# Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future **Channel:** pmilat **Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ **Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/aCgkLICTskQ ## Chapters - 0:01 — Introducing Ghosts of My Life Thesis - 3:24 — Disappearance of the Future and Historicity - 8:29 — Flattened Cultural Time and Retro Universalization - 15:27 — Case Studies of Retro-Simulation in Music - 19:43 — Technological Drivers of Temporal Pathology Emergence - 25:47 — Neoliberalism’s Impact on Music Culture - 34:14 — Anxiety, Boredom, and Politics of Time ## Transcript **[0:01]:** Okay, yes. I'm going to talk today then about some of the main ideas in my new book, Ghosts of My Life, which really in some ways runs parallel to or is the other side of the kind of ideas that I deal with in capitalist realism. Really, if capitalist realism is about the complete takeover of capital, of not only of culture and economy, but also of the psyche, then Ghost of My Life deals with what was thwarted by that. The traces of the outside, the persistences of exteriority in this world completely dominated by capital. **[0:52]:** But what I'm really, what I'm going to do today really is bring you the bad news that you already know, which is I'm going to talk about music culture, and perhaps UK music culture especially as a symptom of temporal pathology or temporal malaise, which can be understood at least two levels. One is the level of history itself and the sense of historicity, a newly ubiquitous sense of the waning of historicity, to use a phrase from Frederick Jameson. You know, Jameson's theorizations of the postmodern, which developed in the 80s, I think now look increasingly prophetic. And you know, what was what Jameson was theorizing in the 80s is still a somewhat marginal phenomenon, still an emergent phenomenon, is now ubiquitous to the point of almost the point of invisibility, I would suggest. But I'll come back to that. **[2:13]:** What is the bad news that you already know? Well, it's that the future has disappeared. The dimension of. Oh, sorry, I meant to go into the second aspect of this temporal malaise is the experience of time itself, the phenomenological, the sense of time in everyday life. And I think, I guess my big thesis, the relationship between these two things. The more that our everyday life is taken over by the urgencies of what Jody Dean calls communicative capitalism, what Franco Berardi Bifo calls Samuel capitalism. The more that the rhythms and the dispersed attentional economies of communicative capitalism take over our life, the more that there is this difficulty in grasping a sense of the historical moment in which we live. **[3:24]:** So, yeah, so to come back then. So what is the bad news? We already know is that the dimension of the future has disappeared. That in some ways that we're marooned, we're trapped in the 20th century still, that what is it to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture on higher definition screens or 20th century culture distributed by high speed Internet, actually. **[3:55]:** So there's a strange. I mean, what ought to be a strange sense of repetition of a clotted or blocked time, a time that's in many respects slowed down or flattened or retarded, gone backwards, where the sense of a forward momentum of culture, which isn't the same as a progress. I'm not arguing that what has disappeared is a sense of the progressive in culture, as if somehow 90s jungle was progressed above Robert Johnson. I'm not arguing that. What I'm arguing is that the thing that's disappeared is a sense of difference or a sense of the specificity, the sense of culture belonging to a specific moment. That is what has disappeared in the 21st century. **[4:48]:** So there's now a feeling that nothing ever really dies, but that's not good. That means that we are assailed on all sides by kind of zombie forms which persist forever, by revivals. Anything can come back. **[5:04]:** Anything can come back. There's a kind of, what we might say, an excessive tolerance for the archaic. But part of the problem is we in. Since the sense of historicity has waned, has declined, it's difficult to characterize anything as archaic anymore. What does it mean to say something archaic in a situation when practically everything feels old? **[5:32]:** The phrase that captured this for me, and which I used at the start of Ghost of My Life from Franco Berardi, is the slow cancellation of the future. The slow cancellation of the future, I think, which captures not only that sense of termination, but the gradual nature of it. Of course, it's not that the future in culture disappears overnight. **[5:59]:** It withers, it drains away. **[6:05]:** But at least in terms of music culture and in the UK context, I think. I think we can say that this waning, this disappearance, this cancellation of the future started to become evident about a decade ago and has intensified since then. And I think in that time, our expectations of music, which I'm treating, as