Mark Fisher Meets James Hillman: Melancholy, Manic Culture & the End of Capitalist Realism (with Emma Stamm)

Hey everyone, we are back again with another episode of Asset Horizon, and if you haven't noticed recently, I have a lot of updates. And to save myself and yourself the time and trouble of listening to all of them, I have compiled everything that you need to know about us and what we're doing for the next few weeks into a blog post that I will drop just beneath the show notes. That is my blog, Split Infinities. You can follow it and sometimes I put blog posts and updates there. Today's episode with Emma Stam on Mark Fisher and James Hillman went quite long. So what we did was, as we put the last 30 minutes on our Patreon account for patrons only. So subscribe now at the $5 level or above and you can gain access to that after you listen to today's main episode. Okay, let's get right into our discussion with Emma where we talk about James Hillman and Mark Fisher on Melancholy and Mania. Welcome to Asset Horizon, the theory podcast. Today, we're bringing together two thinkers who on the face of it might seem theoretically distant from one another, but are in fact entwined in a problematic, we often highlight on the show and I'm talking about James Hillman and Mark Fisher. Hillman is a post-youngian depth psychologist and mythopoetic philosopher of soul. Mark Fisher, of course, is a British cultural theorist whose writings on capitalist realism and depression have shaped how many of us think about mental health under late capitalism. Today, our guest is Emma Stam, a writer, researcher and lecturer whose work on Fisher, like Adelia, and digital culture is helping to expand the conversation he started and the conversation that we intend to have today. And some listeners may know Emma from her contributions on Substack and Real Life magazine and from the Weird Studies Discord. Another fine joint where philosophical inquiry meets a community of great imagination and we're thrilled to have her join us. So in this episode today, we are going to ask what does it mean to live in a manic culture? One that treats sadness as pathology and acceleration as the norm. What does Hillman's idea of melancholy as a soul-deep, imaginal mood have to say to Fisher's diagnosis of capitalist depression? Where does Fisher's vision of acid communism intersect with Hillman's therapy of ideas? And what kind of collective work might be required to turn depressive hedonia into shared mourning or private pain into political imagination? With Emma's help, we'll also revisit key questions. How do internal relations shape our psychic suffering? How does capitalist culture privatize stress? And what happens when therapeutic practice becomes less about fixing the individual and more about reimagining the soul of the world? So let's get into it. Emma, thank you for joining us on the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. And Emma, we're going to use your presence today as an excuse to begin our promotion of the Durations Festival in Brooklyn. That's happening the first full weekend in October. The festival goes from the fifth to the ninth. But the events that we're involved with happen on the eighth and the ninth. First Meredith Graves panel on philosophy and magic, which will involve Phil Ford from Weird Studies. And I will be part of that as well. And then the following night we have Jason Babak, Mohagegg and Resna Gerristani with acid horizon doing an event called Five Gates. And I have to thank Phil and JF because they highly recommended you for this particular topic. I was aware of you in the Weird Studies Discord server. We definitely crossed paths. You attended my presentation on Vintagia on the Weird Studies monthly community meeting. And you were an excellent contributor there. And I'm really glad to have you on the show. So let's talk about you and your work first before we get into anything else. You have written on Mark Fisher. I have seen your work on acid communism as well. Psychedelia, digital culture. Could you just share a bit about how you first encountered Mark Fisher's work? What drew you to him as a thinker? And maybe as a way to get started, what do you see as something that's misunderstood about his legacy today? Sure. So I've been in the world of critical theory and cultural studies for over a decade. I really committed to this line of scholarship around 2015, 2016. And before his passing, Fisher was already a very heavily named thinker. I mean, of course, that became more of the case, sadly, on the occasion of his death. But because I was part of the very online and critical theory cultural studies world back a long time ago, back before Twitter became excellent. And I was aware of the kind of work that he was doing. But his passing coincided actually with when I was beginning to write my doctoral dissertation, which was about psychedelics. And I was specifically trying to politicize psychedelic medicine and make some connections between the trajectory of psychedelic drug research and political economy and the digital age, sort of praising certain elements of psychedelic experience while critiquing the way it was framed in capitalist contexts. So there was quite a lot going on. But I read the essay on asset communism, which he intended as the introduction to a book that he never got to finish, right as I was beginning on this very long journey of writing my dissertation. And it was so important for me at the time because it brought together so many thoughts that I had about what the psychedelic actually is, a sort of like an ontology of the psychedelic. A lot of thoughts about the privatization of mental health that I already was sort of meditating on even before I found his work. And he articulates the idea of the privatization of the self and mental health so, so well. So that's sort of how it got started. And then once I began to read some of what he'd done, then I basically just read everything. I had the K-Punk anthology and became something of a Fisher's scholar where I was, I was doing my academic research, but then also writing for non-academic venues about Fisher's work at a moment where his work was becoming very, very popular. So it was just kind of, it all happened at a perpicious moment, I guess. In terms of what people misunderstand about him and his work, well, one thing that I would want to say is about the acid-combinus notion, which is that it's really not about promoting a particular orthodox version of Marxism. And it's also not about promoting psychedelic drug use per se, although it's not necessarily not that, but his understanding of what acid is and what the psychedelic is is much more nuanced than that. And earlier in his career, he was quite critical of drug use as a form of escapism. He has a very interesting piece on the K-Punk blog that's in the anthology about psychedelic fascism, which is a concept he got from Stanley Kubrick actually. So I think there are different levels that on which you can read Fisher's work, and I would really encourage people