The slow cancellation of the future: A Mark Fisher primer

22:55Simon Poulter:swearing at me earlier on actually she's behaving herself now we can swear as much as we want but

23:00Sophie Mellor:maybe not at each other but we can okay thank you all right yeah i mean i think that it's really fundamental important to touch on this idea of communicative capitalism there are very few spaces where we can communicate or have a political conversation in a space that is not driven by these capitalist dynamics. I think the film kind of enacts that beautifully and kind of bringing people offline and together. But yeah, I wanted to talk about Mark Fisher's relationship to the internet, but maybe we'll save that for a little bit. Yeah. Because I think that this also is like a mirror of his own writings.

23:36Sophie Mellor:I mean, he saw a lot of this coming. He existed within it and then saw a lot of it coming. But first, maybe we get some like brass tacks down. So the film opens with Mark talking about this is kind of a 180, but we have Mark talking about Tony Blair. And I'm curious, especially since, you know, most of our listeners are here in the US, what is the significance of that moment in British politics? Why open on this moment of the rise of labor

24:05Simon Poulter:centricism well yeah that's great question so tony blair really was going back to 1997 it's a quite a big deal for a labor politician to be elected and obviously prior to that was

24:18Sophie Mellor:the margaret thatcher period it did feel like a moment of yeah it was a moment labor got in and i remember distinctly just being like overjoyed and this feeling of a whole new daughter yeah

24:31Simon Poulter:Yeah, but actually what he talks about is that Mark Fisher kind of like rumbles this really and says that really what Tony Blair was, was just another form of kind of centre-right politics. And actually at that point in UK, you can say that the left in terms of a political way of framing was kind of lost. And I think that's one of Mark Fisher's main kind of ideas, is that the left actually kind of just got left behind and failed to communicate. And what Fisher talks about really is that the right wing began to kind of regain a different mantle or a different form. And that Tony Blair's politics were completely monetarist in the same way as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's politics were monetarist.

25:16Simon Poulter:That's why we started with that because a key thing about Mark Fisher is that he's trying to reassemble or put together an alternative vision of a progressive democratic culture, not just in the UK, but everywhere. And he's lamenting the fact that that just didn't happen.

25:35Sophie Mellor:Another key period I feel like in the film is the years 2010 and 2011, the years of the student protests in Britain, which I didn't really know about. I find it perhaps not surprising that this coincides roughly with Occupy Wall Street, or was just a little bit before Occupy Wall Street in the US. So that was kind of interesting to see. Is there something about that time, that moment also, that is key to understanding Mark Fisher, and especially the political dimension of his work? I think it's key to understanding that very particular moment in politics in the UK at that time so all the protest footage that you see in the film and Kate and William's wedding and Margaret Thatcher's funeral that's all footage that we shot so in a way that adds another layer to the film it's kind of got our own hauntology in there so we're there like you know almost 15 years younger with a son who's got a lot darker hair for example and so we were making a film about Mark Fisher then but we just didn't know we were living in london and there were a lot of protests going on so we just thought we'll just go and go and film it and then that footage was just sitting there for like 10 13 years but it was a very particular moment i think anti-bacquet talks about it in the film in british politics because we had this coalition government that did feel like it could just be pushed over and it would fall unfortunately it didn't that didn't happen and you know i think there's still a strong protest culture in this country but that was certainly a very particular moment in time in protest and obviously Mark Fisher was writing at that time.

27:20Simon Poulter:The other thing to answer your earlier part of your question is that we have to go back to the global banking crash in 2008 and then we have to look at Mark Fisher writing capitalist realism and we have Franco Berardi writing at that time and Jodie Dean and so there's a lot of critical theory comes out at that time, which is talking about the fact that as it happens, the banks were too big to fail and they were bailed out globally. So I think for anybody listening to the podcast, you kind of need to scroll your tapes back and your historical thing to the global banking crisis. And then you get a fixed point where you realize, oh, okay, so that was a really key moment.

28:03Simon Poulter:I think And Fisher was reacting to that in his writing. He talks, I think, at one point about the Lehman Brothers firm crashing, you know, and all of that. So it is a kind of historical narrative around that period of time and, you know, rethinking what was happening.

28:18Sophie Mellor:It also coincides with the increased ubiquity of digital culture. Like all these things are kind of coming together and both utopian promise and dystopian promise of what the Internet would be right around that time. and you have like crypto, Bitcoin. That was around the financial crisis.

28:36Simon Poulter:A little bit later, actually, crypto and Bitcoin. Yeah, but if you're looking at your media theory, you would say that the turn of the millennium, the early 2000s, you've got people like Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and other people blogging away in a very kind of open source fashion. You can see that as a way in which ideas on the internet were shared. is a very utopian way of thinking about the internet. It's going to be great. We've all got digital. You know, we're going to be able to talk to each other. Marshall McLuhan, the Global Village, everything's great. And then, of course, what happens is that things like Facebook come along and Web2, and that sort of sends us into the idea of what Jodie Dean and Mark Fisher talk about, which is we're actually captured within platforms and platform capture.

29:27Sophie Mellor:Totally. Now I want to jump back in time for a second, which is to point to the fact that one of the first sort of philosophical concepts you define for the viewer is hyperstition. This idea that a fiction can make itself real or have an operational effect on reality. I see discussions of Nickland and hyperstition or just hyperstition as a concept. I've seen people talking about it again in reference to the internet now and, you know, the weird sort of fictional feeling fever dream of Trump or how reality feels like it's driven by fiction. But what is the significance of this concept to Mark Fisher's work beyond the fact that he got his start in the CCRU, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which was a kind of collective department at warwick university in the 90s yeah and what was the difference between his understanding of accelerationism and nick lands who took more of a obviously right-wing

30:24Simon Poulter:turn with this yeah you've done your homework by the way so congratulations i mean i grew up

30:31Sophie Mellor:reading simon reynolds oh okay cool we're like millennials who grew up looking up to people who were that age if that makes sense yeah yeah but both mark and simon are big influences on us so

30:44Simon Poulter:okay that's amazing yeah so you you're right so ccriu was at warwick university and um sadie plant was um the kind of earlier founder she as you know wrote a book called zeros and ones and if you haven't read that book that's a really great book to to go back to and then she kind of moved out of that and Nick Land came on board at CCIU and the thing about the CCIU is never really an official research institute it was kind of a hybrid thing that they got going within the framework of the university so it leached off the university Nick Land was obviously one of the most well-known characters and he was very interested in these neologisms and portmanteau words as we would call them and i think one of the things that mark fisher got from that is he got also very keen on creating new language and words to describe things but hyperstition a good example of hyperstition now would be cryptocurrencies you know i mean people just come on don't they and they're on youtube and they're blagging away you know buy wonder coin it's the new thing get in fast getting quick and hyperstition is this way of creating value and currency

32:02Sophie Mellor:Summoning futures into being by willing them to exist and the internet sort of like has this crowdsource dynamics that can sometimes actually make that work.