I say, symptomatic, symptomatic as the most obvious example of this. But it's not as if this only applies to music. Our expectations have declined, and this flatting out of time has become more naturalized. I don't think we anymore expect music to sound like a radical break from the past. We expect music now and culture more broadly to be a, you know, quite subtle. If it's different, it'll be a subtle remodulation, a subtle reconfiguration that is available, you know, that is available and understandable, accessible only to initiates and aficionados, largely. **[7:29]:** It won't be some gross sensational shift which is readily apparent to anybody. **[7:39]:** For Berari, the slow cancellation of the future clearly is not just a cultural thing. It's also A political thing. And of course, the sense of the disappearance of political future, the sense of a future which would be radically different and political terms from today, is also part of this, but it's also about the disappearance then of a certain linear sense of time, I think a certain narrative of time with where, you know, time is marked in the same way that space is marked. **[8:29]:** There's a kind of time marks in the way that there are landmarks. I think this is, you know, this was how those of us born, you know, in the same period, you know, from the late 60s, 70s onwards, you know, experienced time as marked by music in certain ways, that there was a strong connection between particular periods and music. And it was. One could periodize music not only by the year, but often by the month. **[9:06]:** And the sense of a rapid supersession of styles, genres, techniques, methodologies, which went along with that. The sense that. **[9:18]:** The sense that it was really experience of modernity through popular culture and modernity, as theorized by someone like Marshall Berman, as this sense of impermanence, as this sense that all the solid melts into air, that any particular form will. Is temporary, evanescent, it will be overcome, it will be replaced, it will become obsolete. I think the way in which we experience that, not now in culture, but in terms of technology, the experience of modernity is now in terms of smartphones or iPhones. That's where we have this sense of permanent obsolescence. In terms of culture, we have the almost opposite now. Nothing is. There's no criteria for obsolescence in culture, as I said before, an accommodation towards the. What previously will be characterized as the archaic. But part of the problem is there's no effective sense of the contemporary by which one could. To which one could compare the archaic now. **[10:32]:** And that's, as I said, I think, been in place for about a decade. So one of the phrases I use is there are non times as well as non places. Marcier's theory of the non place as the space of circulation of late capitalism, which are effectively indistinguishable one from another. Airports, retail parks, et cetera, et cetera. I think years time has become like the non place that, you know, what was the sound of 2005? What is the sound of 2008? These years seem to go and seem to fade into one another. Now, if I ask you what a sound of 1975 was, even if you weren't alive, you've probably got a sense of what it is actually. But I think what's characteristic of the 21st century increasingly especially since around 2003, is that disappearance of that sense of specificity, of cultural time. **[11:33]:** And you know, one of the lack of distinguishing marks, that is to say of a particular period. **[11:40]:** And a sense of the futuristic now belongs to the past. It has not been updated since the. Since the 90s. Really in the 90s with genres like jungle felt radically unprecedented. They felt like there's nothing you'd heard before, nor could you have heard it before. And there was a feeling of the future rushing in towards us and we being caught up in it. I think that's almost entirely gone now. The futuristic, when we use the word futuristic, it's almost the same as the word Gothic. It refers to an already existing and established set of generic protocols. It's like a font, like Gothic font. Futuristic means it sounds a bit like Kraftvolk or something like that. It's not actually futuristic. It doesn't refer to an actual future or indeed a virtual future that is impinging on the present. It refers to a set of all the existing associations which had now been eternalized. **[12:49]:** The way to establish a lot of what I'm saying, I think is a simple kind of time travel experiment which is, if you imagine beaming back anything, any music produced in the 21st century into 1994. I picked 1994 to try deliberately because it's 20 years ago. And it's hard for some of us to accept that 1994 is 20 years ago. But if beaming it back to 1994, what would happen? If people heard that music in 1994, would they go, my God, this is inexplicable. I've never heard anything like this. This isn't even music. I don't think anyone's going to do that. I don't think anyone would do that, actually. I