Ghosts of My Life lecture / Mark Fisher

notes from his lecture:

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• music culture as a symptom of temporal pathology/malaise
• waning of historicity and the experience of time itself
• bad news: the future has disappeared
• 21st cent = 20th cent culture on HD screens and via high speed internet
• specificity of culture belonging to time period has been lost
• excessive tolerance for the archaic
• we don’t expect music now to sound like a radical break from the past, we expect it to be a subtle remodulation that is available to only aficionados
• time as marked by music !!!!!
• there is no criteria for obsolescence in culture
• 21st cent developments in music have not been good for musicians; key technological shifts have been to do with consumption and distribution
• emergence of the internet neatly coincides with the disappearance of the future
• with the weight of the past so easily available, it makes it harder for the new to emerge (partially true, not enough to explain everything)
• smartphones are portals into cyberspace that we carry around with us at all times // which induces habituated reflexes which we have to make a deliberate effort to step outside of
• deleuze describes communication as a command; our smartphones are essentially commanding us everyday; our nervous systems are being strained by it
• the role of art schools: space for popular modernism; experimental techniques, methodologies, preoccupations were disseminated/extended, furthered and popularised via music
• music was a portal into a whole set of cultural resources
• ^the possibility of modernism has closed down^
• “no one is bored. everything is boring”
• we are distracted from our own boredom, distracted from the boring nature of things as we are always subject to these (tethered to the cyberspace) idiotic compulsions
• anxiety has replaced boredom
• domination of capitalism over culture = permanently fragmented attention and dispersion VS a sense of time which is unpressured, expansive which is fugitive at the moment
• the criticism of nostalgia is overrated
• the problem we’ve got is overrating the present and underrating our own dissatisfaction with it!!!
• politicised melancholia = a refusal to adjust to the present moment
• politicised melancholia vs naturalised depression (which is complete acceptance with the state of the present or bargaining)
• a refusal of the present which is not really present, a refusal of the failure of the future