Fluent Essays

Reading: Finish all of Fisher, Capitalist Realism by this week. Suggested Viewing: Finish Children of Men by this week (Fisher discusses at length). Briefly discuss the term capitalist realism and what it means. Say a bit about Fishers overall point about society and life in the 20th century (and into the 21st). Reflect further on the film from your own viewing if you completed it, as well. Mark Fisher is a writer, theorist and teacher. His writing regularly appears in frieze, New Statesman, The Wire and Sight & Sound. He was a founding member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. He is now a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London and a tutor in Philosophy at the City Literary Institute, London. His weblog can be found at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org. He is married and lives in Suffolk. To my wife, Zoe, my parents, Bob and Linda, and the readers of my website 1: Its easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism 1 2: What if you held a protest and everyone came? 12 3: Capitalism and the Real 16 4: Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism 21 5: October 6, 1979: Dont let yourself get attached to anything 31 6: All that is solid melts into PR: market Stalinism and bureaucratic anti-production 39 7: ...if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another: capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder 54 8: Theres no central exchange 62 9: Marxist Supernanny 71 Its easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism In one of the key scenes in Alfonso Cuarons 2006 film Children of Men, Clive Owens character, Theo, visits a friend at Battersea Power Station, which is now some combination of government building and private collection. Cultural treasures - Michelangelos David, Picassos Guernica, Pink Floyds inflatable pig - are preserved in a building that is itself a refurbished heritage artifact. This is our only glimpse into the lives of the elite, holed up against the effects of a catastrophe which has caused mass sterility: no children have been born for a gener- ation. Theo asks the question, how all this can matter if there will be no-one to see it? The alibi can no longer be future gener- ations, since there will be none. The response is nihilistic hedonism: I try not to think about it. What is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is specific to late capitalism. This isnt the familiar totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias (see, for example, James McTeigues 2005 Vfor Vendetta). In the P.D. James novel on which the film is based, democracy is suspended and the country is ruled over by a self-appointed Warden, but, wisely, the film downplays all this. For all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic. The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?) Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj �i✏ek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by capitalist realism: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination - the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. In Children of Men, public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals (one especially resonant scene takes place inside a derelict school, through which a deer runs). Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space but, contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state in Children of Men, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions (I say official7 hopes since neoliber- alism surreptitiously relied on the state even while it has ideolog- ically excoriated it. This was made spectacularly clear during the banking crisis of 2008, when, at the invitation of neoliberal ideologues, the state rushed in to shore up the banking system.) The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesnt end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, prolif- erate. But what of the catastrophe itself? It is evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. I want to argue this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises? Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbors only reiteration and re-permutation. Could it be that there are no breaks, no shocks of the new to come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the weak messianic hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen. The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing to the last big thing - how long ago did it happen and just how big was it? T.S. Eliot looms in the background of Children of Men, which, after all, inherits the theme of sterility from The Waste Land. The films closing epigraph shantih shantih shantih has more to do with Eliots fragmentary pieces than the Upanishads peace. Perhaps it is possible to see the concerns of another Eliot - the Eliot of Tradition and the Individual Talent - ciphered in Children of Men. It was in this essay that Eliot, in anticipation of Harold Bloom, described the reciprocal relationship between the canonical and the new. The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliots claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all. The fate of Picassos Guernica in the film - once a howl of anguish and outrage against Fascist atrocities, now a wall-hanging - is exemplary. Like its Battersea hanging space in the film, the painting is accorded iconic status only when it is deprived of any possible function or context. No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it. We do not need to wait for Children of Mens near-future to arrive to see this transformation of culture into museum pieces. The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its system of equivalence which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself. As Marx and Engels themselves observed in The Communist Manifesto, [Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics. Yet this turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism. In claiming, as Badiou puts it, to have delivered us from the fatal abstractions inspired by the ideologies of the past , capitalist realism presents itself as a shield protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself. The attitude of ironic distance proper to postmodern capitalism is supposed to immunize us against the seductions of fanaticism. Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism. We live in a contradiction, Badiou has observed: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But were lucky that we dont live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But its better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But its not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we dont make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we dont cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc. The realism here is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion. In their account of capitalism, surely the most impressive since Marxs, Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the unnamable Thing, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies warded off in advance. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis. The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and re- defined) pragmatically and improvisationally. This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenters film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact. Capital, Deleuze and Guattari says, is a motley painting of everything that ever was; a strange hybrid of the ultra-modern and the archaic. In the years since Deleuze and Guattari wrote the two volumes of their Capitalism And Schizophrenia, it has seemed as if the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism have been confined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces of reterritorialization. This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious end of history trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyamas thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a terminal beach was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsches most prescient pages are those in which he describes the oversatu- ration of an age with history. It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism, in which cosmopolitan fingering, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsches Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness. Fukuyamas position is in some ways a mirror image of Fredric Jamesons. Jameson famously claimed that postmod- ernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism. He argued that the failure of the future was constitutive of a postmodern cultural scene which, as he correctly prophesied, would become dominated by pastiche and revivalism. Given that Jameson has made a convincing case for the relationship between postmodern culture and certain tendencies in consumer (or post-Fordist) capitalism, it could appear that there is no need for the concept of capitalist realism at all. In some ways, this is true. What Im calling capitalist realism can be subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism as theorized by Jameson. Yet, despite Jamesons heroic work of clarification, postmodernism remains a hugely contested term, its meanings, appropriately but unhelpfully, unsettled and multiple. More importantly, I would want to argue that some of the processes which J ameson described and analyzed have now become so aggravated and chronic that they have