older than you but I too thought the new millenium was about to usher in a kinder future, a better future that would break away from the ever growing technological prison society had built around itself. But as the video stated, we would not be allowed to shape society to work better for humans. Instead we're stuck in a loop as the scumbag ideas of another century are jammed down our throats. The same sick cycles of economic bust that allow more austerity, the increased need to sell yourself into capitalist schemes where everything and everyone is product. Its only gotten worse.
I don't quite agree with this conceptualisation of how we only recycle old types of music and produce nothing new because it isn't profitable enough. To be sure there is a lot of recycling because it seems like safe bets, but this isn't a new phenomenon. In the 60s when there was all this musical Innovation going on, there were still artists catering to more conservative audiences and recycling old themes because this nostalgia was profitable. I see a lot of the "drastic changes" in music, as partially a byproduct of a changing society but also as a result of changes in technology. And these changes in technology are still happening. In IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) there's all these kinds of procedurally generated music styles which are bound by the computing complexity of current technology. There are continuous innovations in how digital files can be bent and altered to either emulate older sounds but also produce radically new ones. In the 70s it was impossible to speed up sound without changing the pitch, in the eighties this slightly changed with sampler, but samplers would have all kinds of digital artifacts that would make it very clear that you changed the sample. Even though it is hated, innovations in pitch correction and pitch alteration have opened up pretty much endless musical oppurtunities. There are also new instruments coming out that change the way we play. I would look up the Roli Seaboard Rise 2. And even thought his point may confirm the idea that capitalism is turning all art into a product: there is a market for people who are dissatisfied with stagnant repetitious and formulaic music/movies/art. Look at the movie "Everything, everywhere, all at once" this is a movie that is both conceptually AND visually incredibly creative. It is not borrowed from the 90s or 80s or 70s... It looks and feels like something completely new. I really like this artist "Floating Points" as well, who is combining avant garde orchestration arrangements with electronic manipulation of sounds to create something that makes me feel things I have never felt before. Even though there is so much formulaic music made and the market seems to be more impatient than ever, which stifles a lot of creativity. This idea of Lost Futures both idealizes older artists as somehow completely original entities even though they were constantly borrowing ideas from older artists and combined them with something new. And it discredits current artists' ability to both create art that reports on the uniqueness of the current time and are able to manipulate completely new technologies to create utterly original works of art. They may be far and few in between and innovation and boundary pushing IS dissuaded by market forces but that does not mean it doesn't exist and isn't attempted by true artists.
Nah, You were dreaming, now your awake, this is just the world, it's always been like this, keep your feet on the ground, Your an animal and so am I, we can be killed so keep your eyes WIDE open
I just want to let you know that you're extremely privileged, coming from a person who lives in Africa and whose father was killed by the president of the country when I was 2
I started reading Fisher in 2017 and had this immediate sense that finally, someone was speaking in a way I could connect with. The vague horror of my adult life had a name, and a cause, and there were people fighting to understand and defeat this terrible condition of the world. After finishing Capitalist Realism, I learned that he had killed himself about a week after I bought the book. It has sort of haunted me since. This man, who felt what I felt and who understood these things so much more broadly than I did, when faced with a zombie culture and a cancelled future, simply decided to bow out. It's hard to imagine facing the world when even those far wiser than you can find no hope. How can we articulate a political subjectivity in an atmosphere of despair?
Wisdom comes in different forms. Someone smart giving up on their own life does not correlate to any other individual person. Genius people do reckless and selfish things every single day, and despair overwrites wisdom, it doesn't underwrite it.
Apathy is the biggest wall, apathy and the problem of choice. Too many choices available and i think the brain/consciousness just gets overloaded, overstimulated with potential pathways with micro-managing pros & cons. What i'm alluding to is we have the internet, we have plenty of forums and digital spaces we can all converge and formulate ideas and express and share etc, potentially to plan a system of reinvigorating each other and creating our own subculture, but it's almost essentially infinite, the choices of where to start, that mixed with the apathy of experiencing a spiritually dead society, we leave our comments on a youtube video then go back to whatever escapism and/or mundane life responsibility and never give it a second thought, basically onto the next consumption. We have been carefully sculpted well oiled consumers, unfortunately.
It's tempting to connect his sucide with his melancholic perspective of the world that you gained through his books. But, those who rid themselves of depression and carry on living have a reason found inside themselves to be happy. No one kills themselves because of a empty, cruel world, they do it because they are empty inside.
The old school brutalism has been replaced with a neoliberal brutalism. Old brutalism was based around the brutal efficiency of the modern state apparatus. The brutal design of state buildings, state housing, state schools, etc was built around efficient public service, but had little aesthetic appeal. That brutalism had a soul though. Ugly blocky apartment buildings, sure, but their housing the poor, and that gives it a moral humanity. The new brutalism is a profit incentivized brutalism. It's the brutal efficiency of the free market in its endless profiteering. It has no soul because it has no goal beyond its own profit. Any aesthetic appeal is build around what is profitable, resulting in bland but inoffensive design. This has infected North American cities and it's a huge part of the murder of the future in the aesthetics of everyday life. No new experiences, perspectives or thoughts can be gained when no challenges are presented in design, when nothing that stands out is allowed because it is too risky.
>ugly dehumanizing cement cells >men regarded as drones >designed for demoralization and depopulation >utterly inefficient in the long run >labor camps good because they house slaves >brutalism had a soul though The absolute state of pseuds
America has adopted the worst kind of greed it possibly could have and is using their hatred of the East as a label to put on you if you disagree. Profit is literally the problem.
@@farzanamughal5933 how anyone can like brutalist architecture though, I find quite puzzling. The shard and the 'gurkin' in contrast, do at least provide some aesthetic scenery which manage to suggest Futurism. The only downside is, these should be being used to actually house people.
I've had this feeling for quite some time. I'm glad I found your channel. Born in 1974 and always felt this excitement about the future as a child/young adult. We had cool art and exploring space to look forward to, so we thought. I was into alternative music/culture before it was commodified in the early 90's. We squandered it all for material consumerism. I'm surrounded by adults chasing the next shiny object. It's disappointing and not the future I imagined as a child.
I find myself coming back to your Mark Fisher videos whenever I need reminding about how the world could be different. Like exceptional art, your descriptive essays alleviate loneliness. Thank you
Ian Curtis is said to have watched Herzog's film Stroszek right before offing himself. That film is one of the best anticapitalist artworks ever made, imo.
Oh Christ, if Curtis topped himself to it, it must be vital. The sad fact that Fisher offed himself should tell you something else, matey! I think Simon Reynolds is a far more readable and relevant writer. Fisher bogs himself down with prolix obscurantism.
"Werner Herzog’s dancing chicken, appearing at the end of his film Stroszek (1977), is probably more infamously known as one of the final, haunting images that Joy Division’s Ian Curtis saw before he committed suicide in 1980. While its appearance is satirical and almost comedic (especially when viewed out of its context), it has darker undertones, acting as a symbol for the bleak nature of our existence. Furthermore, its appearance is a testament to the futility of Bruno S’s impossible quest through America and the harsh realities of his American dream. At the end of the day, we are simply spectacles dancing for money, and our everyday life is reduced to a mindless performance."
I couldn't find the words to explain these feelings, but I've stumbled upon an explanation! Like Fisher, my cultural reference points are marked by being young in the 70's. Being a New Yorker and totally immersed in the music, art and social dynamism of the time. Being in my 60's, I'm overwhelmed by such emotion and nostalgia by just walking streets in Greenwich Village that are familiar, but seem foreign at the same time. All the buildings were no more than five stories, now with neighboring structures that are the wrong scale. I often wonder why I watch period films, American Westerns and B&W costume dramas, almost exclusively. Hearing music from certain bands can overwhelm me with both elation and sadness. Understanding the phenomenon, makes it feel tragic. Thank you for the great work.
Means a ton! But, Weird and the Eerie from Fisher will also make an appearance on this channel! Mark Fisher really resonates with me. So nearly every work of his will have a dedicated video at some point!
Indeed, though they all kind of pull from the same core abstract concept of a socially constructed imaginary prison. But yeah, I'd also add Baudrillard and his conception of hyperreality and Marshall Mcluhan who gets at a similar line of thought with a focus on how the medium itself is an outcome of its function in altering time/space, similar to some of Heidegger's analysis of technology and our totalizing social perspective toward it. So like, maybe a bad example I don't know but I think it demonstrates the point at least lol, the steam engine for example was invented by some dude in the Roman empire, but that technology was seen entirely differently and merely used as a party gimmick for those limited few that had the privilege to experience its functionality, likely because its revolutionary industrial potential was rendered largely irrelevant by the ubiquity of slave labor and other imposed social bondage from the optimates towards their subjects. You're probably already aware of all of this, but if unfamiliar with Baudrillard perchance, I think his piece The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is a pretty great example of how this simulacra/hyperreality pertains to manufacturing consent for contemporary imperialism and highlights that thread of technology's evolution implicitly serving the interests of the ruling class: www.halliejones.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Baudrillard-The-Gulf-War-did-not-Take-Place.pdf Tangentially related and speaking of spectres of Marx, Marx of course I think also gets at this general thread pretty thoroughly with the inherent limitations of reality (both material/ideological of course) underpinned by a particular mode of production, especially in The Fragment of the Machines in the Grundrisse (collection of unpublished notes) as it pertains to the core trajectory of technology in replacing labor (as the outcome of this is inevitably profit), speculating on its eventual replacement of mental labor (which I would argue is basically a computer abstractly), and inevitably if left unaltered also replacing any human function or agency other than keeping the totalizing machine of capitalism going for its own sake. _“Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the… automatic system of machinery… set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”_
to me, society of the spectacle made little sense, it left a general impression of societal shallowness but it was rambling and jumping all over the place, idk
Among cinephiles, the topic of stagnation of innovation in film in has certainly been at the forefront for at least the past decade. Interestingly enough, the theme of tension between art and commerce is central in Birdman, the film that won best picture in 2014, the same year Ghosts of my Life was published. It’s easy to be cynical in a society where highly derivative films like The Avengers and its prolific sequels dominate the box office; but even in this environment, innovation persists. For example, in Nomadland, Chloe Zhang combines Italian neorealist themes with a Malickean aesthetic to produce an entirely unique vision that could very well influence this decade’s directors. Even Birdman itself combines the theatricality of Hitchcock’s Rope with the magical realism popularized by Latin-American literature and their subsequent films to unique effect. Such films are not niche; I point these out specifically because they are the ones garnering enough attention to win Oscars. The same could be argued, perhaps even more strongly, for other mediums like television where recent shows like Breaking Bad have elevated the medium to a level not known in the previous century. I feel compelled to say all this because it’s easy to succumb to the malaise that appears to be omnipresent on the surface-but below that surface is an abundance of artistic novelty that I believe provides us ample reason for optimism.
