8 responses to “Do you miss the future? Mark Fisher interviewed”
On one level I say fuck “the future” that may never happen, we have a present we need to deal with. I support long-term thinking as risk analysis but all this talk about “stealing the future”, “the future is dead” is just so much projection and fear. The reality is that we have serious problems right now, today! If we don’t radically change nearly all that we do and are there won’t be a future to sing songs about..
I think that at his best Fisher is more bemoaning how we are living all kinds of ballardian banalities rather than as you say getting to the work of actively making our lives better but yeah there is an unfortunate Romanticism to his work that goes beyond being a pop-culture critic, one sees this all over the place with many figures that are often thought of as “dark”, from where I’m sitting our lives in the midst of the ruination of modernism assemblages is just brutally grim and not Gothic. http://iainews.iai.tv/articles/the-future-is-a-storm-front-auid-327
Yeah, but I’m not targeting Mark here per se. I like his work. I just don’t think the futurist lingo does the work some think it does.. “Dark” comes in many colors.
Seems like part of what Mark’s problem with us is that the death of the future is really the death of the imagination. We can’t imagine the future. In this sense “the future” he’s talking about doesn’t exist anymore than the one that is supposedly dead. He is trying to reanimate a corpse. Nick Land, meanwhile, has the future arriving all the time via the concept a templex auto-production in which it produces itself within the horror of a speculative fictional temporal loop. Of course the future in part of Land’s projects is just a hypercapitalist Borg matrix…so…
he clearly finds us to be stuck in a kind of engineered&programmed repetition-compulsion rather than things changing from the bottom (or the garage/street) up, let alone progressing a la Land, but it rings with a bit of old man complaints that the pop music of today isn’t what the vital hip/alt music of my day was. Be interesting to have both of them comment on auto-tuned singing (or elevator music, is there still such a thing?)…
The repetition-compulsion is spot on, both in terms of the subjective experience of desire (an obsessive-compulsion is a way to manage desire, keep its anarchic flows in strictly delimited static crystallisations), and in terms of an enforced cultural stagnation.
I dunno if Mark is guilty of that old man problem. Maybe. But I certainly experienced it lately. A bunch of Marxists talking about the counter-culture…and all they could say, their Universe of reference, was Lukacs, “the Party”, the hippies, punk. It was the moribund stink in there.
I put forward a challenge to them: that they couldnt talk about a contemporary counter culture because their isn’t one, and that there isn’t one because desire doesn’t flow anymore, it can’t be given form, can’t be sculpted, because desire requires anticipation and anticipation requires a future which we lack.
now I could be wrong on that, and I could have seemed like a bastard just for suggesting it, but the response I got was some shit about Lukasc and the hippies.
A question occurred to about the title of this here interview- do you miss the future? I qualify, at least in Bifo’s periodisation, as one of those who came “after the future”; are 30somethings and below, in even talking about missing the future, guilty of a constructed nostalgia equal to that of kids who fetishise musical subcultures/counter-cultures they were never around for?
synthetic zerØ 
On one level I say fuck “the future” that may never happen, we have a present we need to deal with. I support long-term thinking as risk analysis but all this talk about “stealing the future”, “the future is dead” is just so much projection and fear. The reality is that we have serious problems right now, today! If we don’t radically change nearly all that we do and are there won’t be a future to sing songs about..
I think that at his best Fisher is more bemoaning how we are living all kinds of ballardian banalities rather than as you say getting to the work of actively making our lives better but yeah there is an unfortunate Romanticism to his work that goes beyond being a pop-culture critic, one sees this all over the place with many figures that are often thought of as “dark”, from where I’m sitting our lives in the midst of the ruination of modernism assemblages is just brutally grim and not Gothic.
http://iainews.iai.tv/articles/the-future-is-a-storm-front-auid-327
Yeah, but I’m not targeting Mark here per se. I like his work. I just don’t think the futurist lingo does the work some think it does.. “Dark” comes in many colors.
Seems like part of what Mark’s problem with us is that the death of the future is really the death of the imagination. We can’t imagine the future. In this sense “the future” he’s talking about doesn’t exist anymore than the one that is supposedly dead. He is trying to reanimate a corpse. Nick Land, meanwhile, has the future arriving all the time via the concept a templex auto-production in which it produces itself within the horror of a speculative fictional temporal loop. Of course the future in part of Land’s projects is just a hypercapitalist Borg matrix…so…
he clearly finds us to be stuck in a kind of engineered&programmed repetition-compulsion rather than things changing from the bottom (or the garage/street) up, let alone progressing a la Land, but it rings with a bit of old man complaints that the pop music of today isn’t what the vital hip/alt music of my day was. Be interesting to have both of them comment on auto-tuned singing (or elevator music, is there still such a thing?)…
The repetition-compulsion is spot on, both in terms of the subjective experience of desire (an obsessive-compulsion is a way to manage desire, keep its anarchic flows in strictly delimited static crystallisations), and in terms of an enforced cultural stagnation.
I dunno if Mark is guilty of that old man problem. Maybe. But I certainly experienced it lately. A bunch of Marxists talking about the counter-culture…and all they could say, their Universe of reference, was Lukacs, “the Party”, the hippies, punk. It was the moribund stink in there.
I put forward a challenge to them: that they couldnt talk about a contemporary counter culture because their isn’t one, and that there isn’t one because desire doesn’t flow anymore, it can’t be given form, can’t be sculpted, because desire requires anticipation and anticipation requires a future which we lack.
now I could be wrong on that, and I could have seemed like a bastard just for suggesting it, but the response I got was some shit about Lukasc and the hippies.
A question occurred to about the title of this here interview- do you miss the future? I qualify, at least in Bifo’s periodisation, as one of those who came “after the future”; are 30somethings and below, in even talking about missing the future, guilty of a constructed nostalgia equal to that of kids who fetishise musical subcultures/counter-cultures they were never around for?