The Nineties’ future-euphoria gave way to cultural deceleration and depleted resources

Evidence

What you could hear behind so much Nineties dance music was a competitive drive — to sonically rearticulate what “futuristic” meant. The No U Turn track “Amtrak” features a sample: “Here is a group trying to accomplish one thing, and that is to get into the future.” But I think it’s uncontroversial to say that no one was aiming to get into the future that actually arrived. If a junglist were pitched straight into now from the mid-Nineties, it’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t be disappointed and bemused. In the interview that I did with Kodwo Eshun which formed the appendix of Kodwo’s More Brilliant Than the Sun, he contrasts the textual exhaustion of postmodernism with the genetic concept of recombination. I think Kodwo captures very well the recombinatorial euphoria that many of us felt then — the sense that there were infinite possibilities, that new and previously unimaginable genres would keep emerging, keep surprising us. But, sadly, what’s surprising from that Nineties perspective is how little has changed in the last ten years. As Simon has said, the changes that you can hear now are not massive rushes of the future, but tiny incremental shifts. That deceleration has brought with it a sense of massively diminished expectations, which no amount of tepid boosterism can cover over. My friend Alex Williams has posited the idea that cultural resources have been depleted in the same way that natural resources were. Perhaps this is a reflection of today’s cultural depression in the same way that the Nineties concepts were an expression of that decade’s exhilaration. … This isn’t just about nostalgia for one decade — the Nineties was at the end of a process that began with the rapid development of the recording industry after the Second World War. Music became the centre of the culture because it was consistently capable of giving the new a palpable form; it was a kind of lab that focused and intensified the convulsions that culture was undergoing. There’s no sense of the new anywhere now. And that’s a political and a technological issue, not a problem that’s just internal to music. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1240

Categorization

• XREF: This is Fisher’s core ‘hauntology’ and cultural-capitalism-depletion argument, connecting to his other writings on the slow cancellation of the future and to Alex Williams’s accelerationism. — connects to: The technostructure faced a spiritual backlash before its economic collapse — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 205; Post-war euphoria repeatedly produces false harmony illusions that history overturns; The concept of the future itself has mutated across the twentieth century (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Dance music’s Nineties futurism gave way to Noughties fixation on the past #exemplifies (0.92) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1247
• The stuttering GIF defines twenty-first century digital temporality against Nineties smooth loops #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1332
• Post-war euphoria repeatedly produces false harmony illusions that history overturns #corroborates (0.78)
• A tired historical age generates philosophies focused on endurance rather than hope #corroborates (0.72) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 1057
• The concept of the future itself has mutated across the twentieth century #expands (0.70)