think the. The reverse would be the case. If you beamed back music from 2014 to 1994, people are going to say, are you serious? This is coming from 20 years in the future. This doesn't sound that different from what we've got today. **[13:52]:** And I think that's thinking of that 20 year period illustrates the kind of slowing down or flattening of time that I'm referring to. If you think back of 1994-1974, the vast Sonic worlds that had been born and died in that period, the enormous kind of series of mutations that occurred between 74 and 94, or again between 54 and 74, the speed, the rapidity, the efflorescence of different sounds, different sensations that emerged in that period since 1994. I don't think that that's flattened out. It's not that nothing at all has happened, but I think it's hard to make the case that almost anything that has been produced in those 20 years subsequently was sonically unimaginable in 1994. I think it's a whole series of fairly logical extrapolations of. **[15:03]:** Of propositions, of methodologies that were already in place. And part of that means then the disappearance of retro, I think, or the disappearance of the concept of retro in the very. In the very universalization of retro. I mean, there's always been. As long as there's been popular music, there's always been retro dimension to popular music. **[15:27]:** There's nothing new about that. I think what is new about the current moment then is really that there's the failure of any alternative to what would have previously been considered retro. Now we can ask the question, retro compared to what? What is not retro? Now, I think that just that really, I guess, follows from what I've been arguing so far. **[15:50]:** I guess this became apparent to me in the mid-2000s, which I refuse to call the Naughties, although in many ways they're a decade which deserves such a horrible name. But, you know, when I was walking through. Walking through a shop in Marlin, I heard that Amy Winehouse cover of Valerie by the indie plotters the Zootons. And when I first heard of it in a casual listen, I thought. I genuinely thought that this was. Was a 60s record. You know, I thought that. So I reversed the temporality in my mind. **[16:30]:** What I. You know, I thought that the Zootons was a cover of this 60s song. You know, it's a production by Mark Ronson. Mark Ronson specializes in those kind of refurbished sound of the 60s. Of course, if you listen to it closely, you know, you realize that it's not actually. It's not 60s sold. It couldn't be. Nevertheless, that initial response sort of indicates this kind of flattening of cultural time that has occurred. So it's something which had come out 40 years later, could sound like, you know, that could sound sufficiently like something from that earlier period. **[17:12]:** A similar thing happened when I first heard the Arctic Monkeys subsequently become even more boring than they were when they started off, which is just some achievement. When I first heard the Arctic Monkeys and I saw that it's actually the video for that track, you know, Bet she looks good on the dance floor. When I first saw that, I actually did believe that it had come from 1980, that it was some Post punk group that I hadn't actually heard at the time, but had somehow been rediscovered. And almost everything about the way the video looked, the way it was shot, the clothes they were wearing, and of course, the music itself conspired in that kind of. Conspired to construct that appearance, that simulation. And again, I think if we actually imagine it being played in 1980, that record, no problem, it could very well have existed then. **[18:06]:** There's nothing to prevent it being absorbed into actual 1980. And I guess the reason I mention these things is that for me, that these should obviously have been classified as retro. These are obvious. Something which sounds like it could have come out 30 years ago or 40 years ago ought to be classified as retro. Yet they weren't. They were posited to us as if they were. As if they were part of contemporary music. But what is contemporary music then, if it can accommodate music which is not influenced by the past, but which sounds like it really could have come from a, you know, a historical moment of long ago, long ago. I mean, 1980, in, you know, in 2005, 2006, that ought to have been a very, very long time. **[19:02]:** I think part of the reason for this is that we can see the 21st century in many ways as a disaster for musicians, actually, that a lot of the developments of the key developments in the music culture of the 21st century have not been good for musicians. Ultimately, the key technological shifts, you could say, are to do with consumption and distribution of music rather than the production of music now. It's not like, again, it's not that 20th century was an ideal situation for musicians. **[19:43]:** It's not that the days of record companies, advances, etc. Was a halcyon period. But in retrospect, it's looking better and better