Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher

NOTES / EXCERPTS OF INTEREST FROM CAPITALIST REALISM BY MARK FISHER

 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. Eliot's 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.  7

I loved this argument, as items and artefacts only ultimately hold the value we place on them, and as soon as we take them out of circulation and the concept stagnates it becomes deadened within it's surroundings. Much like saving items once used by dead major celebrities, with the famous owner themselves dead the only remaining value is that which collectors and buyers are prepared to spend / sell for. Once the celebrity has died their contribution to the scene ends and it is down to the consumer how things are developed further, if that happens at all, and it is this legacy of remembrance which dictates the perceived value of the item.

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. 8

This point linked interestingly to a quote I found in 'Promotional Cultures' by Aeron Davis, which discussed how abandonment of typical sources of guidance; community, religion and family, hold less sway with modern people, 'thus causing them to look elsewhere to identify norms, values, practices and fashions' suggesting that people consume as a way to reassert their 'psychological autonomy' in a world which is so overwhelmingly social.

[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.  8

 The mentioning of Free Trade in this short exerpt from Karl Marx's communist manifesto immediately reminded me of the repeated issues caused by International Free Trade for the environment as a whole, as I am reading about in Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything". I researched this point further, reading more of the manifesto, and found that a lot of the values it becrys are the exact same overconsumptions, overexpansions, and dissastisfactions that feed many of the damaging and wasteful values which are detrimenting our planet. I would like to explore Marx's writings further.

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 we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc. 9

 I think this section of the book holds particular reference to our current state of affairs the world over, where there is a tendency to point the finger at cultural outsiders as the source of problems in the developed world. In current affairs it is immigrants and refugees which bare the brunt, wherein the western world simultaneously bombs their homes, destroys their economies and lowers their standards of living, yet then furthermore holds them responsible, even condemnable, for attempting to find better circumstances elsewhere. We look to Russia and North Korea as examples of how bad democracy can be, then use this to excuse our own shortcomings as a country and devalue the importance of global responsibility and citizenship, allowing negativity to lead us by exmple. By searching for the 'big bad wolf' of each scenario we can attempt to make our own corruption and vices pale in comparison which is not only highly irresponsible but also dangerous.

We find ourselves at the notorious 'end of history' trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama's 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. […] Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation 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. 10

I also thought this paragraph highlighted more concurrent issues which I have noted myself throughout society, particularly within my own millenial generation. Trapped between the 'baby boomer' generation of low house prices and high job availablity, and the 'generation x' of a more applicable education system and technological advancements, I have noted a distinct attitude of nihilism and irony throughout my peers, most measurable in satirical and paradoxical 'memes' which are used to sum up complex yet relatable issues and emotions in a simplistic pictoral format. These images give a sense of community and shared consciousness with thousands 'reacting' with a like, heart or cry emotion for example and finding connections with strangers in a very niche area. Many of these memes are defeatist, suggesting attitudes of deeply integrated pessimism and always offer a cynical take on the situation at hand. (see left) Just as Nietzche describes, the youth of this generation feel that they cannot overcome their forebearing history, for better or worse, and feel trapped beneath the mistakes of the generation before. The public watch as further horrors unfold on a day to day basis, yet due to the 'detatched spectatorialism' that he describes, they no longer get involved and speak out, happy
commentating from the sidelines.

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 establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. 14

This is something I have observed particularly over recent years in the street art community. In the early years of the scene 'graffiti' was synonymously associated with antisocial behaviour and social decline yet also subversion and rebellion, yet as certain elements of the culture began to become more popular, 'street art' became coined and general attitudes grew more positive. With this came acceptance and fame for quite a few members of the scene, however this was closely followed by capital, as brands brought into the fashionable nature of this creative subversion and sought to monetize it. To name one extreme example; car manufacturer Hyundai created an advert for their new i20 and plaigarised the work of a whole handful of prominant artists by paying other unestablished artists to mimic their work, as a cleverly targetted attempt to capture the 'culture of cool' surrounding the movement, and exploit it for profit.

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'. 15

I feel this quote could be interpreted with much of the mainstream media of today, with catastrophes of one kind or another reported from every angle. We are so saturated with all of the wrongdoing in the world, it forces people into a fear driven cycle of introverted-ness; as there are no answers to be found within the media itself we retreat into consumerist pleasures to forget the deeper issues which surround us and threaten to overwhelm at any moment. This works in just the same way as people become so used to corruption in the government that they see no alternative, and feel they can have no affect. Also with the prevelence of clickbait media; dramaticised titles designed to draw the reader in (baiting them into clicking on an article) despite not necessarily containing the piece of information it offers, this means people are so constantly exposed to extreme headlines and titles that the actual genuine important news stories are drowned out.

