CTM 2013 – Welcome to the Virtual Plaza by Mark Fisher

Provenance

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.

• 00:00:00

  Okay. I'm usually massively over-ambitious in what I think I can get into the time, so I try my best. What I want to defend, in a way, is a certain conception of melancholy. It's just about the only possible strategy in a kind of miserable world of capitalist realism. I think the crisis I'm talking about today really…

• 00:06:47

  Nobody thinks that it can ever happen again. Nobody. And we all accept that this is the case. The great days of music are in the past. And, you know, how has it come to that, actually? Why have we come to gradually and slowly lower our expectations? Because it's not that nothing's happened in that period. I think…

• 00:14:09

  But, you know, art schools were the engines of innovation and, you know, wave after wave of kind of music culture from the 60s to the sort of beginning of the 80s. And a sort of re-emboisement of art schools. I mean, art schools were working classes. You know, the first class kids would go to have access…

• 00:21:01

  Part of the way that this is recuperated by neoliberal capitalism is it wants to say, well, OK, well, look, we don't have racism and sexism in the media anymore, and that's because of capitalism. It's because of neoliberalism. That's obviously a ludicrous articulation. But, you know, we shouldn't be forced into…

• 00:29:02

  Clearly, who believes that anymore than they know? But, you know, this kind of modernist notion that culture just shouldn't endlessly be repeating, that it should be able to articulate the present moment, I believe... I'm with Bifo on this. I can't give up on that. ...notion. And I, for me, this... You…

• 00:36:21

  You know, when I first got my Blackberry, you know, I got so addicted to checking things and this one time I knew it was socially unacceptable to, to, to actually look at the Blackberry because I was having dinner with somebody but, you know, I let my fingers just do the clicking motion under the, under the table. You…

• 00:49:38

  I mean, this is also a kind of angelic idea to end up like Bartleby and doing nothing. I mean, this is also something... Okay, another question now here and then there is another behind there. And then maybe one or two more and then... Okay. I just wanted to come back to something Mark said at the beginning about…

• 00:57:17

  And the reason why hope is so difficult to sustain, after all, if one is condemned to a sort of bored perpetual life, as is the feeling, a feeling of no change and endless sameness, then what hope can there be? I realize that's more of a statement than a question as well, but... Okay. So, we take this as a final…