Not niche? I suggest you look at the box office receipts. Films like Birdman (which I enjoyed, but didn't love - an imaginative retread of Fellini's 8/12) are the kind of movies the Academy reward every now and again because they're about filmmaking - and if the American film industry loves anything, it's giving itself a big pat on the back. Face it, cinema in America is on life support. There have been a few moments in the last few years, but not many. TV, however, has had an extraordinary renaissance (ironically, it's killing cinema). It's now much better than film. It's one medium that Fisher leaves out (to my knowledge) but which can be legitimately described as truly innovative.
@shenanigans3710 film peaked in the late 70s early 80s That doesnt mean film cant be good anymore. Were just back to the majority of the 19th century model where art is low budget passion projects that people ignore, and ends up lost, or the over the top corporate moneymakers. For every 3 adventure travel epic there was 1 zany comedy. For every 30 low budget noire films there was 1 massive showy sing-song production. For every 30 b movies trying to tackle a heavy topic like morality, there was 1 western with john wayne. For every 300 art movies done today about something cerebral or thought provoking, theres another marvel movie. But because depression and learned helplessness and nostalgia and so many other mental blocks people teach themselves and are taught to have, people wont accept that money and popularity come from mass appeal, and that thr subjective art stuff is great when it has its niche. And shouldnt be popularized. Just because we cant be in the era of star wars, godfather, and a bunch of other 70s classics doesnt mean we live in a worse time... thinking that way you should realize there were adults back then who thought star wars was bullshit kiddie crap. Maybe people today are a bit more cynical, and maybe that wont be permanent, but if it is, who the fuck cares?
birdman should’ve been a much bigger and more important part of modern culture at large after it won best picture, it’s one of the most important movies to come out over the last decade in my opinion
@@Robb1977 This video itself talks about themes related to Mark Fisher's books on the inescapability of Capitalism and how there is this repetitive cycle on looking back to the past to market the future. These examples you bring up out of the blue to frame your argument go right back to the quote at the start of the video. The way you present it is very conceited and hateful. This type of mentality is why there's art related to lost futures, hauntology, and depression and what eventually happened to Mark Fisher.
I had some (a few!) similar thoughts to Fisher. But unorganized, un-examined. Now I have help and a lexicon for new territory. Much of his analysis rings true for me. Sorry we lost this good mind & heart......
20:38 oh god this part really got me. made me tear up. such an amazing video dude, content and stylistically. you're so good at what you do. def my favorite one by you so far (though i'm pretty biased, huge mark fisher fan). your channel has quickly became my favorite one on youtube! really appreciate what you do.
As a brit myself im glad you got round to covering an author like mark Fisher. These books truly introduced the wider world to what our nation went through in the post 60s decades. What í have for long noticed is how there are paralells with the US, the decline of the detroit industries at roughly the same time as ours also declined in the UK for example.
I can't explain how much this is touching me right now. For the past several years, i've had this exact thought, that music and culture in general seemed to not know where it wants to be. I had been having the thought that I couldn't place my finger on what defining characteristics art has today. I'd say the last decade of music that felt like it had it's own sound was around 2012 to maybe 2015-2016 or so. It feels like everything has blurred into each other as of late, it's really depressing. It feels unreal to find someone who had figured this out and wrote deeply about it so i can understand it. Feels like a revelation.
You have a gift for making such great videos and synthesize these ideas, I hope they encourage more people to read the source material, you are doing a fantastic job! BTW, yesterday I listened to your conversation with Shaun, loved it.
Engaging with mark fisher whether listen or reading reminds me always of the feelings I had for my first romantical love. Mark speaks and writes compactly, precisely and most importanly in simple language. There is this anxious urgency in his work that he is forced to perform because of the conditions we live under and the limits of the internet age. But theres also this underlying longing for calm and long-winded social interaction and discourse. I think he is one of the brightest small openings in the curtain of the capitalist real. Even if he or his mind doesnt exist anymore I think his work will live for long time to come.
"Fun" fact that might be more "fun" considering how prevalent/accepted/exploited it is now: back in like the 19th century I think, nostalgia was classified as a mental disease branching from what was called like 'melancholia' or something.
it's asinine for me to ascribe the prevalence of 80's stuff today to "nostalgia"... kids listening to the weekend's new album are not nostalgic, this for them is the present, not the past.
@@raine975 I think what’s more important here isn’t that the kids today are listening to “nostalgic” music, but rather that most of the artists of today are making art that tends to call back to the past and repackaging it en masse as our current reality
@@projectpems8304 I think fisher wants to say that people are too busy/consumerist to make new art anymore so everything has to be reused, not that nostalgia is the main phenomenon
"Stain of Place" is how I feel about most of the environments I encounter in the US. The way the buildings, businesses and streets look affects my mood tremendously, and not in a good way 😞
This is certainly something I feel in suburban America. Bland strip malls, really weird and uniform housing sub-divisions everywhere, etc. A total lack of character and soul.
One really interesting artistic movement, Hauntological in its nature is Vaporwave - it seeks, to revive naivety of imagined futures which were commanded to us by comercials and hyper-consumerism of the 90's and early 2000's. Worth checking it out.
@@epochphilosophy But would Mark agree with us that it is really new? I am trying to figure out validity of Mark's thesis by looking is it refutable at all. I am thorn to be honest, maybe 21st century needs different conceptual tools to explain what is going on with art, media, communication politics ...
@@poparasan Capitalism has been around a long time. It doesn't make sense that it would crush creativity only in the last few decades. The real culprit is the Digital Revolution. The enormous access it gives to the culture of the past leaves no time or space for originality to develop.
I didn't know he had died by suicide. That came as a shock. Such a deep-thinking and observant mind...I suppose it comes with the territory. Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, other deep-feeling and deep-thinking individuals who not just sense, but grapple endlessly with some of the unnamed terror that haunts our troubled world.
Had his books in my 'To Read' section for too long.. this video floored me and I'm going to read them immediately. Thank you, just found your channel today x
Thanks for this one guys! I was very glad to find out about Mark Fisher some time ago because he articulated so well how I was experiencing our current state of society and culture. I think his message is a powerful one but I always feared that "Ghosts or my life" relies too heavily on the experiences of European/British sub- and underground cultures to really get the core message across. I'm pleasantly surprised that it does resonate with Americans too. Yes the picture he paints is bleak but knowing that he resonates with so many gives me some hope for the future.
This video has articulated all my thoughts about society but couldn't put it into words. There definitely is no definable music/art/fashion from the last 20 years. You can wear an outfit from 10 years ago and no one will say you're being retro like they would in previous generation. Great video and great channel, thank you for introducing me to Fisher, will definitely look more into his work.
Or that due to shifting importance of digital those definable categories of art have changed. And is your statement even true? I listen to an album like Burial's Untrue and it's very much of its time, jump cut to the bastardization of dubstep by crap US producers. DnB's shift from late 90s to 2010s to now. There's a whole indie sound between 2000-2010 that defines that decade with very little bleed backwards or forwards. From Franz Ferdinand, Larrikin Love, Gossip through to The Libertines. Skinny jeans will eventually become a retro trend. But 10+ years ago, Velour tracksuits, puffy coats (a variation of this is actually just started to come back and considered retro), denim vest... just to name a few. I don't know you but you sound like a friend of mine. With him he was engaged with art, music, film etc during the 90s and then stopped somewhere around 2005. So his points of context are fixed in that period and doesn't see the changes (large shifts and smaller more nuanced changes) in the arts since.
Designers like Iris Van Herpen, and even music genres like Hyperpop completely go against the notions presented by you and this whole video IMO. There are people creating concepts of the future in their art, it just isn't mainstream enough for people who are stuck in the past. I don't say this to talk down to you, but I say this as a person who gets it.
I play guitar. Guitar culture is nothing but a reliving of past cultural glories of yesteryear, in which the larger community of players and enthusiasts alike have no high regard for anything new being done with the instrument. Tosin Abasi of Animals As Leaders has his own instrument manufacturing company (Abasi Concepts), which creates the first attempt I've seen in a long time at a full-on redesign of the instrument so famous for being stuck in the past. Even some of his playing techniques like thumping, his use of dissonance and the way he incorporates abstract percussive vs. consonant melodic sounds is a futuristic way of playing the instrument, as well. There are also a growing number of contemporary artists in the jazz genre, like Tigran Hamasyan and Jacob Collier, for example, who are pushing things forward in the realm of theory usage and rhythm. Esperanza Spalding is also a jazz artist, whose work is certainly not new to the music scene, but who is creating more and more forward-leaning avant-garde styled works as of late with every release. I say all this to say, there is a noticeable over-reliance upon the mainstream to provide the newness of thought and art that people constantly say they want, and then when it exists, they act as if it doesn't all because it isn't popular enough for them. The art is out there. People do care about the future. Maybe every artist creating these works doesn't have the same politic as this video or other philosophers but they do care to create something instead of lamenting about the nostalgia wave slowly eroding our present into the past. Idk. Food for thought, just my onion.