    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. 16

I think this 'interpassivity' is something that many modern people are guilty of. With the advent of online petitions and 'share if you think this is wrong' clickbait media, people are conditioned into thinking small actions online equate to real world results. This discourages them from taking physical action in the real world, thus limiting many modern forms of protest or uprising to online formats where they simply can't always make the dramatic difference needed. It is also particularly relevent today as information is so widely available, people are educated on the injustices of our world yet feel like because they are aware of and denouncing it's existence that is enough, and major steps don't need to be taken to inspire change.

    Then today's 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.17

This quote further reinforces the ideas I touched on about interpassivity, Neitzche's 'end of history' cynicism and capitalist formatting and appropriation of subversion. Overall we become so saturated with negativity, both pertaining to the news, hopes for the future, other cultures, politics and even ourselves, that the only way to deal with it on the day to day is to metaphorically throw your hands up in the air and only deal with the problems in ineffective, compartmentalised ways. However it is the mass populous subscription to this way of thinking which is causing this all to become a downward spiral, and if everyone made little changes to their thinking together a big enough difference could be made that we would no longer feel as trapped in this cycle.

    Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a 'business ontology' in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. 21

    Environmental catastrophe is one such Real. At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being 'unrepresentable voids' for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market. 22

The fact that environmental issues are listed as one of the 'undisputable Reals' which can damage capitalism is something I have began to suspect in my reading of 'This Changes Everything' by Naomi Klein, which cites capitalism as one of the core factors preventing positive development in the movement. Capitalism so entirely hinders postive steps because innately the two concepts are opposing, just as Fisher says. Capitalism demands constant expansion and increase in capital (unsustainable levels of growth) whereas Environmentalism relies entirely on living within our means as a planet, and creating sustainable solutions which preserve the riches of our planet for future generations, as the quote below summarises eloquently;

    Yet environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system. The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital's 'need of a constantly expanding market', its 'growth fetish', mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability. 22

    While French students can still be found on the streets protesting against neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, seem resigned to their fate. But this, I want to argue, is a matter not of apathy, nor of cynicism, but of reflexive impotence. They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can't do anything about it. But that 'knowledge', that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.25

I isolated this quote because it particularly mentions students and their attitudes towards the systemic corruption outlined in the book. Although I have already covered many avenues of this idea in previous quotes, I found it to be the final affirmation in my suspicions. It is not because the populous do not care, but because they are rendered impotent in the face of seemingly unfathomable levels of corruption and greed. Disconnected from each other, they are unable to take action, and instead feign apathy as a defense mechanism against a world which doesn't seem to care. This particularly interests me, as it is a learned response and not innate within the human psyche. It makes me wonder if, through means of reconnection and subversion of these typical corrupt systems, the tide could be turned and people could be reconnected with their political response systems? Norwich is already quite a politically active and receptive city with many marches, protests, and ever some left-wing political graffiti propaganda, so I feel that if a notable difference could be made anywhere, it could be here.

    Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that 'something is missing' – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. 26

I also chose this quote as it is something else I have witnessed in my peers. With so much latent dissatisfaction and lack of hope, many people find it hard to save and plan for the future, and thus get into repeated cycles of working all week then spending all their money over the weekend treating themselves and trying to feel better after another bad week, only to go back in Monday and start the whole cycle again. Because of this, in what free time people do have, all they want or feel they have the time to do to do is seek personal pleasure and enjoyment to fulfil internal dissatisfaction, as opposed to personal development and productivity. However personal development and productivity is exactly the way to quell that never-ending cycle of seeking satisfaction and the sense of ‘something being missing’, but it is a slower gratification progress, which is why so few have the time to devote.