32:11Simon Poulter:Yeah, exactly. So I think hyperstition is really kind of sits alongside this idea of hypercapitalism through Bitcoin and through various currencies that arise from that. But actually, Mark Fisher's interest in hyperstition goes way more over to thinking about music culture and the sort of stuff that we're all interested in. So he talks about hyperstition in the way that kind of ideas or music and things kind of occupy our culture. And he, in terms of his framing of popular modernism, is particularly interested in looking back and looking forward. So in our film, Justin Hopper plays the character Parkins, who is from an M.R.

32:55Simon Poulter:James ghost story of Whistle, My Lad, and I'll Come to You. And what we have done is sort of taken a ghost from that ghost story, which Mark Fisher also references, and then we've kind of propelled it along as a further hyperstitional form. So our film, as Andrea pointed out, does play with the syntax and the thinking of Mark Fisher in order to make something. But actually what then happened is that accelerationism and hyperstition branch out into left and right versions. And you're absolutely right about that. The Nick Land version has now been picked up by people like Peter Thiel and others who are looking for a kind of, what do you call it, a credo or a kind of thing to follow.

33:43Simon Poulter:And so Nick Land's work has become very popular within the emerging, well, not emerging, they're in charge, aren't they? The people who are in charge, they really love this Nick Land thing. And then the kind of like more leftist perception of hyperstition, which is around cultural thinking, cultural forms, kind of sits in a totally different area. So Mark Fisher's book, Ghosts, actually does kind of go in a lot to this idea of hyperstition in terms of culture and music theory in particular. But it's fascinating. Yeah.

34:15Sophie Mellor:So on the right, hyperstition or accelerationism might be something like, you know, oh, we need to double down on technology, double down on AI, you know, go as hard as we can with the data centers and maybe uproot everybody, displace all workers and burn it all down and something cool is going to happen on the other side. That's what they seem to think, or at least we'll be in charge on the other side or something

34:42Simon Poulter:like that yeah but the other thing is they want to live to be 200 yeah they want to get to mars and they want to be in perfectly good health so they they've created these kind of unreal reels or perceptions of what is possible but of course if you're a billionaire then maybe you can do certain things to kind of like tinker with the future and reality which is kind of what I guess these people want.

35:08Sophie Mellor:Also, it's like a justification, isn't it? For having an obscene amount of wealth and power. It's just like, you know, I have to do this because we're about creating a new world by accelerating this one. And then we'll break it and we'll see what happens. Not really thinking about the human cost of that. It's like, where do you go when you're like a trillionaire? Right, it's like at a certain point you have to like reverse justify your whole existence. yeah it's like you know musk could like end you know child poverty but he chooses not to he chooses to you know fly yeah you're only always being like dude if you want to immortalize yourself that's how you do it you know kind of yeah but why world everybody will love and remember you forever and yet and yet they don't so why yeah and then the left version the left understanding of it just so i'm clear is more like fostering like collective sentiment or bringing people together through culture and fomenting political change that way yeah i think hypostitian has

36:09Simon Poulter:pretty much been dominated by the far right kind of version but what i get from if you read some of fisher's stuff particularly about music i mean one of the things he's doing is actually looking back at different forms of music he makes the connection around amy winehouse and he says that But, you know, Amy Winehouse's music through Mick Ronson, who's an excellent producer, could actually be a recreation of something that sounds like it comes from the 60s. So hyperstition in the way that Mark Fisher is relating to it is looking backwards and forwards and around things like music genres and our culture.

36:47Simon Poulter:And basically what he's saying is our culture kind of like flattened out. And then he makes the point that once it's flattened out, there's something kind of strange in that we can all be listening to the same stuff, you know, because music culture just exists on this kind of infinite plane. And so where we are, it's kind of like constantly looking back and reconstructing things. Yeah.

37:11Sophie Mellor:And that is kind of a symptom of not being able to see a future, I guess. It's like the difficulty of looking forward because we are in this perva crisis. So all we can do is look back.

37:24Simon Poulter:It's quite depressing, really. It's quite depressing, really. Yeah, which is why, I mean, again, one of the key things about capitalist realism, you read that book, it's 80 pages. It's not a big read. A lot of people think, wow, that's so cool what he's written there. But actually, it's quite depressing, because it doesn't offer too many outroads or off ramps. It's a book that just tells it how it is. And then you think, yeah, that's me. That's how my world is. So part of our thinking with the film is to kind of create a kind of shared picture through the way that people discuss things to actually begin to articulate that, like the conversation we're having here right now on your podcast.

38:05Simon Poulter:And that in itself will actually stimulate further conversations. And that leads us to another picture. And then it leads us to what Sophie's talking about is agency. you know if you spend your whole time doom scrolling trying to get shares likes and follows your life can get really kind of locked down into a very particular space and you kind of maybe lose a sense of what it is you can do in the world and actually one of the things about this process we're encouraging people to think about what it is that they can do that's tangible to them yeah

38:40Sophie Mellor:but also mickey aurora says it really well towards the end of the film it's like thinking about what is the right amount of tech we do have that agency to decide how much tech is the right amount of tech it's like we don't have to be constantly driven by basically you know four or five tech bros you know Elon Musk Zuckerberg Bezos and you know I'm sure somebody else I've forgotten you know our life has been driven by a select few of people then but we do have the agency to decide for ourselves how much tech is enough tech. And I think that's... If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation.

39:25Sophie Mellor:It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas. You can get access to Cujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack.

40:03Sophie Mellor:That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. pretty cool idea i think i want to touch a bit more on hauntology we as you know we interviewed simon reynolds last year for the 20th anniversary of hauntology as a concept as a genre simon's writings on the topic focused a lot on hauntology as a musical movement and fisher also touched on this musical aspect but he also seemed more interested in using cultural manifestations of hauntology in music and film as a way of articulating a wider political idea. Tell us a little bit more about what hauntology meant to Mark.

