| David Garcia via nettime-l on Sat, 25 Jul 2026 02:29:23 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
| <nettime> Steve Kurtz speaking |
It was so hauntingly filmed that Steve seems to be speaking to us directly. As well as being a touching reflection on Mark Fisher his talk also deepens and clarifies many aspects of his final extraordinary work ‘Unreality and Its Discontents: The Struggle Against Christian Nationalism’ which was an urgent and fitting conclusion to his life’s work. I think this rough unedited transcription catches something of Steve’s distinctive way of thinking and speaking that will hopefully resonate with many on Nettime.
--------------------------Mark Fisher is someone who means a lot to different people in different ways. Certainly, that was the same for us as Critical Art Ensemble. One of the ways he was attractive to the youth that was around him in the 90’s the aughts and stumbling into the teens was.. (and please don’t take this the wrong way, take all the bad stuff out) and he was like the Elon Musk of academia. There is no concept he didn’t want to break. And then see what happens.
He had this marvellously non-rational way of interrogating subjects and subject lines on various political and cultural issues that was not really like much other folks. And the reason he was doing it was that he had a sense of refusal that the concept is just going to have to contort itself to fit his needs, and I can tell you CAE particularly with his concept of hauntology were taken with and looking at it from our own perspective. Mixing these two things.
As we approach the seniority if not the end of our careers, Mark comes back again and again as we returned to ghosts in some of our practices and in our last book which was an interrogation of the non-rational and what it’s had to do with the rise of fascism in the west and why its expanding like it is and how it can be used to do something about it.
Since Electronic Disturbance (1994) so much has gone on and since we wrote that book. At the time it seemed like we were ahead of the curve and if you look back to it now it’s a nice explanation of what was happening in the 90s but its prophetic zeal may have dropped a bit now we are here in 2025. Too many things have changed certainly with regard to our methods. Significantly we’ve had to move from tactical positioning that we had tremendous belief in in the 1990s and the ‘Oughts’ into more of a strategic belief. And for us artists that has been a pretty significant shift. At that point too, looking at the big picture outside of the group, we were not expecting to see the fall of neo-liberalism.
If you had asked me a few years ago, “neo liberalism its about done right?” my response would have been “I don’t know about that. Those institutions seem to me to be fairly strong”. But now it seems like this truly could be it. The fascists really have a chance of re-making things. And now we have to worry about them not just as these ‘spy points’ around the globe causing trouble. But now they are in charge of governments and worst of all they are in charge of the US government, the most powerful one.
So that’s quite concerning not only to see it happening but to see that it happened so fast. And what we have to do now to shift in order to meet this moment. So, between these two things we could see a fundamental re-making of capitalism. I mean, how big a revolution do you want? And this spins us back to where we started. We actually had to go *strategic*. We are actually learning from the fascists, who are using a strategic method all the time. We can see it in many countries particularly the US. The take over of the supreme court, is an incredible feat. It took them years. It took them 50-60 years and they did it under the cloak of religious liberty. Its quite impressive how the strategists did what they did.
Using the US as an example as it’s the one with which I am most acquainted. They did it on two different fronts. You had the Catholic front, and their intellectual tradition. And they are all about planning and thinking long term. These guys were thinking in decades. While a lot of us are thinking in years. It was about getting the wealthy people together and pool enough money together. And cash is power so you could slowly but surely get the people in that would make the appointments that would not just get you the supreme court but lots of other courts. They thought if they had the courts then they could take the presidency too. That happens in the US. We kind of change every four to eight years what party is going to be in charge. For the presidency they left that to the evangelicals. As the evangelicals don’t believe in knowledge they are not very smart in many areas but they can do surface planning and they can do it very well. But when something goes wrong they don’t know what to do. God let them down is always their answer. Or they weren’t doing what God’s will actually was. So although they are pretty messy on plan Bs they are very good on plan A’s. The Heritage Foundation has shown us with project 2025 they are pretty good at taking something an institution like the presidency and really abusing the norms of it to expand and consolidate power. So you have even Catholics and Evangelicals working together. They’ve hated each other for hundreds of years and in the United States it’s been really bad for about 90 years or so. But they have managed to put those troubles aside, to get this job done.
So how could the left operate similar or parallel strategies? They could pretty much copy it exactly. The left has its billionaires too. It also has plenty of voters, probably more. All that’s going wrong is that fascism continues to express itself more and more. The revelation is people of colour, many of whom were Pentecostal, Charismatic Hispanics, are starting to realise that this was maybe not a good idea. So we could work in the same way but we have to understand that now we are years and years behind. It means there’s going to have to be a lot of patience and it means we are going to have to figure out some kind of delay strategy. And as far as I can tell we are doing pretty badly on that. And without the courts it's even worse.
One of the concepts that Mark gave us that we were interested in but he moved it much faster than us. We would kind of play with it and then leave it as we would have some kind of political economy analysis that we needed to do and that Mark probably wouldn’t have liked just because he found it bourgeois and boring. Hauntology we really came back into for a lot of reasons because we had to because in the US it’s the foundation of the fascist model. So much of it is based around church and what the church wishes was there. It's an even stranger hauntology than normal and even Mark thought of it as spectres of things past that we just can’t get rid of. Such as artists have never been given the assets and opportunity to bring forth new, which is what stuck us in appropriation where we can only reconsider the past. Or perhaps a bit into the present.
But we’ve got to pick up on that. We did the Ghost Show in Viena that we did with Konrad Becker.. which is how haunting has become one of the means to define the digital reality of the internet.. and how many spooks and spectres, metaphorically speaking, have been let loose. And how it has changed the ontology of reality.
And this is something that really does go back to Electronic Disturbance, that now, far beyond what we imagined that data has become supreme over natural flesh. So we get that little bit of haunting that we did with the ghost show in Vienna and were able to bring down into visibility, the various ghosts that haunt us every day and that we can’t shake the moment we turn our computers on. All the way to what our final book will be now. Where we try to explain how these Christian fascists see the world and try to understand that through an incredible lens of hauntology. That they want a whole era that never existed to be brought back again and established! This is how the so called real/unreal has moved beyond what hauntology originally meant. So far beyond the spectres of Marx as to be practically irrelevant.
So to go to the beginning of our argument of who Mark Fisher was? He was someone who broke stuff. He even broke that which was something that was crazy enough to begin with. He could move it along to the next step and do it in a way that was not about reason or rationality. But proved itself in the real world, proved itself out on the streets.
So let’s not lose Mark. Because if we are going to understand the non-rational which is running rampant right now both on the left and on the right. The right are locked in on a strange way. Happily, the left has a lot of territory that it can expand into, using hauntology. This is a scholar that we don’t want to lose what he said and more importantly how he said it. This is important because we are coming into a crazy non rational period, very different. So if you want to talk about the difference between when we were doing Electronic Disturbance. This is one because the system is changing crashing, moving very fast. That means the non-rational is going to move very fast with it. The age of reason does not do well with this. If you need a haunting to look back on, the haunting of Mark Fisher is one to get your séance board out for.
-- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: https://www.nettime.org # contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org