actually than now. **[19:58]:** Because paradoxically, in some ways, big record companies, you know, insulated some musicians from market pressure. Actually. They gave them, you know, the fact that they were record company advances, the fact that they could make money from recorded music. The fact that recorded music was a commodity that could actually yield remuneration. **[20:22]:** This gave musicians some autonomy, an autonomy, I think, which they increasingly lack in the current moment. **[20:30]:** I mean, part of the problem is we could say that a lot of cultural production has been effectively decommodified or has become a commodity effectively priced at zero. Whereas cultural producers, the things that cultural producers rely on have been hyper commodified. You could say they still need gas, electricity and housing. Just to which I'll return to. Perhaps the housing is perhaps the principal thing in A city like London, which can explain this sense of malaise. **[21:10]:** But I think the other dimension of this in relation to technology is that this new technology doesn't yield sensations, you could say, in the way that previous forms of technology were music culture. Music culture. When you've got a wah wah pedal, whatever, you could obviously hear that when you had samplers, you could hear the effects of samplers. When you had synthesizers, one could hear them 21st century. As I say, music technology has certainly mutated music culture, but it hasn't mutated it in the level of what one is actually hearing. You can't really hear this communicative culture. It just facilitates the distribution, the circulation of music. It doesn't change the actual sound of what is produced. **[22:07]:** So developing this kind of thought then, about why this has happened, why we're in this kind of temporal malaise, why in particular, it's kind of music culture that exemplifies this. **[22:26]:** The first and obvious explanation then would be the emergence of the Internet. And that kind of neatly coincides, I think, with the time, I'm suggesting, when the future definitively disappeared around about a decade ago, when the Internet became ubiquitous. Of course, the Internet was there before, but the domination of our lives by the Internet really only started a decade ago. And this is essentially the argument of Simon Reynolds in Metromania. And for Simon, the key thing is what the Internet provides is oppressive weight of the past, the accessibility, since with the weight of the past so easily available to us, this makes it harder for the new to emerge. **[23:28]:** I think that's partially true. That's partially true, but it's not enough to explain everything. Another remark of Simon's I think, is perhaps more telling, which is where he says that what's happened in the last few years is that everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down. And it's this. I think it's this dimension of speeding up, that speeding up. And here's where we come to what I said at the outset. The second dimension of this temporal pathology, which is, you know, the experience of time in everyday life, the phenomenology of time. **[24:12]:** You know, it's this it for me. And this is not so much just the Internet, but I think cyberspace, which is different. It's really in the last. Only in the last few years with smartphones, that we're inside cyberspace. You could say, you know, in until smartphones, we went to the Internet, which we accessed through computers. That already seems like a genteel age of the Jane Austen world, far distant from us. Now, as soon as. I think smartphones shouldn't be thought of as objects which we have, but as portals into cyberspace, which mean that we are, when we carry them around, we're always inside cyberspace, which induces whole set of habituated reflexes which we have to make deliberate effort to. To step outside of. **[25:11]:** But again, we can't just see this emergence of cyberspace, the ubiquity of cyberspace on its own. We have to see in the context of neoliberalization and the combination of neoliberalization and post forwardism, like all capitalist realism, really. **[25:38]:** And so what I'd rather talk about rather than cyberspace is capitalist cyberspace. I think what we're inside is capitalist cyberspace. **[25:47]:** And this then has coincided in a country like the uk with the final eclipse of social democracy. **[26:01]:** And with it, I mean, what does that mean? It means the end of indirect funding, I think, for something like music culture. A lot of the major developments in music culture in the UK weren't directly funded by the state. It's hard to think of. Well, there are some examples, actually, but in terms of popular music, it wasn't direct funding by the state that made it possible, but indirect funding was certainly a key factor. The example of direct funding by the state would be things like BBC Radiophonic Workshop, etc. Where they were part of a kind of public service broadcasting remit. **[26:51]:** But indirect funding means the machinery of