40:44Simon Poulter:Well, hauntology for Mark Fisher was, a lot of it was, really goes back to his experience as a child. He watched a TV show called Sapphire and Steel, which had David McCallum and Joanna Lumley in it. And it was a cronky kind of show with cheap sets on it. But it would have been the kind of TV show in the UK that you would have sat down with your family at seven o 'clock and maybe had some food and you'd have watched this TV show. And so Fisher was very interested in this idea of specters of the past and particularly in popular culture. And I think what he does with hauntology is he turns popular culture into a kind of manifest of things that he refers to.

41:29Simon Poulter:And of course, In the US, you know, there are great examples of hauntologies, you know, when you drive through certain places. I mean, I'm thinking of places like Arizona, you see like gas stations and decrepit vehicles and things. And, you know, we all create these kind of personal hauntologies, which are largely made from things that we remember from our childhood or from our past. And so I think for Mark Fisher, hauntology is this idea of how these references build up, and particularly in music. The one thing that seems to join up a lot of the music hauntologies is, you know, kind of like Joy Division, for example, and thinking about this band that comes from nowhere in Manchester, and, you know, they make music and they create a song, Love Will Tear Us Apart.

42:17Simon Poulter:So music and hauntology, I think, for Fisher is really connected into these sort of like popular modernist references. He's very articulate about his own references and he kind of pushes his own kind of paradigm of what hauntologies are. But of course, you know, you will have your own personal hauntologies. I will have mine. And these things are often speak to our generational experiences. Well, what music were you listening to when you were 16? somebody plays that track and that will have an evocation or personal memory surrounding it.

42:51Sophie Mellor:Would you describe the film, your film, would you say this is a hauntological film? You know, it plays with time so much. The interviews in it are kind of explicitly positioned as material that's kind of pulled up from the infinite archive of the internet. Yeah, I think it could be described as a hauntological film. I mean, it's not overly linear it's not clearly linear it's not really a documentary though it has some documentary tropes in it i interviews with real people but it doesn't go from a to z but it kind of jumps around all over the place so i guess i guess so sometimes i find the concept of ontology kind of irritating actually well i think with music so i have a daughter who's 14 and she's really getting into like cds and and tape cassettes they're pre-digital media and i think really with digital media people are missing the kind of hand the human hand within it and that's why people bring these like older technologies into this digital space like you know the caretaker the musician the caretaker who is bringing like music from the 1930s into his music because it has this handmade feel and you know I think that's interesting to a certain extent and then then I'm not interested in it and I think it's tricky yeah I mean if you look at it more in a problematic sense so Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensembles interviewed in the film and he talks about you know how artists haven't been given the tools to like bring forth the new and partly I guess it could be this thrall to hauntology, this like looking back, constantly looking back for inspiration and regurgitating what has happened before.

44:41Sophie Mellor:And then if you start thinking like that, you just think, well, then how does anything new ever happen? I think it almost in a way, this concept of hauntology, maybe it's actually stopping us from bringing forth the new because we are too caught up in looking backwards. Although I think some folks, I don't disagree with you there, actually, But, you know, some folks could argue or one could make the argument that this reworking of the past in our current cultural and political context is itself new or the sort of self-aware machinations of hauntology, particularly what you see with the caretaker.

45:15Sophie Mellor:Yeah, I guess. That reflexiveness and the ability to even have the awareness to interact with it and it being this sort of, instead of linear, this kind of cross sort of temporal conversation happening with various. Yeah, I guess you can have that now. because of the internet so again to go back to my daughter like she's really into like late 90s indie music that was kind of around very big with the youth right now yeah yeah it was around when i was young and like you know for me as a young person to be into what my mom was into was feeling like like it'd be deeply uncool but now because like everything is all together all at once right there in your fingertips you can do this deep dive and it's not an uncool thing there to be into 90s indie pop so i think that's quite interesting but i think also in a way in the political space and the internet the idea of the past and the future has disappeared we just have a constant now again with the hyperstition because we don't know what's real anymore therefore well, nothing's real and everything's real all at the same time.

46:23Sophie Mellor:So we feel even more able just to believe what we want to believe because it might make us feel a particular way and not want to move out of that belief because we're comfortable in there. And because nothing is real and everything is real, there's no idea. So we just sit in this space, which I think is what kind of happened in this country, in the UK, with Brexit. There was lots of public conversations about what Brexit would mean to people living in this country. And you go, OK, so you can't go and live in Europe anymore. You're going to lose your freedom of movement. These are quite big things.

47:00Sophie Mellor:But then people didn't really want to hear that. It's like, no, I believe that Brexit will stop immigration. Therefore, this is why I want it. And this is my belief. And I also want to have an old coloured passport. I want it to go back to the black passport, not the bare dignity passport of Europe. And people just sit in that beneath and they can't move out of it because everything is real and everything is not real at the same time. Yeah.

47:24Simon Poulter:One of the things, Andrea, is there's a sort of accompanying word which you might call retrostition, which is where the Republican Party in the US and Trump and co are kind of doing this right now. It's where you assemble a past that never happened. And you say, oh, in the US, it was like this. And you kind of create a vision of the 1950s America or 1960s. And it's kind of constructed around certain kind of narratives that sit within the Republican mode of thinking. And then using hyperstition and using the big phone in your hand, you just keep saying that thing over and over again. And that becomes a part of the algorithmic storyline and the narrative.

48:10Simon Poulter:And so effectively, then what happens is an idea, a retroistician, an idea of the past that never happened becomes the common vernacular and using popular far right megaphone politics that is pushed out relentlessly. And then people attach to that idea and they're like, yeah, in the 1950s, everything was perfect. And we want that right now. So we are kind of assembling an idea of the past that never really happened. And Steve Kerr, who sadly died last year, actually, he's a brilliant guy. When he's in our film, as Sophie says, he talks about the church. And actually what he means by that is the Republican Party.

48:53Simon Poulter:And essentially, the church is actually recreating this kind of idea of a happy pre-DEI kind of narrative stuff that kind of resonates with people in that kind of lifestyle. And, you know, what Steve's saying is that this is kind of really toxic because not only are we pushing out kind of like ideas of futures going to Mars, living to be at 200, we're also saying, oh, this is how the past was, like this. And so effectively, we get to an idea of post-truth and post-reality, and we get the algorithmic effect of the algorithm reinforces post-truth and post-reality. And that's kind of where we are right now is that we're being pushed into a dimension of unreality quite relentlessly, and big money is kind of behind that.

49:43Sophie Mellor:Exactly. And then that in turn crystallizes. Who's to say that isn't the new reality because of the new paradigms that we have all just exceeded our will to agree that that's the case? Yeah.

