Mark Fisher - DIY Conference

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

  I'm going to make a start now. First of all, thanks to Barry and everyone at Incubate for a superbly well-organized festival. And thanks to everyone for coming to listen today. I hope some of you or most of you were at Simon Reynolds' talk, which just happened because in response to that talk, basically scrapped what…

• 00:09:12

  You see why I'm not getting into what I was supposed to be doing. But, OK, what I, you know, one of the things I was really interested in then was Simon's distinction between the two types of DIY. Like, you know, the kind of cool dimension of DIY to do with music and culture, etc. And the more depressing, mundane type…

• 00:17:31

  And, actually, that's in itself significant. Channel 4, in the early days of the network, that's where I first saw Tarkovsky films. That's where they would have hour-long debates with philosophers on there. Now, it's Tories, you know, talking about, well, you've got your £450,000, are you going to spend it, you know…

• 00:25:01

  Maybe we should think more carefully about what we're saying. You know, like... These are not good conditions for winning a war. I think partly what I'm saying here is that politics and aesthetics cross over, but conditions for good aesthetics may well be negative capabilities, as Keats called them, of doubts…

• 00:32:05

  In the current issue of the London Review of Books, there's a great story about the privatisation of electricity in the UK, saying Britain's the only country stupid enough to privatise its electricity. And... That... Part of the argument there is that the architect of the concept of privatisation... When he was coming…

• 00:39:23

  But... And also that mainstream media is decadent, which is not worth bothering with. We don't struggle with mainstream... We don't bother struggling with... And also that parliamentary politics, local government, all of those things, they're decadent, superseded, etc. And kind of... There's also a libidinal argument…

• 00:47:01

  He was on the BBC and able to say that. He was on the BBC and able to say that by the end of the week. But, you know... So, not only did it prompt an authoritarian backlash, I think that it was also not... You know, it wasn't... Clearly, whilst it was negatively political, it was social, political and aesthetic…

• 00:54:39

  So, I'll end on that, I think. I don't know how I'm doing for time. APPLAUSE That's a question. OK, yeah. Thank you.