social democracy itself would mean things like, you know, student grants, unemployment benefits, housing benefits, social housing. You know, I said earlier, probably, if you're looking at a city like London as a particularly powerful case study here, the situation with housing is probably sufficient in itself to explain almost everything that I've talked about so far. The fact that it's so expensive to live in the city deprives the culture of energy, I think, deprives the culture of an unstressed or unpressured energy. The city is exhausted on lots of levels, on a fairly literal level. But then as a consequence of that exhaustion, as a consequence of that perpetual kind of business busyness, inescapability of the ubiquity of urgencies, something which is intensified via the cyberspace environment, I think that we. Again, now we can look back to the Guinea Boer period, the 60s, the spectacle again, it seems like some genteel period. **[28:14]:** You had to put TV on then or, you know, see an advertising billboard in order to be commanded, or have your nervous system assailed by the urgencies of capitalism. Now we carry them around at all times with us and it's important to remember when Deleuze describes communication. Communication is a command. This is when we open up, we look at our smartphones essentially being commanded. And this is a weight on our nervous system that wasn't previously there. I think we're facing these hundreds of commands every day, which we may well ignore them. Obviously we have to ignore them. We can't possibly follow them all. Nevertheless, the strain on our nervous systems must be telling at some level. **[29:17]:** But to come back to then to this social democracy and the indirect funding for culture. I think one particular important example of this in the UK would be art schools. The role of art schools in a lot of major developments of music, certainly from the Beatles, the who up to post punk, the art school was a major institution there. Again, it wasn't teaching this stuff directly. It wasn't teaching people to be in groups and make music. It wasn't about that. But the institution facilitated a circuit which had a particular kind of class dimension to it. Really. Art schools in that period were zones where working class could go. And it was an encounter between the working class and the kind of established high culture, avant garde or experimental, experimental art scene. And you know, that culture was. That encounter was highly productive for music culture, for popular music culture. **[30:32]:** And really with the rise of neoliberalism, we've seen the dismantling of that culture and its conditions. Really the ream bourgeoisiemon of art schools, I guess, is what I'm talking about there. **[30:48]:** You know, I guess what would once have happened was if you were working class kid and you said to your parents, I'm going to art school, they'd say, no, you're not, you're not wasting your time doing that could do something useful. But the student had a full grant, had no fees to pay. So they said, I'm going anyway. With the introduction of fees and increasingly high fees, that space of autonomy is not there. With the result that art schools are now once again, as I said, dominated by the bourgeoisie in the uk. And I think a result of what I'm talking about or another dimension of what I'm talking about is the restratification of culture. Really one of the things I'm interested in why I think music culture was significant in the period, you know, from the, especially from the early 60s up to the end of the 90s, was as a space for what I would call popular modernism with this art school encounter as a kind of engine of that where experimental techniques, methodologies, preoccupations were disseminated, extended and furthered and popularized. **[32:11]:** You know, via. Via music. I think that's why, that's part of the reason music was important, because music wasn't. Music wasn't just music. Music was a threshold, a portal into a whole other set of cultural resources really. **[32:29]:** And that that circuit has closed down. The possibility of popular modernism has closed down. And instead we have a return really to a kind of kitsch high culture, which is kitsch in the sense that it's still there, it persists, but it's no longer capable of generating novelty, of producing the new. And a return to a kind of lumpen mass culture. And that space where these two fields were disarticulated and no longer exists in any significant way. **[33:09]:** So with the decline of the final decline, the final attacks on social democracy, and it's bad enough under new labor in the uk, but in the UK we fell into the. Fell into the illusion of thinking nothing can be worse than new labor. Until we had the old conservatives come back and we found, yeah, something can be worse than new labor. And what's happened with the coalition government since 2010 is the picking off, almost systematic picking up of the last remaining elements of social democracy. Attacks on social housing