Joan Of Art -- 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, what you were saying there at the end about the rich declaring independence from humanity reminded me of a quote from William Gibson who said the rich aren't human anymore. And I think that's part of the shock of the death of Steve Jobs, right? Like, you know, we sort of want to believe in some sense the rich…

• 00:03:09

  And often with the capitalist realism, there's this kind of faux sorrow. We might have liked to have believed in socialist utopias, but we know they don't work now. So we've got to face this. This is how things are. And deal with the reality of things, instead of creating castles in the air. So, I mean, but I mean…

• 00:07:03

  And, you know, these ludicrous documents that are completely disconnected from reality. The only function of which is to, you know, when we had to fill in one of these documents in which one of the managers said to us, yeah, you haven't got enough criticisms in this document. Okay, it's this form of mandatory Maoism…

• 00:09:43

  Where they are constrained by a highly centralized bureaucracy. How can this be? How can this be the case? How can there be this claim of neo-liberalism to have liberated us from the state, yet what we've actually seen is the massive increase, not only of centralized state control, but of a more pernicious form…

• 00:13:38

  Am I like a supermarket providing them with a service which they can complain about, or am I an odd-styled disciplinary figure who has authority over them? Nobody knows. Now, post-2008, I think, in 2008, we would have thought things might have changed with the bank crisis, but what we've seen is really…

• 00:16:45

  Yes, the idea that the state would deliver all our political goals, that's clearly wrong. But the idea that we can completely withdraw from the state I think is also a mistake. And again, I think slightly in tension with what Mike said, the problem for me is not that things weren't anarchist enough after 2008…

• 00:20:20

  But it's clearly not enough in itself. And I think, politically speaking, this is a problem of articulation. That what the right is, the right, the right have been better revolutionaries than us, you know, and they've been better at post-modernism than us. In the sense that the right has achieved a total switchover…

• 00:23:03

  The right know this. You know, they're happy with us having little, you know, they're happy with us out there with ghetto blasters and, you know, happy out, out there in tents because they know that that is something that's easily rooted around and that change is a matter of indirect action not direct action. And…