Crisis Complex Mark Fisher on the Otolith Group's 'Anathema'

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:03

  So Mark, we've just described the different parts of the film, but I haven't gone into detail. So we'd love to hear you expanding on the handout that we've given everyone with your different sections. OK, so I'm not going to talk that directly about the film. I'm just going to talk about, I think, the sort…

• 00:07:51

  A few quotes here, which I've given you, which illustrate this. I'm going to go to the second one in the second section. I think summarizes clearly what Baudrillard thought was happening. Solicitation is substituted for the ultimatum. Mandatory passivity evolves into models constructed directly from the active…

• 00:12:46

  What's striking about a lot of the developments of sort of entertainment culture in the 21st century then. Is the way in which they fuse these two modes that we have that the reality TV mode synthesized with the kind of opinion poll mode in, you know, in sort of the talent competition, which is classically…

• 00:21:10

  You know, often you have to touch in precisely the right place, exert precisely the right pressure. And actually the world way of… I don't know, but actually, the world way of… I don't know, but actually, the world way of… where you're engaging on the plane of abstraction via the old keyboard, rather than apparently…

• 00:32:33

  But the autonomous thesis is that capital is essentially and increasingly a parasite which struggles to convert sort of sociability, communicative interaction of people into profit. And I think what we get with anathema is with this de-anchorage of this kind of erotic image flow, of this promise of tactile…

• 00:41:09

  of the present. So that was kind of interesting to reread and come across that. And you kind of described the term... You used the term postlexia to describe these kids. Yeah. And they spend all their time with this capital's image-dense data, which I suppose is exactly what anathema looks at. Yeah, it does. And…

• 00:45:53

  Or is there an escape from outside language in a certain way? And like you say, I think a lot of mathematics is wordless. And the words that do appear are glossolalia, nonsense. So I'm not sure that I've got a, just as you haven't got a question, I'm not sure that I've got the right answer. But I hope that's some…

• 00:51:57

  That's been really great. Oh, thank you. I thank everybody who's there. I can sort of see in a blurry way. But that's . No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No worries. No…