gone through a change in kind. Ultimately, there are three reasons that I prefer the term capitalist realism to postmodernism. In the 1980s, when Jameson first advanced his thesis about postmodernism, there were still, in name at least, political alternatives to capitalism. What we are dealing with now, however, is a deeper, far more pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility. In the 80s, Really Existing Socialism still persisted, albeit in its final phase of collapse. In Britain, the fault lines of class antagonism were fully exposed in an event like the Miners Strike of 1984-1985, and the defeat of the miners was an important moment in the development of capitalist realism, at least as significant in its symbolic dimension as in its practical effects. The closure of pits Was defended precisely on the grounds that keeping them open was not economically realistic, and the miners were cast in the role of the last actors in a doomed proletarian romance. The 80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and estab- lished, when Margaret Thatchers doctrine that there is no alter- native - as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for - became a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy. Secondly, postmodernism involved some relationship to modernism. Jamesons work on postmodernism began with an interrogation of the idea, cherished by the likes of Adorno, that modernism possessed revolutionary potentials by virtue of its formal innovations alone. What Jameson saw happening instead was the incorporation of modernist motifs into popular culture (suddenly, for example, Surrealist techniques would appear in advertising). At the same time as particular modernist forms were absorbed and commodified, modernisms credos - its supposed belief in elitism and its monological, top-down model of culture - were challenged and rejected in the name of difference, diversity and multiplicity. Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living. Thirdly, a whole generation has passed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In the 1960s and 1970s, capitalism had to face the problem of how to contain and absorb energies from outside. It now, in fact, has the opposite problem; having ail-too success- fully incorporated externality, how can it function without an outside it can colonize and appropriate? For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable. Jameson used to report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into the very unconscious; now, the fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment. It would be dangerous and misleading to imagine that the near past was some prelapsarian state rife with political potentials, so its as well to remember the role that commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth century. Yet the old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorpo- ration, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the estab- lishment of settled alternative or independent cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contes- tation as if for the first time. Alternative and independent dont designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. No-one embodied (and struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliche scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliche. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain is precisely the one that Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed. But the high existential angst of Nirvana and Cobain belongs to an older moment; what succeeded them was a pastiche-rock which reproduced the forms of the past without anxiety. Cobains death confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rocks Utopian and promethean ambitions. When he died, rock was already being eclipsed by hip hop, whose global success has presupposed just the kind of precorporation by capital which I alluded to above. For much hip hop, any naive hope that youth culture could change anything has been replaced by the hard- headed embracing of a brutally reductive version of reality. In hip hop, Simon Reynolds pointed out in a 1996 essay in The Wire magazine, real has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompro- mised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for crossover. Real also signifies that the music reflects a reality constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveil- lance and harassment of youth by the police. Real means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by .... downsizing (the laying-off the permanent workforce in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security). In the end, it was precisely hip hops performance of this first version of the real - the uncompromising - that enabled its easy absorption into the second, the reality of late capitalist economic instability, where such authenticity has proven highly marketable. Gangster rap neither merely reflects pre-existing social conditions, as many of its advocates claim, nor does it simply cause those conditions, as its critics argue - rather the circuit whereby hip hop and the late capitalist social field feed into each other is one of the means by which capitalist realism transforms itself into a kind of anti-mythical myth. The affinity between hip hop and gangster movies such as Scarface, The Godfather films, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction arises from their common claim to have stripped the world of senti- mental illusions and seen it for what it really is: a Hobbesian war of all against all, a system of perpetual exploitation and generalized criminality. In hip hop, Reynolds writes, To get real is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where youre either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. The same neo-noir worldview can be found in the comic books of Frank Miller and in the novels of James Ellroy. There is a kind of machismo of demythologization in Miller and Ellroys works. They pose as unflinching observers who refuse to prettify the world so that it can be fitted into the supposedly simple ethical binaries of the superhero comic and the traditional crime novel. The realism here is somehow underscored, rather than undercut, by their fixation on the luridly venal - even though the hyperbolic insistence on cruelty, betrayal and savagery in both writers quickly be c omes pantomimi c . In his pitch blackness, Mike Davis wrote of Ellroy in 1992, there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a forensic banality. The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagan-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest. Yet this very desensitization serves a function for capitalist realism: Davis hypothesized that the role of L.A. noir may have been to endorse the emergence of homo reaganus. 2 What if you held a protest and everyone came? In the cases of gangster rap and Ellroy, capitalist realism takes the form of a kind of super-identification with capital at its most pitilessly predatory, but this need not be the case. In fact, capitalist realism is very far from precluding a certain anti- capitalism. After all, and as �i✏ek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the evil corporation. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it. Take Disney/ Pixars Wall-E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. Were left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations - or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large - is responsible for this depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called interpassivity: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda - but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it. �i✏eks counsel here remains invaluable. If the concept of ideology is the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge, he argues, then todays society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way ... to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them. Capitalist ideology in general, �i✏ek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief - in the sense of inner subjective attitude - at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to �i✏ek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads. Corporate anti-capitalism wouldnt matter if it could be differen- tiated from an authentic anti-capitalist movement. Yet, even before its momentum was stalled by the September 1 1 t h attacks on the World Trade Center, the so called anti-capitalist movement seemed also to have conceded too much to capitalist realism. Since it was unable to posit a coherent alternative political- economic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organization, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didnt expect to be met. Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism, and the anti-capitalist protests share rather too much with hyper-corporate events like 2005s Live 8, with their exorbitant demands that politicians legislate away poverty. Live 8 was a strange kind of protest; a protest that everyone could agree with: who is it who actually wants poverty? And it is not that Live 8 was a degraded form of protest. On the contrary, it was in Live 8 that the logic of the protest was revealed in its purest form. The protest impulse of the 60s posited a malevolent Father, the harbinger of a reality principle that (supposedly) cruelly and arbitrarily denies the right to total enjoyment. This …