Also, bands like Vein, Reflections, and Code Orange and their use of glitch visual styles in combination with hardcore, slam, and djent elements is very of the future imo. Pretty much, there's a lot of people doing this leaning in towards the future and building tomorrow's aesthetics around that. We are drowning in wave after boring wave of nostalgia, but perhaps we are also witnessing the very, very beginning of the future coming to life.
@@axeslinger94 I mean, this may be a hot take, but hyper pop is simply an extension of the sugary pop music of the early 2000s, and it itself refers back to Y2K as a trend from which it comes from. Obviously, you can’t categorize every hyper pop artist under this description, but you’d have to willingly ignore the amount of artists that rely on Y2K nostalgia for it to “make sense”.
I'm a lifelong musician and currently a musicologist, and last year I traveled to Bali under company of some of the best musicians of the Island, and it was simultaneously the most inspiring and amazing experience ever, and the most depressive experience ever. I grew up in the 90s, the twilight zone where music culture here in the West was riddled with nostalgia for the past, but net yet fully severed by the internet. But I felt that disconnect as long as I can remember. Always that feeling that things weren't lined up, that there was something missing in the way we treat music as society. And in Bali, away from the tourist traps and into the real local music culture, everything is in harmony, every piece of art connects, and art and actual human life perfectly blend into each other. It is the only place where I felt genuinely respected as a musician. Then you come back here to the neoliberal hellscape where there is literally nothing, music is nothing more than background noise, or aesthetic packaging of some kind of product or service, where musicians are not only disrespected, but musicians, and artists in general, are 'hated', a bunch of lazy losers who just want to have fun in life and not 'contribute'. Even amongst musicians there is a general sense of disrespect, a sense of hostile competition. And it is all pretty hopeless, I see no way out of this, it is only going to get worse, music cultures like Bali will succumb to the same thing, and eventually people won't even remember what it is like, nor care about it.
Incredible analysis. Thanks for the work. This eerily makes me think of hunter S. Thompson, his ghost seems to haunt a lot of media and culture as well.
Absolutely. Especially when Thompson wrote about his reflections on 60's counterculture from the perspective of the 70's and how the efforts for a better world was brought to a sudden end.
@@michaelcallaghan1989 yeah isn’t the quote along the lines of “so you could stand on a hill in northern Las Vegas and we where the wave peaked and then rolled back” Hits hard
‘The dimension of the future has disappeared.’ Ok right off the bat i can tell I’m not in the right headspace for this video lol; just from reading the description and a few comments, i know this is a topic that would touch me deeply, but maybe harder than I’m ready for anytime soon. But it’s so important to talk about and I’m glad you posted this regardless. So here’s a humble like and comment for the algorithm
Thanks for a great video! I read Capitalist Realism some ten years ago and it blew my mind. It has stuck with me ever since, I've read it several times. Now, I just ordered Ghosts of my life, looking forward to reading it. This video was a very nice introduction, I think. Thanks!
Thank you for providing new content on Mark Fisher. I've come to disagree with him on a lot of things, including lost futures, but his work remains as relevant as ever to our current condition.
For me a lot of his points are valid in describing the trappings of the societies we live in. However, we do have power as individuals to shape our lives make positive changes in the right direction. Reconnect to our nature and follow a path that’s suited for us. We can’t think our way out of pain we need to feel as we have a body, emotions and must express ourselves. As soon as we connect to things that brings joy and allow us to act with love and purpose this can change a lot in the world.
Excellent video. Mark is, and will be, sadly missed. I liked it when you touched on jungle, and the post-dubstep sounds of Burial and The Caretaker. Personally, I was always fascinated when Fisher mentioned Burial - an artist heavily influenced by dubstep, a genre with an evolutionary arc that encapsulates both hauntology and the subsuming nature of capital. I was a teenager in South London in the late 2000s, which is around the time that the genre emerged, and if any music sounded haunted by the past - it was the dark, ominous and meditative bass of dubstep. It was partly created as a reaction to the champagne and Moschino excesses of garage raves, twisted by the grey, hopeless reality many felt in post Blairite Britain. One of the biggest tracks of the time was literally called Haunted, if I remember correctly, and many DMZ dubstep nights were held at Brixton Mass, which was in an old repurposed church. Anyway, capital eventually did it's thing - and dubstep turned from a transcendental trip through bassweight and Rastafarian spiritualism to day-glo, piss-off-the-parents and highly memeable mid-range noise like that of Skrillex and other brostep producers. Which then, ultimately, had a huge influence on the rise of commercial bass-heavy, wait-for-the-drop EDM that went on top charts all over the world. To the point where the origins of the genre, for most casual fans, were lost to the mists of time. Just my two pence, as someone who grew up in the UK during a lot of the events Fisher talks about in this book.
We need a new cultural language, essentially a breaking down of the miasma of capitalist realism, out of market-based thinking which currently pervades all aspects of human life. All we see today is hauntology: the dead suspended husk of the psyche of the market man.
Fisher argued that "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.
We've become numb and forgotten how to be creative. We are creators capable of everyday original creative thoughts, words and works. There's so much in our culture discouraging us from using our creative freedom because some people have a lot to lose by the present system changing too much.
Forty years of my life make more sense in light of fisher. Its sad that he succumbed to depression, and i also think its sad that we lost david graeber in 2020. But if we are in a sorry state, then i would rather know it fully, as a testament to what is right and true about our lives, or what should be.
Excellent work. I wonder if Fisher (it feels strange to type that) ever tried to talk about Proust in relation to this. I recently realized that while I love most of Proust, there are hundreds of pages of party gossip that remind me of the Kardashians. There's a deeper arc to this. I wonder if he saw it.
Even internet culture has completely died and been taken over by bots, AI generated content and corporate greed. I wonder what he would have made of all this were he still with us
With the development of A.I. art, I really feel this idea of no future for creativity. It makes the sad to see how good it is already and how it can create endless variety.
As an aspiring artist whom uses AI art, I think it's the exact opposite. Never it was so easy to get your ideas onto canvas, without taking a long time performing technique. Closer and closer, we're coming to a point where anyone can project their ideas and imaginations into being, without being shackled by the need to learn a technique. Many artists has this almost Luddist view of art, as if one done by hands and technique is inherently superior because it required effort, but I don't care about what my hands are capable, I never did. I only care about my brain's ideas, and my hands were, to this point, just clumsy subordinates whom I hold no sympathy. Funny how when DAWs were first invented, there were concerned musicians because anyone could use a sampler instead of hiring musicians to play your songs with real instruments. Now tell me, if you listen lots of music, imagine what would be the world without the DAWs? The amount and quantity of niches of music exploded in 21th Century, and at least on this aspect, I disagree a lot with Fischer. Never was so easy to make your own music, so who cares if the trending ones are a pastiche of the recent past?
I'd never heard of Mark Fisher, only heard mention of him by an interview of Asfrin Rattansi on RT. His and your articulation of the socio-economic and political landscape -- I will say from 1973, because that is when so much suddenly changed in the US, as the Vietnam war was wound down. -- this explication of what was going on, represented in a philosophical interpretation or understanding, resonates with me. It portends to make some sense of what was for me a very difficult period of time and life. A new generation begins in 2022, calculated in 15 year increments from 1917, which saw the birth of both Communism and Fascism. I hope it's a historical generation, with a new revelation to displace the Cartesian which we've been laboring under since the 17th century. A methodology for a new revelation was provided by the Spanish Philosopher Ortega y Gasset in his ideas of Historical Reason and Vital Reason. Rachel Carson who lived during the same period, provides content for Vital Reason with the advent of climate crises. Perhaps a new revelation will spring from this confluence of history, life, and the Carsonian Epoch we are already living in.
I find myself luxuriating in the decayed lost futures...they are like snow-globe worlds I shook as an eight-year-old, curled up on an unfashionable brown 1970s couch, in pajamas with the feet attached. Perhaps this whole thing is archaeology? We are investigating regions of the mind that have already been closed off, and enjoying it, sadly, poignantly. Are we really mourning a lost future, or are we (less nobly) enshrining our personal lost futures as "that which should have been," while an actual, living world (because what else can it be, out there?) passes by? I am suspicious of our motives. But I linger, and enjoy.
Lets not forget the other huge musical developments such as hiphop which evolved from the 70's and evolved into the 90s. In the UK and USA we had House, Drum and Bass, as well as garage and grime which were major influences that can define the nineties and early 2000's. Then into early 2010's we had the indie explosion which was fairly unique compared to the similar folk influences of the 60's and of course, dubstep and grime/trap/drill. I think you can listen to these and still define them to a time period, but I do agree in the last 10 years that pop music has swallowed up nearly all these unique areas of music and homogenised it.
@@yoooohooooo Indie-rock as we know it developed mostly in the late 90's and noughties. House came around mostly in the late 80's and had most of it's development through the 90's. Why do you type like a "c u n t" ?
I feel like some of this is the precursor to the "There's no good music these days, nothing's new and nothing's original." Also wish Mark Fisher was alive so I could ask him about Joy Division. His point of reference being Ian Curtis is especially interesting, considering Ian Curtis was a right wing dude by all accounts. His political engagement came specifically from reading quite a bit about fascism. I feel like the band sorta towed that line, at least enough for the public to notice it at one point, and not in the ironic "they're critiquing Fascism" kinda way. Even if he wasn't a fascist though, he was a Conservative dude. Music had a depressing vibe not to necessarily reflect his surroundings, but to reveal some serious misanthropic shit within himself. Ian Curtis' philosophy in art tells me a lot more about the internal workings of Ian Curtis than it does about society.
The funny thing is i love jungle, drum n bass and break beat. Never thought that maybe it my fear coming out in more expressive way than manifesting at work 😅
I enjoyed this video despite its tragic undertones and it's perhaps fitting that I'm writing this comment several months after it's release where the likelihood of it being read is very slim.