tax, on squatting as well as squatting. The possibility of squatting in a city like London was very important to something like punk. It wouldn't have been possible. Punk is unimaginable in London today because of the housing situation, really. **[34:06]:** So I think the result of all this then is this embattled sense of time at the everyday level. **[34:14]:** The key thing was, I think the key thing of something like Dart school experiment at that time was that people were. There was a space in the culture where people were freed up from the pressures of work, where they could pursue projects, where they were going to lead, where their imminent logic led them, which was radically open. **[34:46]:** You know, those kind of spaces in culture, those times, that kind of space time has radically atrophied now. You know, the experience of what is to be a student in the UK is to be, you know, as elsewhere, massively indebted and you know, often working lots of jobs, working more than one job. So that's effectively closed out then this space of freedom from work and freedom from the immediate pressured time. **[35:19]:** I think what this also meant is the end of boredom. I think it's perhaps significant, like the. **[35:30]:** We might look back upon boredom as somewhat utopian proposition. Now in many ways, the dialectics of boredom coming out the situationists and going into punk, you know, what are the politics of boredom? The idea of boredom as a kind of existential challenge that boredom presents us with the blankness of death, the necessity for us to actually do something. It's a kind of existential injunction that's been eliminated now that boredom 1.0 no longer exists. **[36:05]:** I'd say we're now in a period. My slogan for this would be no one is bored. Everything is boring. **[36:15]:** What do I mean by that? Well, no one is bored because we're all inundated by micro stimuli and seamless micro stimuli. So the point at a bus stop where you previously would have been bored, now what's the first thing we do? We reach for our phones in order to cover over that kind of terror of boredom that doesn't really get rid of. That doesn't gets rid of our experience of boredom, but it doesn't stop things being boring. You know, I think the particular lure of a lot of 21st century culture is this mixture of curiosity and boredom at the same time. We're sort of bored even as we're curious about things. Actually, that kind of engine of, you know, as we're kind of insomniacally drifting through social media at night, we're kind of. With some level, we're bored even while we're kind of curious. **[37:09]:** But since there's. Since there's no reprieve from the urgencies of cyberspace, that's what I mean by no one is bored. We don't have the freedom to be bored anymore because on another level, we're tethered in. We're kind of. We're fascinated even as we are bored. And we're distracted from our own boredom. We're distracted from the boring nature of things by the fact that we're always kind of. We're subject to these kind of idiotic compulsion. And again, I think that a lot of Bifaud's work, and this is very important, the inundation of the nervous system by stimuli, the producing this insomniac state where it's no longer possible to dream anymore. And actually, there's quite an interesting post on the plan C website from this anonymous group called the Institute of Precarious Consciousness or something like that, where they argue we've really shifted from an age of boredom to an age of anxiety that with Fordism, the previous regime, dominant regime in capitalism, presented the problem of boredom. **[38:22]:** You know, you're in a factory for 40 years, that's boring. You don't want to do it. Capitalism solved that problem. It solved it in a way that always solves everything via kind of the fairytale Genie solution which is, okay, you don't want to be bored, and make sure you're not bored, you'll be anxious forever. And this, the kind of. That's, you know, this sense of kind of universal anxiety, I think, is another thing which prevents us from experiencing boredom anymore, which doesn't stop culture being boring. Culture is boring, but there's no one who isn't preoccupied all the time who can access this boredom. **[39:04]:** So I think what this calls for, then, is a politics of time and understanding these different quantitative experiences of time and how this is that the attack on the unpressured, unstressed, that time free of urgencies, is part of the domination of capitalism over culture at the moment. And one can almost posit this as a metaphysical level struggle. There's one. There's a set of forces that want us to be permanently anxious, permanently have our attention permanently fragmented, permanently dispersed. **[39:49]:** And that is definitely winning, that's the dominant force at the moment against another kind of sense of time, another kind of attractor, which is, you know, where. Towards this unpressured, expansive, more open sense of time, which is now kind of radically