to look at him not just at a surface level, even though he is much more accessible than a lot of the readers that are a lot of the writers that he's read alongside. But to really, if they want to understand Fisher also to really get to know the sources he's drawn on because you'll be able to appreciate how many valences there are in his sentences and paragraphs. So we all know that the acid communism manifesto, if you will, is incomplete. And despite it being incomplete, there are many intimations about where that might have gone. All of us on the podcast have had our take on it. And I guess I would want to ask you, if you were to put a finer point on it, what is acid communism? What does it look like in practice? Well, one thing that I tell people when I start to talk about the acid communism manifesto and Fisher's project is that it was intended as a work of historiography. He was going to re-narrate the 70s up through the late 2010s as far as I understand it, maybe the late 60s through the period where he was working on it. To show how the more radical dimensions of what we could just summarize is the hippie counter culture, the psychedelic counter culture, to show how those radical dimensions were suppressed in an active campaign by a capitalist interests, especially in the UK and the United States, where basically the potential for a certain spirit, the spirit that you might find. feel in a concert, in a moment of psychedelic inebriation, literally or sort of more figuratively, is part of what holds together a movement that actually has the potential to draw people away from capitalist ways of thinking. So the acid communism project, as far as Fisher was envisioning it, was to show that, whereas the narrative, I think a lot of people subscribe to today, is that that movement was entirely vapid, that it was just the boomers in their heyday doing LSD listening to Pink Floyd and the Beatles and embracing a one-dimensional understanding of freedom, that it did in fact have the potential to draw us towards a more pro-social economy. But that because it was so powerful, those in power needed to put the kabash on it. So acid communism is an articulation of that spirit. It's saying that even though it's becoming more difficult to bring it to mind, it seems sort of like a ghost now, it seems like maybe it never existed in the first place, especially for those of us who had never lived through the 60s and 70s, that there was something very, very real there. And it kind of pushes us to the limits of language because there is this affective, this subjectivity component to it as well, which of course, Fisher was very good at describing. But as opposed to so the acid communism thing is that it points out what was being suppressed. And then the book, the research agenda, was to talk about how it was intentionally suppressed. Looking at particular actors events and so on throughout the later 20th century. I think that's the next and way to phrase it. Kaleem, when it comes to the, yeah, these are the gambit of Fisher's work as well. If the counter-culture was so shit, why would they? Why did so many state operatives, including police officers and entire economies, restructuring themselves to try and destroy it to at least diffuse its manifest potential? And when it comes to, yeah, as you talk about the psychedelic aspects, it's it's all about making our categories seem more mutable. Now, I mean, especially in the time he was writing, in which, well, he was right, I mean, cat was realism was a book written under a new labor government in which we got the, we got the new government in after God knows how long of facture and they were fascia rights through and through and social, usual social democrat stuff. But they just ended up doing the same thing actually, but kind of worse in a red tie. And he thinks, well, in that case, we can't imagine the different future. We can't even elect one. And I think it's all about taking a kind of flight from the kind of mean year everyday life in忌mute ability because that also allows you to, I mean, this is why he loved Dazino Females manifesto so much because it was all about this radical demand for mutability. If nature is unjust change nature and that he was saying it's not psychedelic solely in the sense of a literal always in the abbreviation. Nobody talks to this in his blog posts about listeners for psych equals a psychedelic reason, not just getting out of your head of it, getting out through your head, destroying your brain. So this was kind of something that he picked up from CCIU days, most particularly Sadie Plant and not the other guy about essentially escaping the bounds of a particular kind of subjectivity and keeps you imprisoned in a certain idea of your own body, certain idea of your own capacities through the ways in which capitalist production can't always fully contain the forces it likes to unleash. But yeah, and I think it's also a good point as well to talk about Helmann because of, I mean, Helmann is a Jungian. He already thinks the the psych youth collective and that's what isn't easy. In an easy kind of translation between the way how Fisher talks about the psyche is collective and that's why he's always being a group therapy, the feminist conscious raising practices, groups like big flame from the 70s onwards. And in general, the idea that actually this is an internalization of a social force. You're not broke, you're not broken, the world is actually broken and you're a part of it, and as a part of it, you are in the internal psyche of a broken world. Yeah, precisely. And as Craig pointed out, it's exciting to talk about Fisher alongside a Jungian thinker or it's unusual to talk about Fisher aside Jungian thinkers, but Craig said and it's exciting because it's always seemed intuitively correct to me to think about the idea of a collective psyche through the lens of an anti-capitalist vision of psychology that really, really emphasizes how horribly and privatized our understanding of the self has become how atomized. But you don't often see those two frameworks being brought into conjunction. And I think especially on the left side, there's there's a lot of suspicion to words. Jung, Jung is I think that's also been captured by the right much more so than other descendants from Freud, like Macon. So yeah, there's a lot to talk about there. Well, I think we should actually do a little bit of an introduction to James Hillman too, just so that we have both players on an equal footing on this field. And we've talked about Hillman on the show before. I'm not sure if people are skipping those. Actually, the Hillman episodes do quite well. But I think it's important to talk about who he is. We've talked about him as a Jungian, which Hillman would agree with. But I think others believe that he's either a post Jungian and there are many Jungians who disavow his work and think that what he's done was more radical. He was born in the early 20s. And basically his work spans, I would say, from the late 50s until the early 2010s. He's a psychologist, a