As usual, fantastic. Maybe this is naive optimism, but I think we're seeing some kind of slow but steady sea change rising in a conscious awareness of material reality with the recent Israel insanity that seems to cut through the bs that has prior pacified the public and manufactured consent (finally). Or like, the awareness mitigated and prolonged by imperial expansion essentially to ameliorate very basic material comfort through exploitation elsewhere at the peripheries of empire appears to be necessarily deteriorating as capital and finance capital in particular continues to squeeze the working class and even industrial capital (which at least has to make something tangible to continue - a bug not a feature apparently to these finance ghouls lol). But of course this is just a feeling/speculation on my part and it may already be too late in terms of our passing a technological threshold of no return that can effectively enforce the status quo despite any larger awareness/class consciousness emerging. Not to mention this in itself could be illusory as we seem to much prefer to live in a fantasy world that puts our individual projected piety and self-virtue on full display rather than maybe asking ourselves what we owe each other...or something. Anyway, RIP to a real one for sure...might as well throw in the late David Graeber toward that sentiment too, he really illuminated a lot of the functionality of finance capital through Occupy I think, at least for me, most basically that it was incredibly unjust even by its own supposed justifying logic/standards of "rational" free markets, and really the only thing we can do is exactly what you're doing which is live that tragic Cassandra archetype of the greeks or whatever as best we can.
'Socialism or barbarism' - as Rosa Luxemburg used to say. 'Social democracy' never made the break with commodity production and surplus value appropriation, leaving the door wide open for neoliberalism'a long backlash.
I like this video I am a Lefty Marxist and I was born 80 and i feel from the 80's progress to help people with opportunities has stopped and I feel we just work for money . There is no happiness due to low wages and long hours and just pure mass amounts of inequality, something has to change
The Future...Is Tomorrow. (Brazil - Terry Gilliam). "You'll have to wait till yesterday is here." (Joe Pesci/ Tom Waits) What flattened time? My mother was once a fan of "optimistic" science fiction like Star Trek. Toward the end of her life, the future ceased to beckon with exhilarating promise. Its not just pessimism or fear of the future. In a very real if psychological way, while few were paying attention, the future was "closed" like the American frontier. Empires and capitalism - so clearly set to continue on a suicidal path - don't exist discreetly from every other aspect of human experience. Human culture is awash in generalized despair.
And don't look to young people for optimism or exhilarating promise, right? If I were young and the future seemed "closed", I'd be working to open it back up.
Where's my flying car?!!?! Where's my emancipatory techno-future? (I get what he's saying, but Fisher strikes me as too pessimistic. These forces can be resisted. There are infinite futures waiting to be born.)
Even so, this was an excellent (!) video, and I have to thank you for introducing me to a thinker I've heard of but haven't read. I am especially moved/provoked by your discussion of Fisher and trauma, those ugly open secrets that underlie the happy mask of our consumerist existence.
I gotta be honest - I went to Sheperds Bush once and just like Mark, I felt that time had stopped and that there could be no future and it was difficult to see new ideas and things that might make a difference...
When I watch this stuff, I always have this itching question that keeps gnawing at me. And that's... from what I've observed, anyway... ... why are Boomers and Gen X so... accepting of all of this? I feel like Millenials and Gen Z are constantly thrusted with the bullcrap declining of our quality of life in America, and our elders just keep gaslighting us, saying we're not trying hard enough, saying we just need to tweak our cover-letters just the right way this time, saying we need to not be "lazy" or "entitled" children. And yet... when it comes to issues regarding marginalized groups of people, they get SO reactionary. Like, idk, I'm just so bewildered and confused that their reactionary energy isn't often directed towards going "hey, wait a minute, why is everything such shit now"? It's like we live in completely different realities, only, they keep imposing their reality on mine, and calling me an idiot.
They tend to reverse cause and effect. Victim blaming is easier than facing the fact that they've been lied to their entire life. Also, if they have a decent life, they take any implication that it wasn't due to their effort alone as an insult to their precious ego. They tend to have very big egos. The "entitled" part comes off as projection to me. Todays right consists of the most narcissistic shitheaded Karens ever. They constantly shriek about their right to "freedom" (which basically means never having to do anything for the greater good ever) while they bury the future. The baby boomers are the most entitled generation ever. Another thing is technology. They can enjoy the fruits of an era where we have the greatest convenience ever in the history of human civilization. A lot of menial activities take vastly less effort. But because they are past the stage where they themselves were establishing their life, they don't see the drawbacks of it. They don't see how everything being online depersonalizes many things and creates these competitive arms-races that promote dishonesty. Online job applications and online dating clearly make a lot of people miserable... and many would prefer to go back to the old way of face-to-face interaction. Same with social media. A lot of people my age seem to have just ditched it. A lot of things that were supposed to make life more convenient just created a worse feeling of being overwhelmed. Instead of creating more free time as it should, capitalist innovation just created a lot more meaningless work and stress to compensate for tedious tasks being easier.
cause they already got theirs. They probably were able to get careers and homes and raise their families before everything turned to shit and they don't really have to live that deep in this world they created. They also outnumber us, as birthrates have been steadily declining, and medicine has been advancing to the point where we have more and more old people and fewer and fewer young people
As a card carrying member of Generation X, for many of us, our identity was defined by and remains defined by a rejection of the totalizing effect of capital, of a life defined by capital. We employed the DIY approach to art/education/living/friendships just as state funding for the arts and education was seriously drying up. I was born in 1967 and my coming-of-age was defined precisely by a rejection of white supremacy and of capitalism. We could either sell out to the mega-machine or resourcefully try to live by anti-white supremacist and communal ideals on our own. My immediate peer group and many parallel peer groups groups to mine sought out/seek out & created/create art which reflects these values. I am so grateful to have lived long enough to see new musical forms of expression (not within pop culture) as well as literary expression that seek to deal with the destruction of the future that is occurring as a result of the destruction of the living, ecological planet and the destruction of the traditional cultures that occurred/is occurring under colonialism and neocolonialism.
Hi, friends! Have a huge request: I couldn't do any of this without Patreon and your support! These videos take quite a lot of time to make, and these videos all me to pay the bills and bring this type of content to TH-cam! If anyone is kind enough to support, I offer exclusive content, voting on future videos, editing tutorials, etc. Other than the content on this channel, hopefully there is some stuff I can give back that's worth while! Patreon link here: www.patreon.com/epochphilosophy
Heck yes Epoch Daddy! You, plastic pills and acid horizons are putting out some of the best content I've found in the last year or so, proud to support.
@@reverendsteveii So very kind, thanks so much!
I LOVE THE VIDEO! (side note gets me thinking if there's a way to make these sorta idea more accessible to people to people who don't know what stuff like neo liberal market fundamentalism means, its sad that this has such a barrier of entry!)
Mark Fisher is my new favorite philosopher, I mean I know of him before. But thank you for this complete introduction to this man who wasclearly before his time, than you for being a door for my future exploration and a being on the road to Meyer endless quest for knowledge and thirst to curiosity.
I mean I defiantly could have worded hat better, but fuckit.
honestly more people with depression need to hear, that the root of their depression does not lay on an individual level.
Dunno about that
@@bigfat4172 why? because it would lead to resignation and the feeling that you can't do nothing about it? maybe...
But I think it lifts off weight of you.
@L3nny666 yeah basically, as someone with depression that thought isnt particularly comforting personally. I think most peoples depression is circumstantial and there is probably many possible "roots" of depression which requires individual solutions and strategies. Fisher's point is that, among all things that can cause despair, it's obviously incorrect to exclude labor, work, and prevailing ambient ideologies from what could be few of many causes of an individual's depression. Obviously nobody should feel shame or guilt over their depression, or feel it is merely to do with some unique individual failing on their part. But I think people should be supported and empowered to face their own individual situations and know there at least some things that can be done.
Yeah taking a completely hopeless stance seemed to work for Mark Fischer seeing as he's living such a happy fulfilling life these days
@@zachbostwick4736 what are you trying to say here?
I grew up under stranger circumstances, and rarely ever comment on anything, but I really feel this 'death of the future' deeply. I was born in '99. I grew up in rural Mississippi, not ever knowing that touch screens existed until my family moved in 2010. I was enamored by space, watched anything space related that happened to be on TV. I was convinced that it was our future to explore the vast and seemingly endless cosmos. After the move, I got to see the future, I got to see where we are really headed, and disappointment soaked into my soul.
Man i feel that. I used to be excited for space and the future as well, games like Mass Effect for example. I used to dream of being able to go to the moon or mars one day and see the Earth. But as I got older I realised the future isn't going to be space and lasers and robots. It's going to be climate change, financialism, technocracy and inequality. We're going to have to remember that this wet rock is all we have and all we will have for a home for the forseeable future and take care of ourselves.
I'm a fair bit older than you but I too thought the new millenium was about to usher in a kinder future, a better future that would break away from the ever growing technological prison society had built around itself. But as the video stated, we would not be allowed to shape society to work better for humans. Instead we're stuck in a loop as the scumbag ideas of another century are jammed down our throats. The same sick cycles of economic bust that allow more austerity, the increased need to sell yourself into capitalist schemes where everything and everyone is product. Its only gotten worse.
I don't quite agree with this conceptualisation of how we only recycle old types of music and produce nothing new because it isn't profitable enough. To be sure there is a lot of recycling because it seems like safe bets, but this isn't a new phenomenon. In the 60s when there was all this musical Innovation going on, there were still artists catering to more conservative audiences and recycling old themes because this nostalgia was profitable.
I see a lot of the "drastic changes" in music, as partially a byproduct of a changing society but also as a result of changes in technology.
And these changes in technology are still happening. In IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) there's all these kinds of procedurally generated music styles which are bound by the computing complexity of current technology. There are continuous innovations in how digital files can be bent and altered to either emulate older sounds but also produce radically new ones. In the 70s it was impossible to speed up sound without changing the pitch, in the eighties this slightly changed with sampler, but samplers would have all kinds of digital artifacts that would make it very clear that you changed the sample. Even though it is hated, innovations in pitch correction and pitch alteration have opened up pretty much endless musical oppurtunities. There are also new instruments coming out that change the way we play. I would look up the Roli Seaboard Rise 2.