49:55Simon Poulter:And if you put AI or large language models, as I prefer to call them alongside that, then actually what large language models do is they are all of the past as data, everything that has been captured either illegally or legally. And then you strap AI to a kind of like algorithmic culture. And then effectively, you have an instrument in front of you, which can actually recreate the past and then. and a pass and re-engineer literally what it is we think has happened to us and so ultimately we are in a kind of scary hall of mirrors kind of fairground ride where everything happened nothing happened complete denial you know this is what happens every day llms are actually quite

50:46Sophie Mellor:hauntological if you think about it. Yeah, you are. I want to just circle back a little bit to Fisher's concept of capitalist realism, especially interested in sort of how it's taken on kind of a second life following his passing. What is capitalist realism? Like, why do you think that this idea in particular has resonated so widely? And do you think there's maybe kind of a revolutionary potential or kind of intent in the act of articulating it?

51:13Simon Poulter:Mark, in our film, the reason we chose the particular section, he quotes Raymond Williams. And there's this famous idea of the culture of feeling. The culture of feeling is the idea that we are effectively within something which we cannot escape. And so capitalist realism is a narrative which is about this idea of a culture of feeling. is building on Raymond Williams' thinking and saying that effectively all of our senses are impacted by capitalist realism and there is no escape. So it's quite a dark kind of thought, really, ultimately, capitalist realism, because it's saying that every aspect of how we sense the world is plugged into the mainstream function of capitalism.

52:00Simon Poulter:And capitalism will always win. You may reach for some kind of form of independent culture, punk, post-punk. You might reach for a form of Russian revolutionary literature. But ultimately, capitalism will always kind of reshape itself and find a way to capitalize or to construct itself around that. But this culture of feeling, and as I said earlier, he uses the term affective, that things act upon us. They act upon us emotionally. capitalism isn't just going to the supermarket and choosing to buy you know a particular kind of milk or going to buy a particular car or whatever capitalism is an emotional thing that affects us every day and even in our dreams you know we can't escape it towards the end of the

52:46Sophie Mellor:film jody dean talks about neo-feudalism particularly tech bro neo-feudalism and because capitalism is because it's so pervasive you can't see what's outside of it it's really hard to imagine an alternative to capitalism but I think what's interesting in a way with kind of like tech brony of socialism is you've almost got like a face you've got a face of capitalism now because it has so expanded and and gone into hyperdrive with these people with absolutely seeing ridiculous amounts of money and power it's like you do have something to rebel against there's actually a face literally a face to rebel against and structures that these people have built for example social media so i think that's quite interesting moment in time to think about the alternative to capitalism or just to start off by dismantling the face and the structures of capitalism dismantling the tech

53:42Simon Poulter:basically yeah if you watch we are making a film about mark fisher you will become a part of a global movement towards emancipation from the tech bros. Guaranteed, 100%, also free.

53:58Sophie Mellor:I want to talk a little bit about Mark's working class background. How did his working class background specifically shape the lens through which he viewed the world and also his personal experiences as sort of this hybrid academic and cultural critic who's trying to make a living at a very specific moment in the history of both academia and the media? How did he sort of turn the fact of never quite fitting in with traditional academia into a strength. I think being working class in academia and in writing and in journalism and even, you know, going to university, like being the first person in your family, for example, going to university, you're always going to be carrying this kind of imposter syndrome kind of vibe with you.

54:38Sophie Mellor:So it's always going to put you on the outside, particularly somewhere like Britain, which is, you know, still got a massive class system. So not necessarily positive, I don't think, but I think he also quite liked being on the outside to a certain extent and looking in. So he taught in further education colleges in this country. So that would be seen more as a kind of like a lesser thing to a university. But I think he enjoyed teaching that. But then he also did get into the more of the establishment, big name kind of academic circles. So he worked at Goldsmiths University, which you'd say is one of the sort of like higher universities.

55:18Sophie Mellor:But I think there was also part of him that he never got the success that perhaps other people that were writing in a similar way or in a similar field got. And that could well have partly been due to him being working class.

55:35Simon Poulter:Yeah, I think that's true. So Mark Fisher grew up in the East Midlands of the UK and his family were working class, but he was obviously very academic and he went through various institutions and then did his PhD at Warwick. and he was surrounded by an amazing group of people actually. And I think one of the things about Mark's subsequent work is that if you land in a scene, like you've got Nick Land, you've got Code 9, Code Oesh, and sort of people who all became quite high achievers, I think that gave him a voice and a kind of willingness. But when you see Mark giving a lecture, there's loads of them on YouTube and also in our film, you notice that he does kind of stutter quite a bit.

56:23Simon Poulter:He's quite nervous often. And so within the class structure in England, if you go to a private school or public school, as it's known here, you will be taught to enunciate English perfectly. You will debate with your peers and you will go to do contests where you will win gold medals. And then you will go forth into the world and you will be successful.

56:47Sophie Mellor:But also you will be taught to be a leader going to school. So like our whole government is made up of people who went to Eton and then went on to Oxford and Cambridge. And that's the people that are running this country at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting, though, because he everything we were just talking about, his background, him straddling his role as like a critic, a theorist, academia, non-academia journalist, I think is almost now I guess I'm drawing a little bit just on like Emily and mine's ambient experience. It resonates. It really resonates. It's just like, yeah, as ourselves, not coming from super wealthy backgrounds.

57:26Sophie Mellor:And we're started as music critics. We're culture critics. We are very like academia adjacent, but we're not like in academia. I guess what I'm trying to say is like it almost feels like his whole existence was a template for something that's very much now like folks who want to articulate and follow his ideas. It's sort of almost the only path, the only like space of existing that you can. Yeah. Does that make sense? But I was going to say, Andrea, like for me, it actually feels like something that is less and less possible. We come from a media perspective. We pursue these ideas from outside of the academy, squarely in the journalism world is where we come from.

58:01Sophie Mellor:And I feel like there's less and less space for that itself right now. But it is the dream. Yeah, that's exactly it. That's what I meant. It's like, it's, it's more the norm. And as a result of, you know, the acceleration of it, it feels, you know, sometimes I would romanticize both Simon and Mark and just be like that, that weird gray area that they're in is like exactly, you know, what I want to do. But it feels completely impossible now. But thinking about even just how hard it was for him then as well. I think he started out in quite a different time when he was writing. And when he was writing K-Punk, the internet was a different place.

58:34Sophie Mellor:Blogging was much different from people interacting on X or Instagram. So it was a much more open and friendly space. So he had that start of really being like a one man NME, a one man New Musical Express. And, you know, he was writing constantly about music and popular culture and bringing in theory. So I think one of the things about Mark Fisher is a very accessible writer, mostly because of this early writing around music.