culture critic. And he was trained at the CG Jung Institute. And he later served as the director of studies for several years until 1969 until he developed what he called archetypal psychology, which doesn't really help us disambiguate it from Jungian studies, really in any way. But then again, like I said, he does still identify with the movement. But perhaps his one point of departure is the argument that he put forward that psychology had become over-medicalized, over-moralized, too goal-oriented, too focused on development, and also too focused on its own processes and its institutions and failed to recognize the way that it had been even Jungian psychology had been etipalized much in the same way that Deliz and Gutary talk about Freudian psychology. And as Emma points out, we can certainly see that today with the influence of folks like Jordan Peterson, who have claimed Jungian psychology and the followers and advocates of that strain of Jungianism are clearly interested in the sort of patriarchal dimension of that particular work. But the one thing that Hillman railed against was the monotheistic tendencies of Jungian psychology. Jung was ultimately a Christian of a certain stripe and believed that the cultivation of psyche or the process of his analytical psychology was meant to evolve the self, to work on the complexes that lie deep within the psyche so that we could achieve this sense of Jungian with our higher self already with what I said about Hillman, we could see why Hillman would be somewhat repellent to that idea. The question is, what is the alternative for Hillman? He advocated for more of a polytheistic psychology. So the sort of internal critique of Jungian thought looks like this is that often it's the case that the polytheistic images that are seen early and an analytical setting are a kind of fodder for the development of the self. And this, this is one of the things that Hillman pushes back against because what he wants to do is give the image its own life allowed an image to flourish on its own terms outside of any sort of predetermined psychoanalytic categories. And his method is about sticking with images and cultivating soul, which means turning the psychological project away from medicalization into a kind of exploration of images. And in infusion of life with more imagination, I would say in some sense my argument is that Hillman is closer to Henri Corban than Jung in many ways. And as I started reading Fisher, and really it wasn't until I got the K-Punk reader and read the acid communism essay in the back. I was like, you know what? There's a lot happening between Hillman and Fisher. And this uniform edition 11, which is basically the compilation of all of James Hillman's writings came out earlier this year or very late last year. And I picked it up and I did some essays and monologues for left hand on some of the contents of this book. I spread it out into the world. And Adam sadly did not pick it up until like a few weeks ago or something. And then he said that he had serendipitously ran into it in public. And he's like, oh, I finally got that. And this book's amazing. I'm like, I'm telling you exactly. And so I'm just going to going to use Adam for one second as a guest on the show. Adam's going to be a guest on acid horizon for just like two minutes here. Adam, what happened when you encountered this book and what did it do for you? And then we immediately talked about doing an episode around it. - Well, I pulled it in the charity shop, which is weeks, it only came out in 2024. I'm just seeing this now. I just sort of was looking around just the very scarce philosophy section. I was like, oh, they'll sit as human. Oh, it's like, it's human depression. I'm like, oh, good, I'm depressed as fuck right now. So, I mean, I got it after one of my signature mopey walks around North London listening to black metal. So it's a very, very synchronicitous. And I just picked it up and I just started reading it. And I've never been this keen on the on the more mythological stuff, which is, yeah, kind of a hard barrier to entry for anything young Ian. But there were just these moments when he was just talking about essentially one of the roots, one of the symptoms or descriptions, I guess, in a most basic sense, I think he just drives it, is just how manic we are. I mean, this wasn't long after I finished my book, The New Flash, which is like, okay, these machines are burning us out because they need us, they need our kind of psych again, and G2 to basically fill in the gaps with the advertisements as you're infinitely scrolling through things and producing data, which is actually a form of labor, even though it doesn't feel like work, because you're making metrics, commodities, posts and stuff like that. And when you're just talking about, for example, he talks about the acceleration of all psychic processes, the idea that we're more in ecotires now because, you know, he talks at one point about an advert he sees that says, I don't have time for pain, it's an advert for painkillers. And anyone who lives in London or has been used to tube recently or underground subway network, will see that there's always advertisements of this one fucking eye in the supplement, right? That's like, are you tired all the time? All of the adverts are constantly laughing at you. I mean, there was one of them that said, I remember it very well. I said, our parents got the housing boom, but we got vegan bacon that tastes like real bacon. And I'm like, wow, that's fucking sick. Or there was another advert that said, it was like an advert for Etsy and said, make how sharing survivable. And I'm like, so the housing crisis is a means, okay, right, got it, yep, cool, right, got. I mean, the English is very good for this because it is a place, I think, that's like most places, but we do it, we do it best. It relies upon a kind of misery as a mode of production. And when Hillman says, I mean, Hillman one point talks about the idea of what's called then picture in picture TV, right? And we have that now where you watch something on like TikTok or something and there's like family life on these moments, someone cutting up a bar of soap in the posing house, quite satisfying way. And they ASMR video and then news reel, all in the same clip. And I'm like, well, he's he's clearly on the on a beat of something here, particularly when he talks about, I'll show you that this quote here. I mean, yeah, this is a quote from, it's paid for, yeah, you've just, it is volume. He says, there is a kind of verbal speed or what is called a logorea, diareal of the logos. People keep the luminous journals and notebooks, delusional systems begin to develop, words lead to other words, dot, dot, dot, a pressure is felt to get it all out and get it all down and keep up with the way it is moving in the psyche. And most importantly as well, and a few plays later on the page 43, he talks about how it's, it's kind of the product of a culture. And it's also becoming very nostalgic. And he says, this is a culture that hates