The K-Files presents 'Robin Mackay A CCRU Retrospective'

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.

• 00:00:30

  Hello and welcome to Zero Books Presents Buddies Without Organs Presents The K-Files. I am Sean and I am joined as ever by Matt. Hi Sean. I'm Corey. Hey buddies. And our inaugural guest, we have with us Robin Mackay. Hello. Hello Robin. Am I the first guest you've ever had? The first guest we've ever had, yeah. I…

• 00:13:25

  I mean, Guattari is more of a renegade, I suppose. But they were very well educated, you know. So, then, you know, so I was kind of, I ended up being semi-educated in quite a sophisticated, brand of philosophy, which in turn had internalized all the history of the philosophy that went before it. You know, if you read…

• 00:35:16

  Not like theorizing about culture in a kind of patronizing way. Yeah. Which I think is how they saw ultimately the status quo in cultural studies was that it was always talking about culture and talking down to culture, even when it was studying subcultures. There was a... I don't know if this is... This is maybe…

• 00:52:07

  Yeah. And so in a way, you could say CCRU is one of the few enterprises to really extend that tradition rather than studying it from outside. You know, they're really like synthesizing these elements from these different places and producing more of this type of writing, which is once has like the compelling character…

• 01:04:10

  But let me say this, that I think during my, my strong memory of being involved in this group of people at Warwick, um, and I think one of the reasons why everyone who was involved, involved in that scene has been somewhat kind of dazed and, uh, confused for years afterwards and decades even afterwards is that there…

• 01:16:25

  You, you're concept engineers. Um, and that though, that's kind of a, it's, it's something that I always think about all the time that especially, um, I remember something that came up recently was someone I was talking about capitalist realism. It's like a really, you know, like a, such an engaging and accessible…

• 01:29:25

  Uh, it was, uh, it's a fascinating and very, just a very, very, very interesting thing, uh, which I had a wonderful time listening to, when it was uploaded before it disappeared again into the ether. Yeah. It's a strange, it's a strange artifact, and I don't really know quite what it is, but it's something that I've…

• 01:43:39

  bodies without organs plus one um join us next time which again is gonna be more soon it's not gonna be we're not gonna have big gaps between episodes like we did with bodies without organs it was only because of uh circumstances completely out of my control but we had to delay this as much as we have done but we're…