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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Fisher
Read between
December 11 - December 29, 2018
But the true Schopenhauerian moments are those in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart’s desire – and feel cheated, empty, no, more – or is it less? – than empty, voided.
As the depressive withdraws from the vacant confections of the lifeworld, he unwittingly finds himself in concordance with the human condition so painstakingly diagrammed by a philosopher like Spinoza: he sees himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junky hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions. The depressive cannot even lay claim to the comforts that a paranoiac can enjoy, since he cannot believe that the strings are being pulled by any one.
When Control is maneuvered out of his position by the ambitious (and very pro-US) Percy Alleline, this seems to consolidate the sense of irreversible decline which hangs over the novel. England’s glory lies in the past; the future is American. In the novel and its sequels, it is clear that Smiley’s victory is temporary; his world is on the brink of disappearing.
Smiley’s art consists in cultivating a particular kind of silence – not the mere absence of chatter, but the authoritative, probing silence of the psychoanalyst.
The time travel conceit permitted the showing of representations which would otherwise be unacceptable, and beneath the framing ontological question (is this real or not?), there was a question about desire and politics: do we want this to be real?
The two faces of the Father, the stern lawgiver and Pere Jouissance, resolved: the perfect figure of reactionary longing, a charismatic embodiment of everything allegedly forbidden to us by ‘political correctness’.
1980 is haunted in particular by Throbbing Gristle, especially the phrase that they took from another killer, Charles Manson: ‘can the world be as sad as it seems?’ In Peace’s hands, this question becomes an urgent theological enquiry, the very relentlessness of the sadness and misery he recounts calling forth an absent God, a God who is experienced as absence, the great light eclipsed by the world’s unending tears.
With his inventory of wretched child abuse cases, Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov makes the most famous, and most passionate, statement of this position. Yet if there is no God, the suffering remains, only now there is no possibility of its expiation; if there can be no justice to come, the universe is permanently blighted, irrevocably scarred by atrocity, abuse and torture.
Having the goods on each other, the best kind of insurance policy, the ruling class model of solidarity…
As Andrew O’Hagan argued in his piece on Savile for the London Review of Books, what mattered in the new world of television light entertainment was not likeability, or talent, but a certain larger-than-life aura – call it eccentricity, or call it derangement – which Savile easily possessed as his birthright.
The BBC, now in a permanent state of confusion about its role in a neoliberal world, duly went into a neurotic, narcissistic collapse.
At the time when Savile was abusing, the victims were faced, not with Jimmy Savile the monster, Jimmy Savile the prolific abuser of children, but with Jimmy Savile OBE – Sir Jimmy Savile – Jimmy Savile, Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great.
The powerful trade on the idea that abuse and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and cover–up can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the past. That was then, things are different now…
If, by contrast, Burial’s schizophonic hauntology has a 3D depth of field it is in part because of the way it grants a privileged role to voices under erasure, returning to dub’s phono-decentrism.
‘If you’re well into tunes, your life starts to weave around them,’ he says. ‘I’d rather hear a tune about real life, about the UK, than some US hip-hop ‘I’m in the club with your girl’-type thing. I love R&B tunes and vocals but I like hearing things that are true to the UK, like drum ‘n’ bass and dubstep. Once you’ve heard that underground music in your life, other stuff just sounds like a fucking advert, imported.’
That era is gone. Now there’s less danger, less sacrifice, less journey to find something. You can’t hide, the media clocks everything.’ He checks his pessimism: ‘But [dubstep nights] DMZ and FWD have that deep atmosphere and real feeling. The true underground is still strong, I hear good new tunes all the time.’
Burial makes the most convincing case that our zeitgeist is essentially hauntological. The power of Derrida’s concept lay in its idea of being haunted by events that had not actually happened, futures that failed to materialise and remained spectral.
Isn’t, in fact, theoretically pure anterograde amnesia the postmodern condition par excellence? The present – broken, desolated is constantly erasing itself, leaving few traces. Things catch your attention for a while but you do not remember them for very long. But the old memories persist, intact…Constantly commemorated … I love 1923…
Some viewers complain that Beloved should have been reclassifed as Horror…well, so should American history…
Little Axe confront American history as a single ‘empire of crime’, where the War on Terror decried on Stone Cold Ohio’s opening track – a post 9/11 re-channelling of Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘If I had My Way’ – is continuous with the terrordome of slavery.
‘I think there definitely was something powerful about the children’s TV from that period,’ House maintains. ‘I think it was just after the 60s, these musicians and animators, film makers had come through the psychedelic thing and acid folk, they had these strange dark obsessions that they put into their TV programmes.
The mark of the postmodern is the extirpation of the uncanny, the replacing of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness with a cocksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Ghost Box, by contrast, is a conspiracy of the half-forgotten, the poorly remembered and the confabulated.
At the same time, Ghost Box also remind us that the people who worked in the Radiophonic Workshop were effectively public servants, that they were employed to produce a weird public space – a public space very different from the bureaucratic dreariness invoked by neoliberal propaganda.
Public space has been consumed and replaced by something like the third place exemplified by franchise coffee bars. These spaces are uncanny only in their power to replicate sameness, and the monotony of the Starbucks environment is both reassuring and oddly disorientating; inside the pod, it’s possible to literally forget what city you are in. What I have called nomadalgia is the sense of unease that these anonymous environments, more or less the same the world over, provoke; the travel sickness produced by moving through spaces that could be anywhere. My, I… what happened to Our Space, or
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Confronted with capital’s intense semiotic pollution, its encrustation of the urban environment with idiotic sigils and imbecilic slogans no-one – neither the people who wrote them nor those at whom they are aimed – believes, you often wonder: what if all the effort that went into this flashy trash were devoted to a public good? If for no other reason, Ghost Box is worth treasuring because they make us pose that question with renewed force.
