Off_The_Page_2014_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.

Listen

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

  Mark Fisher. Thanks Tony and thanks everyone for coming so early on a Saturday. I'm just going to play a couple of, well not whole tracks but fragments from tracks just to set the tone of what I'm going to say. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. It's so crazy, crazy, crazy. I get everything figured…

• 00:12:57

  By 80s girl as a computer apart, if you heard North without knowing the history, you wouldn't assume any connection with dubstep. At the same time, North isn't straightforwardly a return to a pre-dance sound. It is more a continuation of a certain mode of electronic pop that was prematurely terminated sometime…

• 00:20:13

  This hedonist sadness, a sadness as widespread as it is disavowed, was nowhere better captured than in the doleful way that Drake sings, We threw a party, yeah, we threw a party, and take care of Marvin's room, and nothing could sound more miserable than this party. Just as a break for a few minutes, another track…

• 00:29:02

  There's no reference to sadness, again, in the official text of the song, but it's a representation of the ! Meaning that the hauntology, like the kind of melancholy, takes a disavowed form. Take a track like the Black Eyed Peas' immensely popular I Got a Feeling, which was, I think, the most downloaded track…

• 00:38:44

  Yes. And you came up with this idea of a kind of cyborgs trying to break free from their casings almost, which I thought was quite a powerful image. And one thing I noticed this week while I worked, there was a placement student wearing a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt who must have been about 18 and that's a single…

• 00:45:36

  If you look at technology in music, you went from the cylinder to the flat disk. You went from mono to stereo. You went from one track to multi-track, from analog to digital. So it was like the future was pulling us all the time. And the 21st century seems to be about the other way around. It's about the building…

• 00:53:51

  Yeah. And producing this, I mean, you know, Bruce Sterling says it's the age of atemporality now. And he thinks that's, you know, that's not, that's no longer postmodernism. I'd say it's, it's just postmodernism, a naturalized form of postmodernism. In terms of this question of depression, I think what I'm trying…

• 01:01:24

  The... The... Mainstream dominant culture had to bargain with this to some degree. It doesn't really have to in the same way anymore, I don't think. Well, thanks, everyone. Thanks for the questions. It was great to hear. Sorry, we've got to... Yeah, good questions, everybody. Got to move along, really. Next, coming…