And even thought his point may confirm the idea that capitalism is turning all art into a product: there is a market for people who are dissatisfied with stagnant repetitious and formulaic music/movies/art. Look at the movie "Everything, everywhere, all at once" this is a movie that is both conceptually AND visually incredibly creative. It is not borrowed from the 90s or 80s or 70s... It looks and feels like something completely new.
I really like this artist "Floating Points" as well, who is combining avant garde orchestration arrangements with electronic manipulation of sounds to create something that makes me feel things I have never felt before.
Even though there is so much formulaic music made and the market seems to be more impatient than ever, which stifles a lot of creativity. This idea of Lost Futures both idealizes older artists as somehow completely original entities even though they were constantly borrowing ideas from older artists and combined them with something new. And it discredits current artists' ability to both create art that reports on the uniqueness of the current time and are able to manipulate completely new technologies to create utterly original works of art.
They may be far and few in between and innovation and boundary pushing IS dissuaded by market forces but that does not mean it doesn't exist and isn't attempted by true artists.
Nah,
You were dreaming, now your awake,
this is just the world, it's always been like this,
keep your feet on the ground,
Your an animal and so am I, we can be killed so keep your eyes WIDE open
I just want to let you know that you're extremely privileged, coming from a person who lives in Africa and whose father was killed by the president of the country when I was 2
I started reading Fisher in 2017 and had this immediate sense that finally, someone was speaking in a way I could connect with. The vague horror of my adult life had a name, and a cause, and there were people fighting to understand and defeat this terrible condition of the world.
After finishing Capitalist Realism, I learned that he had killed himself about a week after I bought the book. It has sort of haunted me since. This man, who felt what I felt and who understood these things so much more broadly than I did, when faced with a zombie culture and a cancelled future, simply decided to bow out. It's hard to imagine facing the world when even those far wiser than you can find no hope. How can we articulate a political subjectivity in an atmosphere of despair?
Wisdom comes in different forms. Someone smart giving up on their own life does not correlate to any other individual person. Genius people do reckless and selfish things every single day, and despair overwrites wisdom, it doesn't underwrite it.
I’ve felt the same way. When the trigger finger gets itchy, I reread The Myth of Sisyphus. I suggest it to anyone who gets a touch of the nihilisms.
@@kylezo suicide is neither reckless or selfish all of the time though...
Apathy is the biggest wall, apathy and the problem of choice. Too many choices available and i think the brain/consciousness just gets overloaded, overstimulated with potential pathways with micro-managing pros & cons. What i'm alluding to is we have the internet, we have plenty of forums and digital spaces we can all converge and formulate ideas and express and share etc, potentially to plan a system of reinvigorating each other and creating our own subculture, but it's almost essentially infinite, the choices of where to start, that mixed with the apathy of experiencing a spiritually dead society, we leave our comments on a youtube video then go back to whatever escapism and/or mundane life responsibility and never give it a second thought, basically onto the next consumption. We have been carefully sculpted well oiled consumers, unfortunately.
It's tempting to connect his sucide with his melancholic perspective of the world that you gained through his books. But, those who rid themselves of depression and carry on living have a reason found inside themselves to be happy. No one kills themselves because of a empty, cruel world, they do it because they are empty inside.
i wish i could hug mark so much man. he died before i even knew him but i somehow feel like i lost a family member
How many years was he? How did ge die
@@DJK-cq2uy Mark killed himself, aged 48, in early 2017.
The old school brutalism has been replaced with a neoliberal brutalism. Old brutalism was based around the brutal efficiency of the modern state apparatus. The brutal design of state buildings, state housing, state schools, etc was built around efficient public service, but had little aesthetic appeal. That brutalism had a soul though. Ugly blocky apartment buildings, sure, but their housing the poor, and that gives it a moral humanity. The new brutalism is a profit incentivized brutalism. It's the brutal efficiency of the free market in its endless profiteering. It has no soul because it has no goal beyond its own profit. Any aesthetic appeal is build around what is profitable, resulting in bland but inoffensive design. This has infected North American cities and it's a huge part of the murder of the future in the aesthetics of everyday life. No new experiences, perspectives or thoughts can be gained when no challenges are presented in design, when nothing that stands out is allowed because it is too risky.
>ugly dehumanizing cement cells
>men regarded as drones
>designed for demoralization and depopulation
>utterly inefficient in the long run
>labor camps good because they house slaves
>brutalism had a soul though
The absolute state of pseuds
True. Except I find brutalist concrete architecture to have some aesthetic appeal, a lot of newer buildings I see in London nowadays are just vile.
It's the end of the history
America has adopted the worst kind of greed it possibly could have and is using their hatred of the East as a label to put on you if you disagree. Profit is literally the problem.
@@farzanamughal5933 how anyone can like brutalist architecture though, I find quite puzzling. The shard and the 'gurkin' in contrast, do at least provide some aesthetic scenery which manage to suggest Futurism. The only downside is, these should be being used to actually house people.
I've had this feeling for quite some time. I'm glad I found your channel. Born in 1974 and always felt this excitement about the future as a child/young adult. We had cool art and exploring space to look forward to, so we thought. I was into alternative music/culture before it was commodified in the early 90's. We squandered it all for material consumerism. I'm surrounded by adults chasing the next shiny object. It's disappointing and not the future I imagined as a child.
I feel you….
I find myself coming back to your Mark Fisher videos whenever I need reminding about how the world could be different. Like exceptional art, your descriptive essays alleviate loneliness. Thank you
Ian Curtis is said to have watched Herzog's film Stroszek right before offing himself. That film is one of the best anticapitalist artworks ever made, imo.
Oh Christ, if Curtis topped himself to it, it must be vital. The sad fact that Fisher offed himself should tell you something else, matey!
I think Simon Reynolds is a far more readable and relevant writer. Fisher bogs himself down with prolix obscurantism.
It was the Dancing Chicken that made him do it.
"Werner Herzog’s dancing chicken, appearing at the end of his film Stroszek (1977), is probably more infamously known as one of the final, haunting images that Joy Division’s Ian Curtis saw before he committed suicide in 1980. While its appearance is satirical and almost comedic (especially when viewed out of its context), it has darker undertones, acting as a symbol for the bleak nature of our existence. Furthermore, its appearance is a testament to the futility of Bruno S’s impossible quest through America and the harsh realities of his American dream. At the end of the day, we are simply spectacles dancing for money, and our everyday life is reduced to a mindless performance."
@@michaelg7520 Not a Frank Chicken then? Or a Best-Dressed Chicken?
@@trevorbarre5616 The Dancing Chicken. Bird had some good moves..
I couldn't find the words to explain these feelings, but I've stumbled upon an explanation!
Like Fisher, my cultural reference points are marked by being young in the 70's. Being a New Yorker and totally immersed in the music, art and social dynamism of the time. Being in my 60's, I'm overwhelmed by such emotion and nostalgia by just walking streets in Greenwich Village that are familiar, but seem foreign at the same time. All the buildings were no more than five stories, now with neighboring structures that are the wrong scale.
I often wonder why I watch period films, American Westerns and B&W costume dramas, almost exclusively.
Hearing music from certain bands can overwhelm me with both elation and sadness. Understanding the phenomenon, makes it feel tragic.
Thank you for the great work.
This video was well worth a subscription, of course in the hope of more to come, especially about Mark Fisher
Means a ton! But, Weird and the Eerie from Fisher will also make an appearance on this channel! Mark Fisher really resonates with me. So nearly every work of his will have a dedicated video at some point!
@@epochphilosophy absolutely - acid communism is the way. capitalist realism felt like a revelation
having just reread society of spectacle, Fisher is a lot closer to Debord than Derrida, Deleuze or Zizek.
Indeed, though they all kind of pull from the same core abstract concept of a socially constructed imaginary prison. But yeah, I'd also add Baudrillard and his conception of hyperreality and Marshall Mcluhan who gets at a similar line of thought with a focus on how the medium itself is an outcome of its function in altering time/space, similar to some of Heidegger's analysis of technology and our totalizing social perspective toward it. So like, maybe a bad example I don't know but I think it demonstrates the point at least lol, the steam engine for example was invented by some dude in the Roman empire, but that technology was seen entirely differently and merely used as a party gimmick for those limited few that had the privilege to experience its functionality, likely because its revolutionary industrial potential was rendered largely irrelevant by the ubiquity of slave labor and other imposed social bondage from the optimates towards their subjects.
You're probably already aware of all of this, but if unfamiliar with Baudrillard perchance, I think his piece The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is a pretty great example of how this simulacra/hyperreality pertains to manufacturing consent for contemporary imperialism and highlights that thread of technology's evolution implicitly serving the interests of the ruling class:
www.halliejones.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Baudrillard-The-Gulf-War-did-not-Take-Place.pdf
Tangentially related and speaking of spectres of Marx, Marx of course I think also gets at this general thread pretty thoroughly with the inherent limitations of reality (both material/ideological of course) underpinned by a particular mode of production, especially in The Fragment of the Machines in the Grundrisse (collection of unpublished notes) as it pertains to the core trajectory of technology in replacing labor (as the outcome of this is inevitably profit), speculating on its eventual replacement of mental labor (which I would argue is basically a computer abstractly), and inevitably if left unaltered also replacing any human function or agency other than keeping the totalizing machine of capitalism going for its own sake.
_“Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the… automatic system of machinery… set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”_
to me, society of the spectacle made little sense, it left a general impression of societal shallowness but it was rambling and jumping all over the place, idk
Fisher is a mix of Debord and Jameson
@@za1231in i think its disjointed style is a part of the theory itself, like Minima Moralia or anything by Benjamin
@@za1231in I had to reread it. The first half of the book is especially cryptic, but it makes more sense after reading the second half.
Among cinephiles, the topic of stagnation of innovation in film in has certainly been at the forefront for at least the past decade. Interestingly enough, the theme of tension between art and commerce is central in Birdman, the film that won best picture in 2014, the same year Ghosts of my Life was published.