59:03Simon Poulter:Yeah, I mean, what I think you're talking about, Andrea, is that now we have got a very swamped media space. So I can think of like my inbox is quite commonly raided by people in their sub stack. And I'm going to say I don't have the time in the day to read all this sub stack material. And obviously there's a whole kind of idea of monetizing sub stack and the kind of careerist notion that you can plug your stuff in and you can make some money. But hardly anybody really makes any money out of sub stack at all. So part of what we've been advocating with the film is to go back to more of that open source paradigm that I suspect you guys are both interested in, which is where we do conduct a discourse.

59:53Simon Poulter:And actually what we do is we find stuff that's cool and we curate it. And we're not kind of perpetually kind of like breaking into, you know, sort of firewalls and paywalls and stuff of content. So you're right that the media space has changed. There's so many people now doing this. One thing I'm interested in personally is like, how do you find curated sources of cool stuff, you know, which don't exist in a platform? So this is partly what we've been doing with the Mark Fisher film Instagram. We've got like a reading list and it's just a Google doc. Anybody can put a book on it or they can just add to it or music or whatever.

1:00:36Simon Poulter:So there's an idea of trying to make our media consumption a bit more eclectic and about discovery.

1:00:43Sophie Mellor:But also I think, you know, the capitalist impulse makes us all want to be like gatekeepers of our own creativity. There's this drive to, like Simon was saying, monetize everything. And of course, you know, we all need to pay the rent, pay the bills. But it's not all about, you know, setting up ourselves as mini capitalists. It's like, what if we decided not to do that? you know what if we stopped gatekeeping or content which is a horrible word as well isn't it and we're just like being open to what might come our way more things would grow from that than keeping things behind a paywall Something that I also just wanted to touch on was, and maybe I'm just projecting, but I kind of got a sense that in not fitting in squarely in the academy, but also not fitting in squarely in other places and being familiar with material struggle and being very sensitive to that and the world, that that was like an important thing in Mark Fisher becoming Mark Fisher.

1:01:42Sophie Mellor:And I say this anecdotally a lot, but there is in the journalism world, people complain about the New York Times over here in the States and how they often underplay, for example, economic issues in their coverage of domestic policy. And something that I often say to people is like, well, if you work for, you know, the main big media company your whole life, New York Times is the only media company that is like growing, kind of monopolizing the media space and where you can have a career that you never lose your job. You are going to have a different perspective on the world than if you're like Andrea and I, who have worked for a number of publications that have laid us off over and over and over again and develop class consciousness through that.

1:02:26Sophie Mellor:And I think that is like a level in which I really personally, maybe I'm projecting, but I think I resonate with Fisher. And I think that he had a unique sensitivity that others maybe squarely in the academy would not to class.

1:02:41Simon Poulter:yeah I mean I think Sophie and I have a similar view like we can't really speak for Mark Fisher we probably compared to most people we've dug around in his world now for nearly two years and so we've kind of contended a lot of the material and we've met a lot of the people and who knew him and you know that kind of thing but there are certain aspects of Mark's world which were very idiosyncratic and quite rightly so unknown to us you know i mean he was a very intensely kind of convivial person very kind person would always pass time of day with people if you sent him your latest thing like some guy said to us he sent him his critical theory notes and he'd never met him before for his classes to teach so you build up a picture of somebody who is just being very open and very unproprietorial about their life and their world.

1:03:38Simon Poulter:And that's kind of what we've done with the film. We've sort of taken the same approach. But I think there's a point where when you're quite vulnerable as a person, if you're putting out a lot all the time for other people, it can be quite hardcore, really. And I think that's something I've felt about Mark Fisher's work, is that in terms of the pathology or his experience or whatever of the world, maybe one of the things was that he was very open in a way that made him quite vulnerable. And that is a working class thing that people feel is that vulnerability. Whereas people, and I think you've both spoken very honestly about your own experiences, if you're not surrounded by wealth and if you've not got the safety net, then your world is quite different.

1:04:26Simon Poulter:and you are feeling the edge of things and you've been laid off, you've lost your job, you have to get back in the ring, you have to write the CV, you have to get ChatGPT to rewrite it and make it sound like it's great. These things are quite relentless and I think what we're talking about is that we understand from Mark Fisher that he did put himself out there quite vicariously, but actually there's something about, which I think is in your questions about that, that has vulnerability at the same time. But we can only say that what an amazing person, you know, because his work is resonating. We've spoken to a number of people who've said, well, this film has really got people looking at him again.

1:05:08Simon Poulter:And we are absolutely delighted about that, not because of any gravitas that it might attach to us, but we're excited because his experience is your experience. And you felt that yourself, the precarity of being a freelancer. So, you know, that's a really cool thing, actually. Yeah.

1:05:26Sophie Mellor:So sort of back to the Internet for a moment, we've talked about how he was a blogger at heart and working in that medium was so central to his thought or to what made him so special. We also touched on how he was, you know, kind of early in calling out social media as something that has a toxic effect on speech and specifically political speech. what was the vampire's castle? I know that was kind of a controversial piece and what did he see coming that a lot of people didn't?

1:05:59Simon Poulter:I think exiting the vampire castle from 2013 which is an open source document if anybody's listening they can google it exiting the vampire castle. I think it's possibly what he didn't see coming which is the answer to that which is that within In that essay, Mark Fisher was trying to talk about identitarian politics, and he was very firmly placing himself within that period of time. But I think in citing various people, including Russell Brand, he kind of fell into quite a full-on pit, really, in terms of at that point, Mark had a very big Twitter following. You might be able to remember there was an app called Twitter back in the day.

1:06:45Simon Poulter:And the Twitter ghosts and ghouls and vampires actually did take him on. And in some respects, what Mark wrote about was, as Jeremy Gilbert, who's another academic friend of Mark, has said, being a white guy writing about identitarian politics might not have been the best thing to do at that time. And so from that point, with that essay, what happened is that Mark took a lot of criticism, very personal and most people have experienced that either themselves or on friends where you suddenly the fire is on you from social media and he decided to quit twitter and he was very knocked by that process and so i think exiting the vampire castle is in the right intended space but the way it's articulated and the way it's historically now um reinterpreted is not necessarily really great look.

1:07:43Simon Poulter:So what Mark Fisher was really talking about in that essay was the effect of the left breaking up into identitarian forms that would be in the US, UK and other Western democratic countries. And that identitarianism was making us all into vultures, really doing takedowns on people who have got very similar opinions to us on other common areas.