youth. And so Mark Fisher, I mean, I think Mark Fisher was, I mean, I personally think Fisher didn't go far enough on this topic. I mean, if you've, this is as you've seen, the movie Children of Men, it's set in a Britain which all migrants are kept in cages. Everyone is going basically mad. There is no future because there's been a global infertility crisis and essentially youth has been abolished. What Fisher misses is the fact that a decent chunk of British society would be going, fuck yes, we've abolished the youth when we put everyone in cages. So I kind of think that Hilbert is a good way of looking into the psychological aspects of Fisher's own pessimism. But also, you know, I mean, cat was realism is also an oppressive realism to what both Fisher and Hilbert are doing. So I thought, well, these two have to come into conversation because they were clearly within the barrier of, maybe a decade, 15 years or so, we're clearly getting into a similar malaise. And as well, because I think as well, because Hilbert's definition, well, Hilbert's non-definition of an archetype. I mean, the archetype's on the big barriers to me and I think a lot of people for young because it's just a fixed category that one bloke in Switzerland picked out of a few books he read one time and then they started applying it to everything and he like, well, this is just a kind of conceptual imperialism because it is. But then what Hilman does is he suddenly goes, no, no, archetypes are defined by feeling up by definition. Not defined. So archetypes are found in feelings, not in definition. And I was like, well, this is a revolutionary show where I have tackling this because we all feel like shit. And therefore, luckily, the things, the things that are causing us to feel like shit are themselves imperialists. They are themselves productive with global spanning system. So in a way, the imperialism is then for moved on to the other side of the concept in its origin, where I've done it, in its origin in terms of where it's genealogy, where I've done it's purely conceptual application. And Fischer does talk about these kind of universal feelings in terms of horizons. I mean, not universal in a soft sense, but generally, most people feel like shit most of the time. And once you are on 10 to be the ones, I've good for them or they're part of the problem. They're the ones cheering for the people in cages. Yes. Emma, if I'm not mistaken, I'm sure you've read young before it. This is your first brush with Hilman. That's correct. I was aware of his work and I had listened to podcasts about the work, but this is the first time that I'd actually read him. Really interesting, very readable, real, really a pleasure to read. Yeah. Just a fantastic writer. Well, with that said, in your depth of knowledge about Mark Fischer, I guess we'll give the floor to you first on this. How do you hear the voices of Mark Fischer and James Hilman, either speaking to each other on the topics of melancholy, depression, mania, or maybe even past each other? What stood out to you in your first encounter? Well, Hilman lives in a more enchanted world, necessarily based on his sources. So for our conversation today, I reread Capitalist Realism for the first time in years, which I had read through multiple times when I was in graduate school. But moving from reading Hilman to Fischer, the affect shift is palpable. And neither of them are talking about topics that are particularly happy. I mean, of course, the Hilman text we read for today was on melancholy. But you have the sense that Hilman is living in the world that he describes where his fissures is standing at a remove. And calling it as he sees it, but he's more, I suppose he's a theorist and a critical theorist of a sort, whereas Hilman is not. There are ways in which Hilman's work, I think, supports a lot of critical theory, not just Fischer. But there's a sense in the text itself, that the Hilman text, that he takes this idea of encultured knowledge very seriously and very sincerely and to define that concept for listeners. There's a card in the text in melancholy, the text on melancholy that discusses learning and education. And maybe this isn't actually right in the part that we read and that you might be associating with this episode. So, but in any event, his writing on education, that's part of the whole book. Hilman discusses the cultivation of the intellect and the process of learning is not just about being-- it's not just learning concepts. It's expanding one's subjectivity. It's refining one's sensitivity and capacity to receive. And he's discussing this specifically in the context of preparing psychiatrists or science practitioners to work with patients who are experiencing depression. So he's talking about clinical education as a preparation of the soul, essentially. And sort of suggesting that in order to do this work clinically, you have to come into a relation with what you are addressing, in this case, the patient's depression, rather than kind of standing apart from it. And I see his writing as a demonstration of that. He is speaking from a place of believing in the gods that he talks about. Whereas it's not clear to me that Fisher is, I suppose one way of putting it is that he's not acknowledging an ideal and speaking from that place in the same way. He's almost being a little bit more detached and descriptive. So I suppose that's a comment on the how, of how they reign. But I think that it has implications for the content and the point as well. Where they meet, of course, is in this idea that our pain is not our own. Our pain is the pain of the world. Depending on your politics and your philosophy, you might say that one is more radical than the other. I actually see Helmann as being more radical because he puts it into a metaphysical register, even if it's not explicit. But I really do think that he sees literal belief in things that can't be proven by science as a part of the project, whereas the Fisher is more of a materialist. So perhaps more politically radical. The implications for Fisher, I think, have more to do with political practice and for Helmann have more to do with spiritual and clinical practice. So there are these practical differences that we could tease apart as well. I think the one thing that is important about Helmann and one of the ways that he challenges my sort of dominant metaphysical or ontological predilections insofar as they were cultivated by reading like Delos and Gattari and post-structuralist thinkers is that with Helmann, you get a return to a sense of innerness, inwardness, he calls it. But he does so in a way that doesn't make recourse to a familiar notion of interiority. Because I think what he's trying to head off is the sort of bourgeoisie, he even uses these terms, the sort of bourgeois individuality and the interiority that has been brought about by capitalism and the way that is ontologically underpinned, I mean not only by real economic structures in society but also the ideas that we share about ourselves. And he uses this brilliant