It’s easy to be cynical in a society where highly derivative films like The Avengers and its prolific sequels dominate the box office; but even in this environment, innovation persists. For example, in Nomadland, Chloe Zhang combines Italian neorealist themes with a Malickean aesthetic to produce an entirely unique vision that could very well influence this decade’s directors.
Even Birdman itself combines the theatricality of Hitchcock’s Rope with the magical realism popularized by Latin-American literature and their subsequent films to unique effect.
Such films are not niche; I point these out specifically because they are the ones garnering enough attention to win Oscars. The same could be argued, perhaps even more strongly, for other mediums like television where recent shows like Breaking Bad have elevated the medium to a level not known in the previous century.
I feel compelled to say all this because it’s easy to succumb to the malaise that appears to be omnipresent on the surface-but below that surface is an abundance of artistic novelty that I believe provides us ample reason for optimism.
among us
Not niche? I suggest you look at the box office receipts. Films like Birdman (which I enjoyed, but didn't love - an imaginative retread of Fellini's 8/12) are the kind of movies the Academy reward every now and again because they're about filmmaking - and if the American film industry loves anything, it's giving itself a big pat on the back. Face it, cinema in America is on life support. There have been a few moments in the last few years, but not many. TV, however, has had an extraordinary renaissance (ironically, it's killing cinema). It's now much better than film. It's one medium that Fisher leaves out (to my knowledge) but which can be legitimately described as truly innovative.
@shenanigans3710 film peaked in the late 70s early 80s
That doesnt mean film cant be good anymore. Were just back to the majority of the 19th century model where art is low budget passion projects that people ignore, and ends up lost, or the over the top corporate moneymakers. For every 3 adventure travel epic there was 1 zany comedy.
For every 30 low budget noire films there was 1 massive showy sing-song production. For every 30 b movies trying to tackle a heavy topic like morality, there was 1 western with john wayne.
For every 300 art movies done today about something cerebral or thought provoking, theres another marvel movie.
But because depression and learned helplessness and nostalgia and so many other mental blocks people teach themselves and are taught to have, people wont accept that money and popularity come from mass appeal, and that thr subjective art stuff is great when it has its niche. And shouldnt be popularized.
Just because we cant be in the era of star wars, godfather, and a bunch of other 70s classics doesnt mean we live in a worse time... thinking that way you should realize there were adults back then who thought star wars was bullshit kiddie crap. Maybe people today are a bit more cynical, and maybe that wont be permanent, but if it is, who the fuck cares?
birdman should’ve been a much bigger and more important part of modern culture at large after it won best picture, it’s one of the most important movies to come out over the last decade in my opinion
@@Robb1977 This video itself talks about themes related to Mark Fisher's books on the inescapability of Capitalism and how there is this repetitive cycle on looking back to the past to market the future. These examples you bring up out of the blue to frame your argument go right back to the quote at the start of the video. The way you present it is very conceited and hateful. This type of mentality is why there's art related to lost futures, hauntology, and depression and what eventually happened to Mark Fisher.
I am grateful to have found this. Thank you. ❤
More than welcome. Thanks so much.
I had some (a few!) similar thoughts to Fisher. But unorganized, un-examined. Now I have help and a lexicon for new territory. Much of his analysis rings true for me. Sorry we lost this good mind & heart......
20:38 oh god this part really got me. made me tear up.
such an amazing video dude, content and stylistically. you're so good at what you do. def my favorite one by you so far (though i'm pretty biased, huge mark fisher fan). your channel has quickly became my favorite one on youtube! really appreciate what you do.
Extremely kind! Thanks for all the support!
As a brit myself im glad you got round to covering an author like mark Fisher. These books truly introduced the wider world to what our nation went through in the post 60s decades. What í have for long noticed is how there are paralells with the US, the decline of the detroit industries at roughly the same time as ours also declined in the UK for example.
I can't explain how much this is touching me right now. For the past several years, i've had this exact thought, that music and culture in general seemed to not know where it wants to be. I had been having the thought that I couldn't place my finger on what defining characteristics art has today. I'd say the last decade of music that felt like it had it's own sound was around 2012 to maybe 2015-2016 or so. It feels like everything has blurred into each other as of late, it's really depressing.
It feels unreal to find someone who had figured this out and wrote deeply about it so i can understand it. Feels like a revelation.
You have a gift for making such great videos and synthesize these ideas, I hope they encourage more people to read the source material, you are doing a fantastic job! BTW, yesterday I listened to your conversation with Shaun, loved it.
Engaging with mark fisher whether listen or reading reminds me always of the feelings I had for my first romantical love. Mark speaks and writes compactly, precisely and most importanly in simple language. There is this anxious urgency in his work that he is forced to perform because of the conditions we live under and the limits of the internet age. But theres also this underlying longing for calm and long-winded social interaction and discourse. I think he is one of the brightest small openings in the curtain of the capitalist real. Even if he or his mind doesnt exist anymore I think his work will live for long time to come.
This video seems like something I need to watch a few more times. I'm feeling truth in it, for sure. Thank you for making it.
"Fun" fact that might be more "fun" considering how prevalent/accepted/exploited it is now: back in like the 19th century I think, nostalgia was classified as a mental disease branching from what was called like 'melancholia' or something.
it's asinine for me to ascribe the prevalence of 80's stuff today to "nostalgia"... kids listening to the weekend's new album are not nostalgic, this for them is the present, not the past.
@@raine975 I think what’s more important here isn’t that the kids today are listening to “nostalgic” music, but rather that most of the artists of today are making art that tends to call back to the past and repackaging it en masse as our current reality
@@projectpems8304 I think fisher wants to say that people are too busy/consumerist to make new art anymore so everything has to be reused, not that nostalgia is the main phenomenon
@@raine975 Raiding everything how we grew up
The guy imitates a shit tonne
@@projectpems8304 Uh it is called mass culture vulturism and imitation
"Stain of Place" is how I feel about most of the environments I encounter in the US.
The way the buildings, businesses and streets look affects my mood tremendously, and not in a good way 😞
This is certainly something I feel in suburban America. Bland strip malls, really weird and uniform housing sub-divisions everywhere, etc. A total lack of character and soul.
Have you read 'The Geography of Nowhere'?
Amazing video, really makes me think. I feel like Mark Fisher has articulated a feeling that so many of us have. Thank u 🙏🏽
One really interesting artistic movement, Hauntological in its nature is Vaporwave - it seeks, to revive naivety of imagined futures which were commanded to us by comercials and hyper-consumerism of the 90's and early 2000's. Worth checking it out.
Yup. I actually quite like vaporwave music. It's got that nice, warm nostalgic tinge to it!
@@epochphilosophy But would Mark agree with us that it is really new?
I am trying to figure out validity of Mark's thesis by looking is it refutable at all. I am thorn to be honest, maybe 21st century needs different conceptual tools to explain what is going on with art, media, communication politics ...
Yes. Vaporwave imitating the 80's is hella creative.
*LOL*
@@poparasan Capitalism has been around a long time. It doesn't make sense that it would crush creativity only in the last few decades. The real culprit is the Digital Revolution. The enormous access it gives to the culture of the past leaves no time or space for originality to develop.
I didn't know he had died by suicide. That came as a shock. Such a deep-thinking and observant mind...I suppose it comes with the territory. Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, other deep-feeling and deep-thinking individuals who not just sense, but grapple endlessly with some of the unnamed terror that haunts our troubled world.
Cobain was sacrificed. Casualties by any means or method feeds the dark energy machine
Spalding Gray, Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace too...
@@michaelwills1926Cobian was a sap that CLOSE to be a JUNKY , a stupid low live junke that shot a narcotic into his arm and overdosedboo hoo
Thanks!
Thank you for making a video on such an important book. Geat video as always. 🙏
Had his books in my 'To Read' section for too long.. this video floored me and I'm going to read them immediately. Thank you, just found your channel today x
Reading this book for my book club, and listening to the playlist, such a pleasure to read and listen❤! So sad to realize he is no longer here
Thanks for this one guys! I was very glad to find out about Mark Fisher some time ago because he articulated so well how I was experiencing our current state of society and culture. I think his message is a powerful one but I always feared that "Ghosts or my life" relies too heavily on the experiences of European/British sub- and underground cultures to really get the core message across. I'm pleasantly surprised that it does resonate with Americans too. Yes the picture he paints is bleak but knowing that he resonates with so many gives me some hope for the future.
Sick I have a new video to send to people when they want to learn more about fisher. nice work as always
This video has articulated all my thoughts about society but couldn't put it into words. There definitely is no definable music/art/fashion from the last 20 years. You can wear an outfit from 10 years ago and no one will say you're being retro like they would in previous generation.
Great video and great channel, thank you for introducing me to Fisher, will definitely look more into his work.
Or that due to shifting importance of digital those definable categories of art have changed.
And is your statement even true? I listen to an album like Burial's Untrue and it's very much of its time, jump cut to the bastardization of dubstep by crap US producers. DnB's shift from late 90s to 2010s to now. There's a whole indie sound between 2000-2010 that defines that decade with very little bleed backwards or forwards. From Franz Ferdinand, Larrikin Love, Gossip through to The Libertines.
Skinny jeans will eventually become a retro trend. But 10+ years ago, Velour tracksuits, puffy coats (a variation of this is actually just started to come back and considered retro), denim vest... just to name a few.
I don't know you but you sound like a friend of mine. With him he was engaged with art, music, film etc during the 90s and then stopped somewhere around 2005. So his points of context are fixed in that period and doesn't see the changes (large shifts and smaller more nuanced changes) in the arts since.
Designers like Iris Van Herpen, and even music genres like Hyperpop completely go against the notions presented by you and this whole video IMO. There are people creating concepts of the future in their art, it just isn't mainstream enough for people who are stuck in the past. I don't say this to talk down to you, but I say this as a person who gets it.