1:08:09Sophie Mellor:Or like the left spending time kind of cancelling each other instead of building a coalition.

1:08:14Simon Poulter:Yeah, of course, that led to cancel culture as well. So actually, the Vampire Castle is almost a marker point historically, where that kind of thing started to happen, where the wonder of blogging and the utopia of the internet turned into the toxicity of social media. And I think Mark didn't really see all of that coming. I think he thought, you know, he could push through because he's a very robust character, But that did affect him enormously. And Exiting the Vampire Castle now is almost a textbook essay that you might give to younger people in a class to talk about identitarian politics.

1:08:52Sophie Mellor:Well, I noticed that around where you are talking about this or where the film talks about this, we have some images of and I think references to kind of like the current or present day 2020s policing of dissent against Israel coming from the left. and kind of drawing a line from that to some of those same tactics being then co-opted by the right in order to suppress dissent in that area. Am I correct in reading that implication in the film?

1:09:30Simon Poulter:Yeah.

1:09:31Sophie Mellor:So if you look unsure, you made an expression. I'm not sure if there's a direct correlation from that essay to the present political far-right culture that's particularly in Britain at the moment. But I think, as Simon said, it's almost like his essay was a precursor to that full-on cancel culture. Like, you know, Mark himself wasn't cancelled because that kind of wasn't happening then. I was talking about, and this is a big issue, I don't know exactly what the discourse around this looks like in the UK. I'm sure there's some corollary, but in the US there's definitely a feeling right now in the air that kind of cancel culture has shifted into, I mean, it was always kind of a right wing tactic.

1:10:14Sophie Mellor:We've discussed this as well on this, like the right was always using cancel cancellation tactics. I think it might also be somehow endemic to the capitalized space of social media that sort of like incentivizes it. But there's definitely a very pronounced feeling in the U.S. right now and Trump's second term that the canceling is coming from the right. and then the cancelling is also coming from the centre-left against the left, or those same sort of dynamics that were being criticised by the right in the 2010s are now, it's kind of flipped. That was why I was struck by the references to the pro-Palestin, pro-Palestinian protesters.

1:10:52Sophie Mellor:So we have an artist and writer Dave Beach talking in the film, and he talks about, you know, it got to the point where the left just didn't have the words to kind of speak to the electorates you know they didn't have the right in this country and also in the u.s and other countries has this libidinous way of talking sexy for want of a better word way of talking that instantly draws you in it's like pithy it's like in this country you know you have people saying stop the boats this kind of very simple direct way of talking that draws you in and the left really doesn't have an equivalent way of talking if you think about all the kind of like catchphrases you know the far right has catchphrases it has very particular ways of speaking that draws you in really quickly and and the left really can't find the words to counter that and I think it is a lot about language and communication that where we are in this country now and and Palestine actions is a good example of that in a way because you know at some point they're a terrorist organization and then they weren't you know this kind of word terrorist was applied to them and then the courts took it away for a bit and then it put it back in again and you know see the palestine action protest in the film and people are being arrested for words really they're being arrested for holding up a sign saying i support palestine action and they're a terrorist and so i think words and how you communicate is something that really comes out in the film.

1:12:25Simon Poulter:And I think hitting your very delicately put question, I like the way you did that.

1:12:31Sophie Mellor:I hope it was delicate.

1:12:33Simon Poulter:Yeah, it was very delicate. And that actually what happens is that from identitarianism, we get a set of splintered orthodoxies, and therefore people can be going down into those orthodoxies and actually defending positions from those niche interests. And if we go back to thinking about intersectionality, which I think is really interesting still. And in Trump America, intersectionality is now being kind of pushed back and suppressed, you know. But actually, the orthodoxies, I think, were what Mark Fisher was relating to. I think what he was trying to do, which is what Sophie's saying, is to kind of say, what we need is a much more broader, libidinous, leftist culture, which is inclusive and is intersectional and reaches across all of these different dimensions but actually what we we are facing is orthodoxies and silos of opinion where as we've said earlier people who've got quite similar attitudes on many different things will fall out about one very fine detailed issue and so american culture and british culture are very similar in that respect the gaps have been collapsed so there's no longer a discursive space to conduct a debate in a kind of open way.

1:13:49Simon Poulter:And I think what Mark Fisher was talking about and what we talk about in our film is that we are now, in terms of the idea of communication, we're in a situation where a lot of people don't necessarily say what they think because they're already...

1:14:05Sophie Mellor:Well, they're in self-sensorship.

1:14:07Simon Poulter:Yeah, they're already understanding what the narrative is ahead of the situation. So we cannot have honest, discursive discussions because we're already mediating or self-censoring our responses. so the way out from this is as mark fisher talks about in his later work sadly obviously he didn't continue that writing but the way out of this is a much more libidinal permissive notion of the left which is where we have a greater intersectional frontier of people who have lots of differences but they have a commonality enough to actually drive things forward and if at the moment our perception or my perception in the UK looking at American politics is American politics doesn't seem to be able to get this broader leftist consensual thing together and what Sophie's saying to actually corral the narrative and the messaging and to say we are going to own this situation and this shit that Trump is pushing out every day we're going to meet it with a way of living that we want in the US there is a strong need to actually pull back the narrative and actually allow people to fall out and have disagreements but let's actually conduct that

1:15:30Sophie Mellor:broader narrative and make that stick I mean the problem we have here which I think is probably shared on some level in the UK I know like Jeremy Corbyn was recently trying to like form his new party I don't know if that actually happened but the problem we have here is that the left or the Democratic Party is split between the centrist Democrats and then the sort of Democratic socialist inspired left. And I think we do see in like Zoran Mamdani and other candidates sort of like picking up the Bernie mantle. And moving forward, you do see sort of like a rallying around a consolidated message on some level.

1:16:08Sophie Mellor:And you do see sort of, I think, a reconciliation or what you described as sort of like uniting around the common issue of class, but in a way that makes space for a diversity of people all together. It doesn't erase identity. The problem is the party is controlled by the other side. But we have some interesting elections coming up and we're going to see what happens. Even here in Philly, there's like a exciting congressional candidate who is running and he's trying to pull off the Zoran thing here and we'll see.

1:16:41Simon Poulter:I mean, one of the things about American politics is one of the things I first learned when I went to America is that what really makes Americans change their mind about stuff is the price of gas. Okay. Yes. What's going on right now with the price of gas in America? Yeah.