Thankfully, I can now make sense of a lot of stuff that happened back then; I can balance this against any residual scars I might be left with. I’m not saying I’m glad that I had a turbulent childhood, but for what it’s worth, it has shaped my art, quite indelibly.’
Composers that are highly regarded by record collectors now, for example Sven Libaek and Syd Dale, did a lot of work for Muzak. In much the same way, I apply this fascination to domestic design or motorway service stations. Dieter Rams was interested in creating something that just worked, with elegance and simplicity. I love the fact that he wasn’t searching for fame with his designs, but now we can celebrate those designs publicly and hand him the spotlight, as it were, in much the same way as we have discovered composers like Sven Libaek.’
The digital seems to promise nothing less than an escape from materiality itself,
Digital archiving means that the fugitive evanescence that long ago used to characterise, for instance, the watching of television programmes – seen once, and then only remembered – has disappeared. Indeed, it turns out that experiences which we thought were forever lost can – thanks to the likes of YouTube – not only be recovered, but endlessly repeated.
He ‘became convinced that sounds once generated never die, they simply become fainter and fainter until we no longer perceive them. Marconi’s hope was to develop sufficiently sensitive equipment, extraordinarily powerful and selective filters I suppose, to pick up and hear these past sounds. Ultimately, he hoped to be able hear Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount.’
Ballard wrote in his 1966 essay on Surrealism, ‘Coming of the Unconscious’, ‘surrealist painting has one dominant characteristic: a glassy isolation, as if all the objects in its landscapes had been drained of their emotional associations, the accretions of sentiment and common usage.’
What Foxx appeared to discover in Da Vinci and Botticelli is a Catholicism divested not only of pagan carnality but of the suffering figure of Christ, and returned to an impersonal Gnostic encounter with radiance and luminescence.
What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental.
Yet, as Rudolf Otto establishes in The Idea of the Holy, encounters with angels are as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons. After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy?
I mean, that’s what we’re trying to attain, aren’t we, through media? – That awful maximisation of time and efficient transmission of ‘information’. Some of this is economic – time equals money – and some is simply done because it can be done, and has become an unquestioned convention.
Our parents simply weren’t fast enough, they hadn’t been accelerated as we have been by media and the pace of modern life, and they also don’t have the inculcated, busy reference chain.
The twinning of romance and introspection, love and its disappointments, runs through 20th century pop. By contrast, dance music since disco offered up another kind of emotional palette, based in a different model of escape from the miseries of individual selfhood.
Berardi’s argument is not that the dot.com crash caused depression, but the reverse: the crash was caused by the excessive strain put on people’s nervous systems by new informational technologies. Now, more than a decade after the dot.com crash and the density of data has massively increased. The paradigmatic labourer is now the call centre worker – the banal cyborg, punished whenever they unplug from the communicative matrix.
This is the kind of Auto-Tuned lament you might expect neo-Pinocchio and android-Oedipus David from Spielberg’s AI (2001) to sing; a little like Britney Spears’s ‘Piece Of Me’, you can either hear this as the moment when a commodity achieves selfconsciousness, or when a human realises he or she has become a commodity.
Drake and Kanye West are both morbidly fixated on exploring the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism. No longer motivated by hip-hop’s drive to conspicuously consume – they long ago acquired anything they could have wanted
The digitally–enhanced uplift in the records by producers such as Flo-Rida, Pitbull and will.i.am is like a poorly photoshopped image or a drug that we’ve hammered so much we’ve become immune to its effects. It’s hard not to hear these records’ demands that we enjoy ourselves as thin attempts to distract from a depression that they can only mask, never dissipate.
Pop has always delivered sugar-sweet pleasure, of course, but, Barrow argues, there’s a tyrannical desperation about this new steroid-driven pop. It doesn’t seduce; it tyrannises.
Whereas the digital technology of the 80s and 90s fed the collective experience of the dancefloor, the communicative technology of the 21st century has undermined it, with even clubbers obsessively checking their smartphones. (Beyoncé and Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ – which sees the pair begging a caller to stop bugging them so they can dance – now seems like a last failed attempt to keep the dancefloor free of communicational intrusion.)
‘Always say we’re gonna stop/ This Friday night/ Do it all again…’ Played at half-speed, this would sound as bleak as early Swans.
‘Keep partyin’ like it’s your job’. It’s the perfect anthem for an era in which the boundaries between work and non-work are eroded – by the requirement that we are always-on (that, for instance, we will answer emails at any hour of the day), and that we never lose an opportunity to marketise our own subjectivity.
Your aims and objectives have to be stated up front. ‘Free time’ becomes convalescence. You turn to what reassures you, what will most refresh you for the working day: the old familiar tunes (or what sound like them). London becomes a city of pinched-face drones plugged into iPods.
Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there’s no work to do. If neoliberalism’s magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted.
Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce.
A condition in which, as Žižek so aptly puts it, ‘global harmony and solipsism strangely coincide. That is to say, does not our immersion in cyberspace go hand in hand with our reduction to a Leibnizian monad which, although “without windows” that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the entire universe? Are we not more and more monads, interacting alone with the PC screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever in the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe?’
Instead of accelerating down Kraftwerk’s autobahn, we found ourselves, as Petit puts it in Content, ‘reversing into a tomorrow based on a non-existent past’, as the popular modernism Radio On was part of found itself eclipsed by a toxic-addictive confection of consumer-driven populism, heritage kitsch, xenophobia and US corporate culture.