I play guitar. Guitar culture is nothing but a reliving of past cultural glories of yesteryear, in which the larger community of players and enthusiasts alike have no high regard for anything new being done with the instrument. Tosin Abasi of Animals As Leaders has his own instrument manufacturing company (Abasi Concepts), which creates the first attempt I've seen in a long time at a full-on redesign of the instrument so famous for being stuck in the past. Even some of his playing techniques like thumping, his use of dissonance and the way he incorporates abstract percussive vs. consonant melodic sounds is a futuristic way of playing the instrument, as well. There are also a growing number of contemporary artists in the jazz genre, like Tigran Hamasyan and Jacob Collier, for example, who are pushing things forward in the realm of theory usage and rhythm. Esperanza Spalding is also a jazz artist, whose work is certainly not new to the music scene, but who is creating more and more forward-leaning avant-garde styled works as of late with every release.
I say all this to say, there is a noticeable over-reliance upon the mainstream to provide the newness of thought and art that people constantly say they want, and then when it exists, they act as if it doesn't all because it isn't popular enough for them. The art is out there. People do care about the future. Maybe every artist creating these works doesn't have the same politic as this video or other philosophers but they do care to create something instead of lamenting about the nostalgia wave slowly eroding our present into the past. Idk. Food for thought, just my onion.
Also, bands like Vein, Reflections, and Code Orange and their use of glitch visual styles in combination with hardcore, slam, and djent elements is very of the future imo. Pretty much, there's a lot of people doing this leaning in towards the future and building tomorrow's aesthetics around that. We are drowning in wave after boring wave of nostalgia, but perhaps we are also witnessing the very, very beginning of the future coming to life.
@@axeslinger94 I mean, this may be a hot take, but hyper pop is simply an extension of the sugary pop music of the early 2000s, and it itself refers back to Y2K as a trend from which it comes from. Obviously, you can’t categorize every hyper pop artist under this description, but you’d have to willingly ignore the amount of artists that rely on Y2K nostalgia for it to “make sense”.
Wrong. You can definitely wear an outfit from 10 years ago and it will look dated. Perhaps it doesn't affect you as much though
I'm a lifelong musician and currently a musicologist, and last year I traveled to Bali under company of some of the best musicians of the Island, and it was simultaneously the most inspiring and amazing experience ever, and the most depressive experience ever. I grew up in the 90s, the twilight zone where music culture here in the West was riddled with nostalgia for the past, but net yet fully severed by the internet. But I felt that disconnect as long as I can remember. Always that feeling that things weren't lined up, that there was something missing in the way we treat music as society. And in Bali, away from the tourist traps and into the real local music culture, everything is in harmony, every piece of art connects, and art and actual human life perfectly blend into each other. It is the only place where I felt genuinely respected as a musician.
Then you come back here to the neoliberal hellscape where there is literally nothing, music is nothing more than background noise, or aesthetic packaging of some kind of product or service, where musicians are not only disrespected, but musicians, and artists in general, are 'hated', a bunch of lazy losers who just want to have fun in life and not 'contribute'. Even amongst musicians there is a general sense of disrespect, a sense of hostile competition. And it is all pretty hopeless, I see no way out of this, it is only going to get worse, music cultures like Bali will succumb to the same thing, and eventually people won't even remember what it is like, nor care about it.
Incredible analysis. Thanks for the work. This eerily makes me think of hunter S. Thompson, his ghost seems to haunt a lot of media and culture as well.
Absolutely. Especially when Thompson wrote about his reflections on 60's counterculture from the perspective of the 70's and how the efforts for a better world was brought to a sudden end.
@@michaelcallaghan1989 yeah isn’t the quote along the lines of “so you could stand on a hill in northern Las Vegas and we where the wave peaked and then rolled back”
Hits hard
Thank you so much for making this. THisi was an extremely moving video for me as an artist , filmmaker and writer
‘The dimension of the future has disappeared.’ Ok right off the bat i can tell I’m not in the right headspace for this video lol; just from reading the description and a few comments, i know this is a topic that would touch me deeply, but maybe harder than I’m ready for anytime soon.
But it’s so important to talk about and I’m glad you posted this regardless. So here’s a humble like and comment for the algorithm
Thank you for this video. Fisher and Derrida are definitely on my tbr now!
Thanks for a great video! I read Capitalist Realism some ten years ago and it blew my mind. It has stuck with me ever since, I've read it several times. Now, I just ordered Ghosts of my life, looking forward to reading it. This video was a very nice introduction, I think. Thanks!
Thanks. I didn't know about him. I am going to read his books-- this is really important.
Thank you for providing new content on Mark Fisher. I've come to disagree with him on a lot of things, including lost futures, but his work remains as relevant as ever to our current condition.
Oh man, thank you! ❤Will look up fishers books
For me a lot of his points are valid in describing the trappings of the societies we live in. However, we do have power as individuals to shape our lives make positive changes in the right direction. Reconnect to our nature and follow a path that’s suited for us. We can’t think our way out of pain we need to feel as we have a body, emotions and must express ourselves. As soon as we connect to things that brings joy and allow us to act with love and purpose this can change a lot in the world.
Waiting to learn more about Fisher’s works
Big thanks for this video! Depression is horrible but we can fight it!
I forgot which video I saw that referenced this one, but this was great. I can feel it on a deep level.
Great one, recently finished ghosts of my past and loved it.
This is brilliant work. Thanks for sharing some insights for the literary and politically lacking layman like myself.
Somewhat interesting, I will have to remember to have a look at his book as it would've been something I used to be interested in
Great video! Very insightful, and told in such a way that makes it easier for us to understand what could be quite complicated concepts.
Thank you for an awesome critical review of a brilliant mind that I miss…
Amazing video, as always. I always share everything you post...awesome stuff! Keep up the great work!
Excellent video. Mark is, and will be, sadly missed. I liked it when you touched on jungle, and the post-dubstep sounds of Burial and The Caretaker. Personally, I was always fascinated when Fisher mentioned Burial - an artist heavily influenced by dubstep, a genre with an evolutionary arc that encapsulates both hauntology and the subsuming nature of capital.
I was a teenager in South London in the late 2000s, which is around the time that the genre emerged, and if any music sounded haunted by the past - it was the dark, ominous and meditative bass of dubstep. It was partly created as a reaction to the champagne and Moschino excesses of garage raves, twisted by the grey, hopeless reality many felt in post Blairite Britain. One of the biggest tracks of the time was literally called Haunted, if I remember correctly, and many DMZ dubstep nights were held at Brixton Mass, which was in an old repurposed church.
Anyway, capital eventually did it's thing - and dubstep turned from a transcendental trip through bassweight and Rastafarian spiritualism to day-glo, piss-off-the-parents and highly memeable mid-range noise like that of Skrillex and other brostep producers. Which then, ultimately, had a huge influence on the rise of commercial bass-heavy, wait-for-the-drop EDM that went on top charts all over the world. To the point where the origins of the genre, for most casual fans, were lost to the mists of time. Just my two pence, as someone who grew up in the UK during a lot of the events Fisher talks about in this book.
Beautifully and so well written..
And the same thing happened with Jungle/D'n'B.
The personal/political subtext point is so important. Great video
Great closing statement, got to the core of things
Great synopsis
Great Video as always! I remember reading the book a few months ago and it really touched me. Your editing style carries this tone so perfectly!
Respect for the video
Beautiful video, thank you!
Superb, very well done. Congratulations!
We need a new cultural language, essentially a breaking down of the miasma of capitalist realism, out of market-based thinking which currently pervades all aspects of human life. All we see today is hauntology: the dead suspended husk of the psyche of the market man.
Fisher argued that "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.
We've become numb and forgotten how to be creative. We are creators capable of everyday original creative thoughts, words and works. There's so much in our culture discouraging us from using our creative freedom because some people have a lot to lose by the present system changing too much.
Subscribed. And very nice edition skills.
Please make more videos, there great !
Forty years of my life make more sense in light of fisher. Its sad that he succumbed to depression, and i also think its sad that we lost david graeber in 2020. But if we are in a sorry state, then i would rather know it fully, as a testament to what is right and true about our lives, or what should be.
I must go read the book.
Thank you ❤
Ghosts of my life is definitely on my to be read list.
amazing video, honestly. It really touched me
Excellent work. I wonder if Fisher (it feels strange to type that) ever tried to talk about Proust in relation to this. I recently realized that while I love most of Proust, there are hundreds of pages of party gossip that remind me of the Kardashians. There's a deeper arc to this. I wonder if he saw it.
There's something of Ruskin to Fisher. And Proust reading him. Circling time in the gyre.
Thanks for this video.
Even internet culture has completely died and been taken over by bots, AI generated content and corporate greed. I wonder what he would have made of all this were he still with us
With the development of A.I. art, I really feel this idea of no future for creativity. It makes the sad to see how good it is already and how it can create endless variety.
As an aspiring artist whom uses AI art, I think it's the exact opposite. Never it was so easy to get your ideas onto canvas, without taking a long time performing technique. Closer and closer, we're coming to a point where anyone can project their ideas and imaginations into being, without being shackled by the need to learn a technique.
Many artists has this almost Luddist view of art, as if one done by hands and technique is inherently superior because it required effort, but I don't care about what my hands are capable, I never did. I only care about my brain's ideas, and my hands were, to this point, just clumsy subordinates whom I hold no sympathy.
Funny how when DAWs were first invented, there were concerned musicians because anyone could use a sampler instead of hiring musicians to play your songs with real instruments. Now tell me, if you listen lots of music, imagine what would be the world without the DAWs? The amount and quantity of niches of music exploded in 21th Century, and at least on this aspect, I disagree a lot with Fischer. Never was so easy to make your own music, so who cares if the trending ones are a pastiche of the recent past?
I'd never heard of Mark Fisher, only heard mention of him by an interview of Asfrin Rattansi on RT.