1:17:00Sophie Mellor:I wouldn't know what you're talking about. I don't think that is enough to change people's minds anymore. Because it's not good now. Well, this goes back to the larger crash. I mean, of hyperstition at play a little bit, or at least what you're seeing Trump and his ilk trying to do with, you know, and just seeing how gas, when he says, oh, the Strait of Hormuz will be open in whatever days, he's just like making that shit up. But you're seeing the stocks adapt accordingly versus on the ground. Some people think that Trump won the election rhetorically because of the price of gas. I think it was the price of eggs.

1:17:33Sophie Mellor:Yeah, the price of eggs. But yeah, this now becomes even more meta, right? Because like we just don't know. we can say that we feel that it is making a difference. I mean, you do look at his approval ratings right now, but at this point, I wouldn't put anything past what could happen or what could change that going forward because it's nothing is grounded. The price of gas is no longer maybe right now we're seeing it have an impact. But the hope the Democratic Party's hope is that this is going to are not exactly the same, but many of the same things that cause people to elect Trump because things were too expensive are now going to cause people to swing the other way and vote for the Democrats.

1:18:09Sophie Mellor:So the Democrats are sort of like, we're just going to maintain the status quo and not really change anything. And people will just naturally, because of the cost of living, vote the other way. And I'm sure that there's variations of this going on with elections across the West as well.

1:18:24Simon Poulter:Yeah. Yeah. One thing that we could talk about though is we could say that Mark Fisher is a really great example of what we would call a public intellectual. and he's writing about popular modernism and his work is extremely accessible and his ideas have got a resonance and actually we could say where are the public intellectuals of our current culture, you know?

1:18:51Sophie Mellor:But I think in this country that kind of infrastructure has been whittled away so making the comparator with Italy one of the reasons the film's gone down so well there and people are so into Mark Fisher they still have this kind of network of community cultural spaces. And I think also through their education, this idea of cultural thought and talking about cultural issues and politics, you know, it's part of their culture. And that infrastructure is still there to some extent. Whereas in the UK, this community way of coming together, community centres, social clubs. In this country, a lot of clubs are associated with various industries that are now gone like mining and still these kind of community spaces have been whittled away.

1:19:39Sophie Mellor:So you don't have that kind of natural place to come together and have these kind of conversations. Yeah, that's a really astute observation. I'd also argue that the sort of institutional infrastructure for having public intellectuals just broadly across Western countries, with maybe Italy being one of the exceptions, has kind of been whittled away as well. It's like, what even is a public intellectual? The context and perception and relationship to a public intellectual is so different now from even later on in Marx's life. They exist. The new public intellectuals are all, they're all influencers.

1:20:14Sophie Mellor:Exactly, exactly. like bloggers streamers yeah reality tv stars like even your president is a reality tv star right yeah we're trying to be a public intellectual in the vein of mark and others it's kind of impossible to actually be one without becoming an influencer and then what is that you

1:20:34Simon Poulter:know yeah yeah yeah i just want to read this bit because part of the instagram account is to kind to capture this sort of stuff because i think we might end up being friends and working together which would be really cool definitely it's not not just the kind of thing that we're doing so this is paraphrasing but it's um it says fascism thrives when the neoliberal consensus fails to provide a future leading to a cancellation of the future yeah as capitalism becomes unable to imagine alternatives far-right narratives fill the void presenting themselves as rebellious while actually reproducing the status quo and raking off capital this is the situation we find ourselves in when was that from well this is a piece of writing that we have made which reframes some of fisher's writing when we say that you're like yeah that's it isn't it that's it

1:21:35Sophie Mellor:I think we can recognize the situation though, can't we? I mean, the problem is what to do about it. And that's what's coming out to all these discussions.

1:21:42Simon Poulter:But you see, the thing is that we could, if we apply the warp button to this podcast, we can say, well, we've hit it off now. We like each other. We've all experienced precarity. So what we have to do is probably hang on to the good stuff from this, which is that we've become friends and we're going to do more things together. and we're not just going to kind of inhabit our media worlds where we go off and construct other little things because we've all got something invested here, a bit of shared time and shared thinking. And as you were speaking, Andrea, this is not pejorative, but I was thinking, what would it be like if you did like a 48-hour podcast nonstop, you know?

1:22:23Simon Poulter:Because what I've enjoyed about this is that we have got into a lot of detail and the landscape feels open here. And that's cool, isn't it? So podcast is normally a thing where it's like, oh, hey, guys, got your new film. Yeah, yeah, we got a new film. Great. Yeah, you got a new film. But actually, we're talking about real things here. But they are going to edit it. I know you're going to edit it. But actually, the thing in itself is great. We've done this and we need to hold on to that bit of it, you know.

1:22:52Sophie Mellor:As far as it's the idea of like, you know, people talk about slowing down and slowing down is a way of tackling capitalism. you know capitalism is driving us to go faster and faster and faster so what happens if you slow down which sometimes i find that idea like really irritating because you know i've got a busy life i can't just slow down and you know do self-care you're really busy though so no no no i'm not no i don't think so but yeah i mean that is a way isn't it just don't be productive is that how we stop you know this this battle against you know how we stop capitalism by stopping producing stopping being productive we joke about that we like to sit in beds on our phones on instagram and that's how we work you know so little ways you can like we're not going into an office and standing around the water cooler and waiting till five o 'clock you know we're kind of trying to do capitalism on our own terms i guess so maybe that's maybe that's the way of doing it i don't know yes but hey me and english yeah yeah yeah we have a bath at two o 'clock in the afternoon you know it's like because we can no it's it's interesting though because i mean i think that another sort of light that i'm leaning from this and from the project and our interactions is it is a reminder what you've been able to accomplish with this project that the more idealistic promise of the tools and technology of the internet and all that is it's actually like it's still there i mean people are so quick these days we talk a lot about on this show is you know how quick people are to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of like we see this time and time again it's like the internet like whatever technology is at hand going back to like the luddites even as a political movement like the issue has not been the technology itself is bad but it is you know what those in power have chosen to do with it or not to do with it and i think you're making a real case for the potential of some of these technologies still actually potentially leading us to a way out of this mess and not just being something we have to get rid of wholesale yeah I think I go back to Mickey I still I love her sentence you know how much tech is enough tech and right and then another thing that you know classicalism wants to do is keep us in fear you know we're parents and we have teenage children and you know there's the fear around social media and teenagers yeah you know there's a lot of very real bad things happening there there's lots of really good stuff as well and you can use social media in a way that's creative and interesting and it's also you know it's it's citizen journalism isn't it it's like you're put you're making a podcast you're nobody has to you don't have to be wait to be employed to make this podcast you're doing it you've got the technology and the skills and you can put it online there it is whereas you know before the internet you wouldn't be able to do that at all obviously but capitalism wants us to be scared so it can sell us more things what do you um think about mark fisher andrea what i think about mark fisher yeah yeah what's your take on him

1:25:55Simon Poulter:in what sense well it's clear that he is a figure that resonates in like your world and you live in la and la is kind of like oh the ultimate city isn't it of capitalism really and you know the the gap not new york yeah well i'm from new york you're from new york i was going to say the gap between success and failure in LA. I mean, like Sophie and I went to LA and we spent ages exploring the LA River, which of course in July is empty. And it's just this gorgeous, and it is a hauntological thing, the LA River. But I'm just asking you, because Mark Fisher for a lot of people in England talks about, you know, you read it and you think, okay, yeah, that's me.

