Mark Fisher - Terminator vs. Avatar

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: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). 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

  The revolutionary path, or what came after revolution, a new kind of strategy, would be to somehow accelerate capitalism to the point where it kind of went beyond itself. This got revisited, this moment, in a sort of equally forgotten period in the 90s in UK philosophy, in a moment that is almost entirely forgotten…

• 00:03:29

  We prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don't wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either. In his introduction to his 1994 translation of this book. From which the above extraordinary outburst comes. Ian Hamilton Grant referred to a certain maturity…

• 00:06:01

  If only for its notoriety. The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive. They hang on tight and spit on me. Enjoyed the hysterical masochistic whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines. In the foundries. In the factories. In hell. They enjoyed it. Enjoyed the mad destruction of their…

• 00:08:31

  Metal bars. style being sausage pâtés and cyberspace matrix. So briefly I just want to make three claims that I can't really defend but maybe we'll get into in the discussion. One, everyone's an accelerationist, really. Two, accelerationism has never really happened as a political position. Three, Marxism is nothing…

• 00:11:29

  Hatred for the academic left was in fact one of the libidinal motors of Land's work. And this is a quote from Machine of Desire, which is in the Urban Order collection. Machine of revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction, through socialistic regulation, pressing towards ever more uninhibited…

• 00:14:22

  And which reach empirical termination only contingently if and when its material substrate burns out. Hegelo-Marxist historical materialism inverted. Capital not ultimately being masked as exploited labour power. Rather, humans are the meat puppet of capital, with identities and self-understanding simulations which…

• 00:17:36

  The actual near future wasn't about capital stripping off its latex mask, revealing the machinic death's head beneath. It was just the opposite. New sincerity. Apple computers advertised by kitschy juicy pop. And this failure to foresee the extent to which pastiche recapitulation and a hyper-edipalised neurotic…

• 00:20:36

  3. What we need is Frederick Jameson, the author of Walmart as Utopia, and a kind of nuanced accelerationist, I would argue, is that the left is a moral critique of capitalism. 4. The left is a moral critique of capitalism. 5. The left is a political critique of capitalism, a political critique of the political…