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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Fisher
Read between
December 19 - December 29, 2018
‘the slow cancellation of the future’
the intensity and precariousness of late capitalist work culture leaves people in a state where they are simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated.
In this insomniac, inundated state, Berardi claims, culture becomes de-eroticised. The art of seduction takes too much time, and, according to Berardi, something like Viagra answers not to a biological but to a cultural deficit:
This is what I said about capitalism: if it’s to continue, we’re going to need better drugs.
The other explanation for the link between late capitalism and retrospection centres on production. Despite all its rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new.
As public service broadcasting became ‘marketised’, there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful.
The late capitalist world, governed by the abstractions of finance, is very clearly a world in which virtualities are effective, and perhaps the most ominous ‘spectre of Marx’ is capital itself.
Paul Gilroy calls ‘postcolonial melancholia’.
is about evading ‘the painful obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history and to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness.’
what Alex Williams has called negative solidarity, in which we
celebrate,
the fact that another group has now bee...
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PR and populism propagate the relativistic illusion that intensity and innovation are equally distributed throughout all cultural periods.
we are induced by ubiquitous PR into falsely overestimating the present, and those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever.
‘To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.’
Julian Jarrold
it’s like the 70s have gone on trial. Yes, but it’s a very particular strand of the 70s that is under investigation – not the officially debauched rock ‘n’ roll 70s, not Zeppelin or Sabbath, but the family entertainment 70s.
Who’s going to believe your word against the word of a television entertainer, someone who has raised millions for charity? But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable – this can’t possibly be happening.
The father
is inherently spectral.
It’s another version of patriarchy’s occult history, now not so secret: abuse begetting abuse.
Jack’s curse, on the other hand, is that he is nothing but the carrier of the patronym, and everything he does always will have been the case.
Wittgenstein, the world is everything that is the case.
how does Danny escape from Jack? By walking backwards in his father’s footsteps).
Some viewers complain that Beloved should have been reclassifed as Horror…well, so should American history…
Ian Penman complained about Greil Marcus’ ‘measured humanism which leaves little room for the UNCANNY in music’.
Little Axe position blues not as part of American history, as Marcus does, but as one corner of the Black Atlantic.
‘Dub was a breakthrough because the seam of its recording was turned inside out for us to hear and exult in; when we had been used to the “re” of recording being repressed, recessed, as though it really were just a re-presentation of something that already existed in its own right.’
For Little Axe, as for the bluesmen and the Jamaican singers and players they channel, hauntology is a political gesture: a sign that the dead will not be silenced. I’m a prisoner Somehow I will be free
At one level, the Ghost Box is television itself; or a television that has disappeared, itself become a ghost, a conduit to the Other Side, now only remembered by those of a certain age.
Television as poltergeist
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.
Negative capability
The implicit demand for such a space in Ghost Box inevitably reminds us that the period since 1979 in Britain has seen the gradual but remorseless destruction of the very concept of the public.
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.
Geoaphasia
Crackle, then, connotes the return of a certain sense of loss. At the same time, it is also the sign of a found (audio) object, the indication that we are in a scavenger’s space.
So much film and television now deploys sound as a crude bludgeon which closes down the polyvalency of images. Whooshing sound effects subordinate audiences to the audio equivalent of a spectacle, while the redundant use of pop music enforces a terroristic sentimentalism.
Keiller shows that capitalism – in principle at least – saturates everything (especially in England, a claustrophobic country that long ago enclosed most of its common land, there is no landscape outside politics);
Robinson is drawn to Margulis because she rejects the analogies between capitalism and the biological that are so often used to naturalise capitalist economic relations. Instead of the ruthless competition which social Darwinians find in nature, Margulis discovers organisms engaging in co-operative strategies.
I’m reminded of the black orchids in Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge Of Darkness, those harbingers of an ecology that is readying to take revenge on a humanity that thoughtlessly disdained it.