metaphor about the archipelago that each one of us is an island. This is true and it seems as if we are individuals. And the tendency is to get lost in a kind of nihilism or solipsism about being remote from one another. But that image doesn't go far enough because the way that the islands are common is through the sea. And in Helmann's work, the sea, the ocean in particular and the writings on Melancholy and Mania, they constitute this horizon of commonality. And in Helmann's own work, he admits that it was even the water, this kind of aqueous imagery that even drew him into therapy in the first place, that he had dreams of drowning and being sucked underwater. And it caused him great anxiety. And then at one point, he realized in the process of therapy that amidst being caught in the undertow as it were, that he could breathe underwater. And this then created a new sense of affect for him. And he basically enacted a therapy that had its roots in developing this water imagery. But I really like the example that he uses regarding Heidegger, too. Heidegger talks about how a bridge doesn't just unite two banks of water. We might imagine a bridge between two islands. But the bridge as an extensive object also creates a break between them. It affirms their separation. And although Helmann uses the word inward, I would like to use the word intensive and the sort of Dulles and Gautari way to talk about what Helmann is doing. In the absence of the bridge, we have an intensive relationship with each other as islands. And once we understand that, and we can, on his terms, deepen or cultivate soul, enter into psyche, as he says, it's in that space that we can remain as islands ontologically, so to speak, but cultivate the intensive relationship surrounding them. He even talks about this in terms that Dulles and Gautari might discuss incorporal transformations when he talks about a marriage. So, for example, two people are dating, they're engaged, they're together at the marriage ceremony, a kind of event occurs where they, as individuals, maybe they are constituted as capitalist subjects, they're sharing the bills, they're sharing the expenditures and so forth. But it's in the event of marriage that that shared affective relationship becomes more metaphysical in some ways. You may kiss the bride or I now pronounce you man and wife or what have you. It creates something that wasn't there in the external world, but it has this sort of intensive dimension or quality to it. Well, I think, yeah, I think there is a distinct two different spheres of radicality. Emilia, right? Particularly, yeah, we're holding metaphysical and the political because I don't think vicious metaphysics is particularly as radical as its politics. Absolutely. I mean, I don't necessarily think that's because he's not a metaphysician, he isn't developed much metaphysics, but it does seem to be, for the psychedelic stuff, it just seems to be input plasticity, the cospinose, blah, blah, blah. Then, eventually, we get to do the collective work of complex raising and common communism, whereas what Helm is doing is, as you're saying, is there something quite sad about being a subject or being a psyche? And it all comes down to this kind of metaphysics of, ultimately, motion of speed. When it comes to, in terms of the gods, he says at one point, we have a mercurial relation to the idea of cleverness. To be clever is to be quick-witted, whereas to be so-called intellectually disabled by using ableist category, sometimes people are described as slow, and you can tell we've seen manic culture that we think going faster is smarter, which is a view that has absolutely cashed out in LLM-driven nonsense, whereas it can do it really fast, therefore it's really smart, or the quicker one can have an answer, therefore the smarter it is. And of course, in turn, back to Fischer's experience in the British of healthcare system, especially the welfare system, the quickest answer usually gets no, but there's not usually the smartest answer you can get. And there's definitely a metaphysics here of slowness across both. I mean, this, I mean, yeah, we dealt with this in Antiochial, this is why so many social movements are quite occupying space and holding it and obstructing the flows, not only of capital, but the flow, even the flows of psyche, you're not really allowed to stop. You're not allowed. I mean, if you look at the example of labor, you have less money and things are more expensive, therefore you need to move around to earn more intensively or extensively, only computer or by moving about, was it a liveroo driver or something? You move through circuit circuits, which record you, which you spend in, which reduce data, which, you know, which produce circulation of capital, that has to be faster and faster because you have a fire under your ass the entire time, because you're more precarious. And I think this is where someone like B.F.O. Baradi actually picks up both Filler and Hillman, for example, when it's my recent book. Yeah. Which is why I was so, I mean, wasn't surprising finding Hillman in the B.F.O. book was like, yeah, this makes sense. Why wasn't, why, why, why wasn't this done before? In a way, because for Hillman, it's like, he has a treat psyche as a substance that is being, as he said, he's being accelerated. And if you want to take out of the clinical scenario, in which the free association is at, I mean, you're not being told to speed up your free association. Unless, unless you're sort of, you've got a canian therapist and you're like, well, they're going to stop this in about five minutes. So I might as well free associate as fast as possible, because it's going to cost the same either way. But typically in a therapy space, there is something that you carve out where you can take it your own pace within the limits of 15 minutes to an hour, but that's still a lot more time of slowness than a lot of people would get. I mean, previously it would be, I guess, in religious terms, like the Sabbath, no working on certain days. Whereas now, not so many to go back to, particularly, for a critic order, but there was at least some time at which you could put all the shit down. Whereas now it is an incredibly acceleration of psyche. And I think one of the ways, for example, at B.F.O. we know it's both of them is by saying that, yeah, there was an energy here and it's exhausted. And this is why a healman would come back in and say, this is why we need to turn to a cyclone, it concept from Klein, and that's the idea of the manic at defense. The idea that we start spending more with you know, in order to offset the depression, we sort of become more manic, we have a stretch ourselves. I am definitely not speaking from personal experience in order to avoid the crash out, because if you stop moving, you're not part of the the rising tide that lifts all boats as Reagan would say. And I said, if you stop moving, you stop being a person, you kind of, you mean, you basically do. I mean, if it can be an example, this way, if it's on the homeless