fugitive. I think it's very, very hard to get hold of that in particular in a city like London, which I think London is a kind of doubling that, like, everything's blocked, cluttered anyway, by the fact that everything's so difficult, overcrowded, expensive. It's like, you know, it's like cyberspace in physical form in lots of ways. And then on top of that, you've got the actual experience of cyberspace, and everyone tethered and tranced by that by their phones as a means to escape it, but also to kind of perpetuate it. **[40:45]:** So, you know, one of the things that I sort of posit then in the book, then what does it leave us with in a situation where it seems that nothing new can ever really happen anymore? What do we do when the future is terminated? What do we do? **[41:06]:** An important thing to stress here, then, is not to take, is not to adopt a too easily nostalgic perspective where we say, well, yes, everything was great in 70s, 80s, 90s, now things are really bad. **[41:23]:** Although I think nostalgia is easily criticized when the opposite is far less criticized, which is a certain credulousness about the present. Actually, it seems to me more of a problem than nostalgia, actually, given the immense weight of the kind of PR industry, branding, et cetera, and their role in deliberately producing this waning of historicity, I think can't be underestimated. **[41:59]:** They are this force which the Problem with nostalgia. The nostalgia, in a culpable sense will be that makes us overrate the past. But I think that the problem we've got is overrating the present in lots of ways and underrating our own dissatisfaction with it, which we're invited to do, which we're pressurized to do in lots of different ways. **[42:21]:** So rather than invoking an actually existent past and comparing it with the present, I think the point from which we can criticize the current moment, the point at which it can be found wanting, is in terms of the futures that were projected from the 20th century, not the actual existing past. You know, that it's the shocking difference between what we thought might have happened and what actually has happened which can be revealed by that experiment I suggested, where we beamed back something in time. **[42:59]:** And in the face of that, I think we're almost offered an opposition between a certain kind of politicized melancholia and depression. Actually, it's not necessarily that nice a choice at the moment, but I mean. Okay, what I mean by politicized melancholia. Politicized melancholia would be a refusal to adjust to the present moment. Refusal to adjust. It is to say, I can't accept this. And that's fundamentally what I feel when I turn on the radio. Actually, I turn it on, I sort of quite like this, you know, whatever track it is, so quite like it, but it's not acceptable. You know, this. I can't adjust to the fact that this sounds like it could have come up 20 years ago. It isn't just boring rock music now. It's dance music as well. Whatever. **[43:48]:** You can't adjust to it. And even if it's going to carry on forever, I think I'm going to refuse to adjust to a time when it's acceptable for. For things to be so anachronistic. The alternative to that, I think, is a kind of just depression is a kind of naturalized depression where we just accept that nothing new's ever going to happen, but it's not a problem anymore. And often this logic of depression takes over where not even people say, well, you know, nothing new is going to happen now. So what? Did anything new ever happen in the past anyway? You know, it's kind of overrated. Things weren't really that new ever before. We start bargaining ourselves down not only about the present, but about anything that's ever happened before. So I suggest that this is, you know, that's part of the overwriting of the present, actually, in certain ways, is that those tendencies so one of the things I explore in the book, then, is these strains of melancholic maladjustment as one strategy for the refusal of a present, which is not really a present, and a refusal of the failure of the future. **[45:02]:** And, you know, one of the threads that I try and pull on is this. Is this longing, this yearning for a future in conditions where the future can't be delivered. And I guess I think that is the authentic articulation in the present. One can't, by force of will alone, create a sense of the future. We have to accept the conditions which allowed a sense of futurity have really been attacked. And it's voluntaristic action can't put that right. Have really been attacked. They've really radically deteriorated. **[45:42]:** Yet if we're not to accede, if we're not to completely submit to this present where the future has disappeared, what remains is a certain set of longings, yearnings, etc. And it's a kind of fidelity to those yearnings and longings that is one of the things that I track in the book, really. **[46:01]:** Okay, we'll leave it there if that seems good point to end on, if that's okay. Okay, thanks, everybody.