A non-instrumental wasted time is the precondition of the genuinely new.

Evidence

These developments precisely opened up a kind of time that is now increasingly difficult to access: a time temporarily freed from the pressure to pay rent or the mortgage; an experimental time, in which the outcomes of activities could neither be predicted nor guaranteed; a time which might turn out to be wasted, but which might equally yield new concepts, perceptions, ways of being. It is this kind of time, not the harassed time of the business entrepreneur, which gives rise to the new. This kind of time, where the collective mind can unfurl, also allows the social imagination to flourish. The neoliberal era — the time when, we were repeatedly told, there was no alternative — has been characterised by a massive deterioration of social imagination, an incapacity to even conceive of different ways to work, produce and consume. It’s now clear that, from the start (and with good reason) neoliberalism declared war on this alternative mode of time. It remains tireless in its propagation of resentment against those few fugitives who can still escape the treadmill of debt and endless work, promising to ensure that soon, they too will be condemned to performing interminable, meaningless labour — as if the solution to the current stagnation lay in more work, rather than an escape from the cult of work. If there is to be any kind of future, it will depend on our winning back the uses of time that neoliberalism has sought to close off and make us forget. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1638

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extendable to ‘Grafting & Growth’: the bracketed living time of slow growth is exactly the ‘absorbed drift’ culture needs — both pieces converge on defending non-optimised, unattended-to durations against neoliberal time-efficiency.
• CANDY: The charge that ‘if you want a state-funded twenty-year project you’ll have to kill someone’ is a memorable, darkly funny compression of how much free academic time has been eliminated.
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing paragraph theorises a positive, non-oppositional category — experimental ‘wasted’ time — as the true substrate of culture and social imagination, then declares that winning back this mode of time is the whole political future. It resists summary because it reframes the book’s negative critique as a positive claim about a hidden commons of attention.
• XREF: connects to: The blanked-out past signals a present hollowed of genuine newness — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1314

Broader Connections

• The blanked-out past signals a present hollowed of genuine newness #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1314