His and your articulation of the socio-economic and political landscape -- I will say from 1973,
because that is when so much suddenly changed in the US, as the Vietnam war was wound down. --
this explication of what was going on, represented in a philosophical interpretation or understanding,
resonates with me. It portends to make some sense of what was for me a very difficult period of
time and life. A new generation begins in 2022, calculated in 15 year increments from 1917, which
saw the birth of both Communism and Fascism. I hope it's a historical generation, with a new
revelation to displace the Cartesian which we've been laboring under since the 17th century. A
methodology for a new revelation was provided by the Spanish Philosopher Ortega y Gasset in his
ideas of Historical Reason and Vital Reason. Rachel Carson who lived during the same period,
provides content for Vital Reason with the advent of climate crises. Perhaps a new revelation will
spring from this confluence of history, life, and the Carsonian Epoch we are already living in.
Great video! Thank you!
So good
Well done!
I find myself luxuriating in the decayed lost futures...they are like snow-globe worlds I shook as an eight-year-old, curled up on an unfashionable brown 1970s couch, in pajamas with the feet attached. Perhaps this whole thing is archaeology? We are investigating regions of the mind that have already been closed off, and enjoying it, sadly, poignantly. Are we really mourning a lost future, or are we (less nobly) enshrining our personal lost futures as "that which should have been," while an actual, living world (because what else can it be, out there?) passes by?
I am suspicious of our motives. But I linger, and enjoy.
Lets not forget the other huge musical developments such as hiphop which evolved from the 70's and evolved into the 90s. In the UK and USA we had House, Drum and Bass, as well as garage and grime which were major influences that can define the nineties and early 2000's. Then into early 2010's we had the indie explosion which was fairly unique compared to the similar folk influences of the 60's and of course, dubstep and grime/trap/drill. I think you can listen to these and still define them to a time period, but I do agree in the last 10 years that pop music has swallowed up nearly all these unique areas of music and homogenised it.
house was around earlier you tw at
and the origins of everything else t o o
and indie is actually from an era w e l l before the 2010's, you i d i o t
@@yoooohooooo Indie-rock as we know it developed mostly in the late 90's and noughties. House came around mostly in the late 80's and had most of it's development through the 90's.
Why do you type like a "c u n t" ?
I feel like some of this is the precursor to the "There's no good music these days, nothing's new and nothing's original."
Also wish Mark Fisher was alive so I could ask him about Joy Division. His point of reference being Ian Curtis is especially interesting, considering Ian Curtis was a right wing dude by all accounts. His political engagement came specifically from reading quite a bit about fascism. I feel like the band sorta towed that line, at least enough for the public to notice it at one point, and not in the ironic "they're critiquing Fascism" kinda way. Even if he wasn't a fascist though, he was a Conservative dude. Music had a depressing vibe not to necessarily reflect his surroundings, but to reveal some serious misanthropic shit within himself. Ian Curtis' philosophy in art tells me a lot more about the internal workings of Ian Curtis than it does about society.
The funny thing is i love jungle, drum n bass and break beat. Never thought that maybe it my fear coming out in more expressive way than manifesting at work 😅
I enjoyed this video despite its tragic undertones and it's perhaps fitting that I'm writing this comment several months after it's release where the likelihood of it being read is very slim.
You have been read.
Well now you've just spoiled my point!
@@jasonmitchell5219 Very sorry dear friend.
@@epochphilosophy 😉, thanks for the good videos, btw. Better than most of the guff on philosophy channels.
Rock might be worn out but hip hop each decade still sounds very different to me. Same with pop but to a lesser degree
Another banger video
As usual, fantastic.
Maybe this is naive optimism, but I think we're seeing some kind of slow but steady sea change rising in a conscious awareness of material reality with the recent Israel insanity that seems to cut through the bs that has prior pacified the public and manufactured consent (finally). Or like, the awareness mitigated and prolonged by imperial expansion essentially to ameliorate very basic material comfort through exploitation elsewhere at the peripheries of empire appears to be necessarily deteriorating as capital and finance capital in particular continues to squeeze the working class and even industrial capital (which at least has to make something tangible to continue - a bug not a feature apparently to these finance ghouls lol). But of course this is just a feeling/speculation on my part and it may already be too late in terms of our passing a technological threshold of no return that can effectively enforce the status quo despite any larger awareness/class consciousness emerging. Not to mention this in itself could be illusory as we seem to much prefer to live in a fantasy world that puts our individual projected piety and self-virtue on full display rather than maybe asking ourselves what we owe each other...or something.
Anyway, RIP to a real one for sure...might as well throw in the late David Graeber toward that sentiment too, he really illuminated a lot of the functionality of finance capital through Occupy I think, at least for me, most basically that it was incredibly unjust even by its own supposed justifying logic/standards of "rational" free markets, and really the only thing we can do is exactly what you're doing which is live that tragic Cassandra archetype of the greeks or whatever as best we can.
'Socialism or barbarism' - as Rosa Luxemburg used to say. 'Social democracy' never made the break with commodity production and surplus value appropriation, leaving the door wide open for neoliberalism'a long backlash.
Excellent content. We musicians have our work cut out,
Great video. Cheers!
I like this video I am a Lefty Marxist and I was born 80 and i feel from the 80's progress to help people with opportunities has stopped and I feel we just work for money . There is no happiness due to low wages and long hours and just pure mass amounts of inequality, something has to change
Is the music by Stars of the lid? if so, great pick, I read Fisher's Capitalist Realism with their albums
The Future...Is Tomorrow. (Brazil - Terry Gilliam). "You'll have to wait till yesterday is here." (Joe Pesci/ Tom Waits) What flattened time? My mother was once a fan of "optimistic" science fiction like Star Trek. Toward the end of her life, the future ceased to beckon with exhilarating promise. Its not just pessimism or fear of the future. In a very real if psychological way, while few were paying attention, the future was "closed" like the American frontier. Empires and capitalism - so clearly set to continue on a suicidal path - don't exist discreetly from every other aspect of human experience. Human culture is awash in generalized despair.
And don't look to young people for optimism or exhilarating promise, right? If I were young and the future seemed "closed", I'd be working to open it back up.
Where's my flying car?!!?! Where's my emancipatory techno-future?
(I get what he's saying, but Fisher strikes me as too pessimistic. These forces can be resisted. There are infinite futures waiting to be born.)
Even so, this was an excellent (!) video, and I have to thank you for introducing me to a thinker I've heard of but haven't read. I am especially moved/provoked by your discussion of Fisher and trauma, those ugly open secrets that underlie the happy mask of our consumerist existence.
Burial
I gotta be honest - I went to Sheperds Bush once and just like Mark, I felt that time had stopped and that there could be no future and it was difficult to see new ideas and things that might make a difference...
very cool
Fisher said to think forward beyond this rather than just looking backwards, so everyone get to writing.
Great video has always my friend, I discovered fisher around 2019 and im glad more people are reading/talking about his text lately
David Lynch's Twin Peaks (2017) is one of the most original takes on hauntology. Would you make a video on that?
When I watch this stuff, I always have this itching question that keeps gnawing at me.
And that's... from what I've observed, anyway...
... why are Boomers and Gen X so... accepting of all of this? I feel like Millenials and Gen Z are constantly thrusted with the bullcrap declining of our quality of life in America, and our elders just keep gaslighting us, saying we're not trying hard enough, saying we just need to tweak our cover-letters just the right way this time, saying we need to not be "lazy" or "entitled" children.
And yet... when it comes to issues regarding marginalized groups of people, they get SO reactionary.
Like, idk, I'm just so bewildered and confused that their reactionary energy isn't often directed towards going "hey, wait a minute, why is everything such shit now"?
It's like we live in completely different realities, only, they keep imposing their reality on mine, and calling me an idiot.
They tend to reverse cause and effect. Victim blaming is easier than facing the fact that they've been lied to their entire life. Also, if they have a decent life, they take any implication that it wasn't due to their effort alone as an insult to their precious ego. They tend to have very big egos.
The "entitled" part comes off as projection to me. Todays right consists of the most narcissistic shitheaded Karens ever. They constantly shriek about their right to "freedom" (which basically means never having to do anything for the greater good ever) while they bury the future. The baby boomers are the most entitled generation ever.
Another thing is technology. They can enjoy the fruits of an era where we have the greatest convenience ever in the history of human civilization. A lot of menial activities take vastly less effort. But because they are past the stage where they themselves were establishing their life, they don't see the drawbacks of it. They don't see how everything being online depersonalizes many things and creates these competitive arms-races that promote dishonesty. Online job applications and online dating clearly make a lot of people miserable... and many would prefer to go back to the old way of face-to-face interaction. Same with social media. A lot of people my age seem to have just ditched it. A lot of things that were supposed to make life more convenient just created a worse feeling of being overwhelmed. Instead of creating more free time as it should, capitalist innovation just created a lot more meaningless work and stress to compensate for tedious tasks being easier.
cause they already got theirs. They probably were able to get careers and homes and raise their families before everything turned to shit and they don't really have to live that deep in this world they created. They also outnumber us, as birthrates have been steadily declining, and medicine has been advancing to the point where we have more and more old people and fewer and fewer young people
They completely identify with the culture, so they cannot see outside of it, and cannot see themselves from within it.
As a card carrying member of Generation X, for many of us, our identity was defined by and remains defined by a rejection of the totalizing effect of capital, of a life defined by capital. We employed the DIY approach to art/education/living/friendships just as state funding for the arts and education was seriously drying up. I was born in 1967 and my coming-of-age was defined precisely by a rejection of white supremacy and of capitalism. We could either sell out to the mega-machine or resourcefully try to live by anti-white supremacist and communal ideals on our own. My immediate peer group and many parallel peer groups groups to mine sought out/seek out & created/create art which reflects these values. I am so grateful to have lived long enough to see new musical forms of expression (not within pop culture) as well as literary expression that seek to deal with the destruction of the future that is occurring as a result of the destruction of the living, ecological planet and the destruction of the traditional cultures that occurred/is occurring under colonialism and neocolonialism.
uh plenty are not even thinking of you
except when our shit is imitated
like 24/7 365
Great vid