retreated, for that they're not really, there's people who have like regular sports like on a place of their time to regular places where they can get cheaper accommodation, super just free food, local churches. They are kept in the same, they are kept more stationary than most people, even if most people are running around in the same circuits. And because they are not able to participate in this concept flow of exchange interactions, they're essentially treated as not being part of the collective psyche, because they're not part of the collective acceleration of the psyche. When you have on the other end, in which the ultra rich can buy themselves out of this system, but the part of the system now to be constantly, because the rich don't enjoy being rich, well, they enjoy being rich, they're not happy being rich, and they are themselves caught in these circuits. We saw this with Musk, right? They want to be happy, they want to be loved, but they can't stand still enough in between doing all of this horrible shit so that anyone could look at them and think of them as lovable, partially it's because they're not fucking lovable, but that's not really, that's not my problem, that's theirs. But it's my problem so far as they control everything, but there is this complete total high I pressed emulative mania. I mean, I ever, I kind of, after wonder if he'll whenever watch video drone, because that is, that is the beginning of that, of that Debbie Harry's character is talking about how we're who was stimulated all the time. And I think in a way, that's how he introduced to disjunct it off. We become more depressive in a way to escape, recognizing the standing still comes of melancholia. And this is why our depression these days is also for Hillman that something that's very manic, he thinks it's manic depression. That's why he wishes to climb. The client's not about just depression. It's about manic depression. And the same reason that Fisher will talk about depressive hedonia. So depressive hedonia listeners is opposed to the traditional symptom, which is called depressive anhodonia. When you're so depressed, you can't seek any, you can't find or seek any pleasure in anything. Fisher says, that's, that's, that's quite, that still exists. But the majority of the depressive affect today is in the inability to do anything but seek pleasure. And the infinite scroll, the exacerbated dopamine, adult boredom. And this is why I've a place where I think this is really good to bring these two thinkers together. So Adam, you're talking about quit everything. That's the beefotext you're referring to. Yeah. Very speedy of beefote if he wrote another book in the intern. Does that just came out, I think, late last year. So to pick up on this idea of inwardness and maybe draw on a few other things that you were just saying Adam, in order to have an inward or intensive relationship with another person or with the self, you need to withdraw from a surface. Or you need to create something that is subcutaneous, so to speak. So in the marriage ceremony, the wedding ceremony, you are creating a shelter or an inner circle for a couple. And we can point to so many other examples of types of formal rituals or informal rituals that create this protected space. I think there are ways of doing it with the self. Of course, there are ways of doing it with another person. But in all of these cases, you are creating a fortress, so to speak. And anything that is within a fortress will not be so easy to extract and put into play, put into circulation. This is why there's a sense in which traditional structures of relationships, including traditional marriage, the relationship that may prevail between members of a church or a house of worship, is very bad for capitalism, because there's a bond there that can't be broken down into data or capital and then just absorbed by the machine and made to accelerate. And so many thinkers-- Barardi is one, Fisher is one, young Till Han has written about this. And all sorts of different books. He's written like 500 books. But now I think this process creates a condition of exhaustion or burnout. Barardi and Han would both use those terms. And Fisher also picks up on this idea of just-- he might not use the phrase burnout the same way that Han does or exhaustion the same way that Barardi does, but of the soul being worn out, so to speak. And then what happens with depressive hedonia, when we're in a state of depression that does not look like the absence of pleasure, but nothing but the pleasure. I think that what's going on is that the individual is feeling their own exhaustion, seeking comfort, and unable to kind of exist at a distance from themselves, because their inwardness has not been registered or acknowledged by external structures. It's been completely collapsed. Everything has been serviced. This is what it means to live under capitalistic acceleration to the point where we fail to recognize the difference between what's within us and what's without us, the interior-- the interiority of ourselves, the interiority of, let's say, a romantic relationship or a friendship, and the exteriority, so that in the state of ultimate exhaustion from just being instrumentalized so much, one collapses in a way that you can't handle a certain kind of rigor and outward facing this anymore. You're unable to put on your suit and tie and go into work. The only thing that makes sense is to stay home in your sweatpants and binge on Netflix and junk food. I think it's actually a way of seeing your own inwardness. Of course, most people doing this wouldn't see it that way. These are theory frameworks. There's this sense in which there's this focus on inwardness and intensivity, and then the recognition that our pain is not private, and there's something outside the self. But I think what I'm getting at here is that our society doesn't recognize the difference between the two. It flattens them, but you need a line between them in order for both to be properly constituted as such on their own. And then what you get, in effect, is people collapsing in words and not realizing that both need to be treated as sacred. And I think as a final thought for that, this is most clearly manifest in online culture where it's completely normal to fail to register a difference between inner life and outer life. We have logarria happening on social media platforms, especially where people are almost encouraged to be kind of schizophrenic online, because that gives you more attention. And people live casting themselves in their sweatpants at home. This has been part of the culture now for a while over a decade. So I think it drives one towards that inward state that looks like hedonia and just sort of nestling in and only doing things that feel good in a very superficial, but still pleasurable way. I think one of the important distinctions that a human makes too that is useful for us here in distinguishing what I've called interiority from inwardness, let's start with interiority. For some people, interiority is a nightmare