1:26:45Simon Poulter:I'm that person. But, you know, I'm asking you what you think about what hits you from his writing.

1:26:52Sophie Mellor:Yeah, I mean, I think I had a really similar experience with him. You know, when I first encountered capitalist realism, it was just this sense of affirmation kind of like, yeah, that's me. Him managing to articulate a lot of more complex thoughts and observations. I have a background in sociology as well. So I think and I've always been very, very interested in class. Part of that has to do with, I think for me, I grew up in LA. I'm the child of an immigrant and working class background essentially, but was thrust into a lot of, you know, I had the strange opportunities to be thrust into a lot of sort of higher, more moneyed spaces in LA when I was growing up, but it was very like removed from me, but it was very much observing the microcosm of culture and society that LA very much embodies and visibility as well.

1:27:39Sophie Mellor:And so for me, I just felt very at home when I found Fisher's work and the way that he just sort of thought about culture and the way that it interacts, intersects with money and society and power. Yeah. And technology, of course. Cool. I don't know if I answered your question. Yeah, no, you have. Yeah. We're almost done here. We have two more questions.

1:28:00Simon Poulter:I was hoping this was going to be 48 hour nonstop podcast.

1:28:04Sophie Mellor:Maybe we can do a 48 hour one. We might just manifest it. That would be an interesting stunt to manifest and get people in every time zone. Yeah. Take over. We could help with that.

1:28:16Simon Poulter:Definitely. Yeah.

1:28:18Sophie Mellor:So we touched on this a bit, but would you say that Fisher's work outlines or implies a certain kind of praxis? And was it a praxis that took place, would you say, in the cultural realm or a praxis that took place in the streets? And also, where does acid communism fit in with this?

1:28:37Simon Poulter:I think the praxis largely took place in further education colleges, and it took place in places like City Lit, which is a place for people who can go and do adult education. And it took place in strange rooms in Eastern Europe where there might be media agencies, media arts. So I think Mark Fisher deliberately located his work in the popular domain and the popular milieu, and he wasn't attention seeking to get into the kind of mainstream culture. the other thing that he did was he had a kind of a polemic about protest and he did attend quite a lot of those big protests that are in our film and he was very excited about the student protests in the UK because he felt a kind of sense of tangible change but a lot of his writing after that he laments the idea of and then it's in our film what if we held the protest and everybody came, the idea of, and I'm paraphrasing here, in London, it's quite possible to go to a big protest on a Saturday with your kids and family, and then you go back to work on Monday.

1:29:51Simon Poulter:And basically, his idea of praxis in that respect was, well, that's not good enough. Actually, that's just a kind of middle class holding position of playing into protest with no actual form, functional change. So the idea of acid communism was, we're told, a joke, but acid communism is a kind of serious joke. And what it upholds is the idea of the, as Sophie said, the libidinal energy of the 60s and the 70s, and the movements in culture in the US and UK and other countries. And some people would say, by the way, that the global self perspective is actually missing in Mark Fisher's thought quite rightly.

1:30:34Simon Poulter:And he was because our politics were very much like the US and navigated around kind of like East West, Russians are bad, we're good kind of thing. But actually, the Global South thing didn't really come into the picture. And I think that's an omission. And that is certainly something we've been thinking about with our film. But actually, acid communism is an idea of a return to a libidinal progressive culture where stuff happens, people make music, people hang out. It's an idea of a kind of live and let live, kind of leftist progressive culture where things are much more emergent and a bit more flaky and rough around the edges.

1:31:16Simon Poulter:And in this respect, what he's talking about is that now digital culture is very hard edged and our lifestyles are very programmatic. And as we move more and more into the idea of an algorithm running our daily life acid communism actually really leaps out as quite a good idea so i think what acid communism is is it's an idea of a recombined left where you take your time back you connect with people you do stuff this all sounds kind of like terribly obvious

1:31:49Sophie Mellor:doesn't it really yeah but i think it's also i mean if you look back to the 16th and 17th it's not just us having parties sitting around and getting stoned is it i mean there's like massive and societal change around rights for women lots of new equality laws looking at race so i think that's what he's referring to surely more than like yeah it's kind of the thing about acid

1:32:13Simon Poulter:communism it's sort of unfinished business because um it was written towards the end of Mark's life and then there's a book kind of like lectures of him with his students at Goldsmiths and it's kind of looking at poking at different ways of recreating a progressive culture and some of it is a little bit off I mean an example would be I personally I lived in a commune for eight years and I would not recommend it to other people highly but in that writing there's discussions about communal living and that kind of thing so the tail end of mark's writing is as andy beckett says in our film is about using the past as a way to rethink what the future looks like which comes back to weirdly our earlier conversation whereas mickey aurora says you know she uses the term occult and she says i'm an occultist and there's a big movement now i know this is happening in the US, but particularly in the UK around reconnecting with like folk histories, reconnecting with rituals and magic and stuff like that.

1:33:20Simon Poulter:And actually, you kind of look at that, and you think if you were kind of like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk, you'd be like, huh, where's the money in that? How are we going to control the universe? And actually, the occult is a kind of an expression of a refutation of that deep level of control through capital. And actually, what I find interesting is that that's coming from another generation perhaps a bit lower than even you two guys people who are trying to reconstruct through looking at the past and some of those things which can be reused as tools for a more progressive vision.

1:33:55Sophie Mellor:Simon and Sophie thank you so much for your time you've been really so generous and looking forward to more with you offline and otherwise. Absolutely thank you. Obviously people should go to the Instagram for all things we are making a film about Mark Fisher but is there anywhere else that we can direct folks or that you want to direct them to to check out more about the project and your work yeah on our website you can see the full tour schedule of where the film's going around the world and our website is www.closeandremote.net and you can also see examples of other projects we've done great thanks so much cool thanks guys

1:34:39Sophie Mellor:This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominik. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.