because it's just an incessant cacophony of an internal monologue. But for a human inwardness, often demands silence, or at least it demands a break with the flow of that cacophony, the ongoing noise. And he talks about inwardness, not in terms of going into ourselves. He talks about it in terms of going into an image. So when an image comes up, can you go into that image? Can you inhabit it? Can you dance with it? Can you co-articulate with an image in a meditation? What's happening? Something you've seen in a dream, a reverie, and an idea that has occurred to you versus when we look at something like the timeline, or the feed, as we've called it here, there are images there, but it's an incessant flow. And each one goes by and offers no chance for us to enter into it. And so I think that's an important distinction that he makes between inwardness and interiority. And we've been using the word revolution to dis-- or I'm sorry, we actually use the word radicality to determine who's more radical, Mark Fisher, James Hillman. But in one of the essays on melancholy or mania, Hillman says that the revolution for subjectivity or anti-interiority or anti-subjectivity begins with being able to make that intervention into the manic flow to peel back its mask and show mania for what it is. It is a mask that occludes the sort of almost primordial melancholic humor that exists within the world, but that has been exacerbated by the conditions under contemporary capitalism. And so mania then becomes this kind of crust whereby we cannot see melancholy. And part of Hillman's metaphysics or ontology, if you will, he believes that melancholy exists almost cosmically, that it is part of who we are. It constitutes us. Sadness is one of the alchemical humors for him. But maybe that brings us to another point in the conversation here, because one of the things that Hillman wants us to do, as I said, is inhabit these images, articulate them, see them almost as entities unto themselves. And in a way, part of the revolution as it were, this is something that needs to happen collectively, which also means that we need to stay with the trouble of sadness. We need to stay with the trouble of melancholy. And it's okay to be sad. It's okay to put the breaks on the manic movement for a moment and just stand in acknowledgment of this deep well of melancholy that we are all feeling, I mean, logically, both for Hillman and Fisher. This is constitutive of the collective or the collective psyche. So maybe I'll turn to you again, Emma. how are hillmen and Fisher asking us in their own way? to stay with the trouble. Or maybe, since we did talk about human already, maybe we can, I'll ask you this. How do you think Fisher is trying to stay with the trouble? - Well, I think first, by pointing to the very practical ways in which depression has been framed as a problem of the individual. I think he really wants people to understand that this is not an abstract matter, but it's written concrete in mental healthcare systems in our discourse, in the drugs that we take to modulate our brain chemicals, all of that. Just by pointing to the contingency of the world that we live in, because we could have had a different world where it was not, melancholy was not framed in these privatized terms that effectively turned it into depression, to Arla, framing from Helmand, where he makes that distinction between melancholy as being a collective condition and depression as being a private condition to summarize it. Fisher towards the end of his career, at least, was very interested in collective consciousness raising drawing on practices from feminists in the 1960s and 1970s and other countercultural movements where people would get together and talk about the problems they were experiencing in everyday life as a function of being a woman or maybe being poor or being non-white and come into this collective subjectivity. It wouldn't be about activist strategies or at least not exclusively about activist strategies, but kind of synchronizing everyone's mind, so to speak, everyone's mind and heart, get everyone into a room and get them on the same wavelength and build that bond as an intrinsic good and also because it has revolutionary potential. Fisher wants us to come into our sadness together, to really not to seek to transcend in this very, I don't know, almost biopolitical sense of we need to all get together and be happy because it's bad to be sad. However, this is one of the ways I think that the acid communist text could be misread. There's this idea that if we do that, if we come together and allow ourselves to be sad together and just simply do that, not do it to try to cure it, but just to kind of collectively grieve, almost have something like a funeral together, a global funeral. If we do that, the very act of coming into communion though, is there's something joyous about it, even if we're doing this to acknowledge our grief and our pain and we're not trying to heal per se that simply by being in the same room together, and I mean, maybe literally the same room, feeling each other's energy, feeling each other's physicality, listening to the same music at the same time, but there's an all chemical dimension to that where you almost kind of can't help but transform the collective subjectivity by treating it as collective and realizing that its collective nature is almost, it's an objective truth. He's written so much about experiences of going to concerts of the way in which music in particular modulates and reflects political realities, and I think about that a lot with kind of what Fisher was always asking us to do in different ways. Like, I think one way to put it is that he wants us all to go to a concert or a party with a DJ and maybe not listen to happy music necessarily, but to just be there on the same wavelength because that is sort of the most real thing that we can do. That's actually the way of acknowledging the problem most directly and most concretely. - No, I think this idea of being sad collectively, I mean, at least from my experience, the recent years in certain kinds of organizations is that it is really hard to be sad collectively but it's kind of what we do. There have been our friends over at Red Medicine podcast. They've started this anti-self-help line. There are asking people who've basically burnt out from organizing just write in and just say how you feel, we can feel bad. It's actually quite a few new podcasts in the British level about, man, we all feel like shit all the time. And it's, yeah, it's similar because most of us we keep losing, but also because it's an framing of doing organizational work is sometimes it's a collective, it's a collective of individuals who could be doing something else basically. You're called to it, usually through the online space we hear about actions and meetings and then like through individualized mediator that is the account. The account is your individual, like be it, be it, Twitter, be it, Blue Sky, be it, all those together, be it your bank accounts, be it your fucking loyalty card account and you just get discounts at supermarket. You are divided into many different individualizations of yourself and those are called accounts. That the you beyond that, the capital society isn't give a shit about that because use value only exists as bearers of exchange value and that's the only use you have for them unless they're going to literally devour your flesh which in which way things are going probably, but they'll sell it before they use it. And in terms of the idea of being sad together a lot of times have been like, it's hard to be sad if you collectively and sort of organizing spaces because we are, we feel a kind of conscience duty of hope. Even if we don't quite think what we're going to be doing is going to work or worth it, we kind of are mostly coming to this individual being like, well, I've got to do something because on my individualized accounts I've been watching the most horrific things more around the world at once and something needs to be done. This is part of the way that revolutionary desire is co-opted to some extent in that mania because you can't treat your own, you can't look inward at all even if this stuff is making you depressed. You know, acknowledging that the pressure is going to be parvagnolaging how bad things are but if you can't acknowledge that the pressure because you're going, why are you to be doing this, why are you to be going to this, this, this, this need to be sending this email, this email, this email, there's no way of reflecting on it not even collectively because you're a bit afraid that you don't want to know, you're not harsh to hope, even if, sometimes we kind of need to be a little bit hopeless and sometimes that hope is actually just a carrot on the stick that keeps us doing things which probably don't work. But at the same, yeah, it's the effect of mobilization, I think can often be the same as the effect that demobilizes us because it is kind of a manic defense against listener, you've probably heard our last episode by now, like come on, it's on the gas again aside, you can scroll infinitely and have your affect modulate it between cat images, dead children, pornography, memes, and the on-rider, going rise of fascism in, I mean, I like to say it at the speed of desire. That is not good for you, that's not good for, we don't have to be humanist about this, that's not good for anything that has anything to do with psyche mediated by language. And there we go, we have to be, we can be, well, we don't be landed about it because, you said, yeah, again, well, to talk about Nick Cland, that Clean Our Lex episode, which is with the guy from up against the wall, motherfucker. So that's a preview of our episode with Ben Moria. But this is kind of the general thing of the effects of actually feeding into the political here because without this inwardness, we can't even be sad together. Usually our way of being sad together is, well, we don't, we just go home and like, this is all pointless, I'm not going to do any org work or anything. I'm not, I'm going to pull back from this work on myself, but myself isn't just my problem. That's kind of the problem. - I mean, we are so conditioned to think in terms of the future and progressive change over time. This is part of the capitalist, realist mode. We've all grown up in a society where the assumption as is that the future is going to be different from the present. I mean, up until I don't know, maybe I was part of the last generation to have this idea that the future is going to be better than the present. I don't think that the Gen Zs and Gen Alphas are going up in such a happy age. But in any event, there wasn't until relatively recently in human history that we had this notion that 500 years from now, things are going to be unrecognizably different rather than just sort of cyclical. And this is penetrated down to the very core of the way we think is individuals and collectively. And I mentioned that because certainly when we are with other people, especially if they're not close friends, family members, partners, I think we have a largely unconscious, ethical sense that we cannot come in front of another person and say the things aren't going to change. or that things are gonna get worse. because it makes us very uncomfortable to make other people unhappy or to think that we're making other people unhappy. And also that's just, it's so radically different from how we think. So it would be almost a bit strange if, and with people, and we're, I don't know, the year is 2007, and we're all excited about what we're going to be doing after we get our bachelor's degree, we're all going to be unemployed and miserable, and that, you know, if I were to go in front of a group of my friends in that year and say, we're probably having a better time now than we will when we're 30 or whatever, or things are going to be very different. We're not going to feel very different types of feelings. The world's not going to be very different. We're still going to be addicted to social media, which is even true back then. So with respect to what Fisher wants us to do in particular and what, what might be, I'm not going to say the best, but maybe the the truest thing to deal. The most honest is to come together and have something like a scapegoat, not in the Gerardian sense. Or a Nord scapegoat is kind of a, not to be careful these days, but have a scapegoat for your misery, which is why I like the idea of coming together at a concert or around an artwork that can be the objectification of a certain kind of feeling. It doesn't have to be a black metal band. It doesn't even matter what the kind of music or the kind of art is. I think there's a melancholy to art in and of itself, even if it's happy artwork, just the very fact of making art. I think it expresses inwardness in a way that it speaks to the mues of tragedy. So that allows us to affirm our own sadness and futurelessness without having to be so direct about it. Emma, I hope you can spend maybe, I don't know, 20 to 30 more minutes without, do you still have time? Because what I would like to do at this time is take the conversation behind the payroll as we do. And yeah, just just to give something else to those who support us. And since we're both involved with a weird studies community, I'd like to ask you how weirding intersects with some of the things that we're talking about. And also go back to the discussion of ritual and meaning making in the world, which is something that our right wing counterparts, like Jordan Peterson, they've really tapped into that. The market aspect of that. But I think the real question is, how do we take this out of the vector of privatization and make it a more collective experience? Okay, that does it for the public version of this episode. If you would like to hear more, please join us on Patreon. That's patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast. You can find us in the show notes below and link with us there. Okay, see you soon. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]