Both aspirations and the expectations that they can be fulfilled. ... In the entrepreneurial fantasy society, the delusion is fostered that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual likelihood of this occurring has diminished since the 1970s – a person born in 1958 was more likely than one born in 1970 to achieve upward mobility through education, for example. The Selfish Capitalist toxins that are most poisonous to well-being are the systematic encouragement of the ideas that material affluence is the key to fulfilment, that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background - if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame. 40

I think this all carries on beautifully from the other concepts discussed, and part of the reason modern generations struggle under societal pressure so greatly. With many new self-made celebrities and powerful individuals rising to notoriety; social media Youtube bloggers for example, making millions from their bedrooms, characters plucked from episodes of reality TV and shot to fame for simply being their own caricature, or online gamers paid a salary to travel the world and battle fantasy creatures online, the expectation is that any act can be monetised and any entrepreneurial teen can realise their dreams of mass media stardom, doing what they love. The unfortunate reality is very different, with the vast majority of UK workers in comparably mundane Management, Admin, Support or Sales roles, and of course call centres. With the promise of a future built on equality and opportunity for all, the harsh reality of growing up in a capitalist society is that individual workers matter for absolutely nothing against the greater workings of the machine, and the vast majority of individual workers will never be anything more than of infinitesimal consequence to it.

    In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. […]

The 'mental health plague' in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high. 23 [...]

    It is telling, in this context of rising rates of mental illness, that New Labour committed itself, early in its third term in government, to removing people from Incapacity Benefit, implying that many, if not most, claimants are malingerers. In contrast with this assumption, it doesn't seem unreasonable to infer that most of the people claiming Incapacity Benefit - and there are well in excess of two million of them – are casualties of Capital. 41

I found this section of the book quite upsetting, as it was horrible to hear just the extent to which our societies inherent corruption, and it’s desperation to turn every resource, even humans, into monetised commodities to be bought and sold, has actually had a negative effect on the mental health of the very people it pretends to serve. So intense are the pressures applied by a system built on expanding capital, that we have pushed ourselves and younger generations yet to our own emotional breaking point. It is honestly a complete tragedy. These interesting points raised also mke me curious to Oliver James’ book, ‘The Selfish Capitalist’. I would like to consider this as potential further reading should I have the time.

Scapegoating an impotent government (running around to clean up the messes made by its business friends) arises from bad faith, from a continuing hostility to the Nanny State that nevertheless goes alongside a refusal to accept the consequences of the sidelining of government in global capitalism – a sign, perhaps, that, at the level of the political unconscious, it is impossible to accept that there are no overall controllers, that the closest thing we have to ruling powers now are nebulous, unaccountable interests exercising corporate irresponsibility. 67 […]

The disavowal happens in part because the centerlessness of global capitalism is radically unthinkable. […] The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. […] The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller – there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. 68

I had never thought to this level about the centrelessness of our societal corruption before, and found it fascinating, especially when paired with the call centre analogy. Fischer developed this as a analogical concept by taking reference from the writings of Franz Kafka in The Castle which explores ideas of hierarchy and bureaucracy with feudal authority in a medieval setting. As well as the sense that for the first time in history the problem cannot be isolated into a single figure or organisation, but is instead tied up in large figureless conglomerates, or on a smaller scale woven tightly through the decisions and motivations of everyday people who are withheld in a seemingly inescapable system, what he most deftly captures is the futitility of any kind of induvidual aggressor response. It is hard to grasp the depth to which capitalism has entirely consumed every aspect of human existence on earth, but perhaps hardest of all to come to terms with is how unshakeable it’s bond to our lives feels. It is hard to conceive of a world where increasing profit is not the primary directive of every institution, perhaps even almost every individual. Just as the opening chapter of the text suggested; “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.

There are certainly conspiracies in capitalism, but the problem is that they are themselves only possible because of deeper level structures that allow them to function. Does anyone really think, for instance, that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of ('better') people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves. 72 […]

For this reason, it is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Žižek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis – the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those 'abusing the system', rather than on the system itself. But the evasion is actually a two step procedure – since structure will often be invoked (either implicitly or openly) precisely at the point when there is the possibility of individuals who belong to the corporate structure being punished. At this point, suddenly, the causes of abuse or atrocity are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible. [...] And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/ expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-a- subject: Capital. 73

These two excerpts speak more about the centreless of capitalism, and also work well as intermediaries discussing exactly where the buck for all of this negativity falls. The concept of blame trickling down to whoever next in line is ‘abusing the system’ is another I am not only familiar with but also feel is closely linked again to the scapegoating and the justification via comparison mentioned before. However it reinforces that when it comes to this there is no truly responsible individual or organisation, and that there aren’t even any ‘bad guys’ so to speak, just yet more individuals motivated by self-preservation and the pressures and strains of their place in the greater system.

It means recognizing that the goal of a genuinely new left should be not be to take over the state but to subordinate the state to the general will. This involves, naturally, resuscitating the very concept of a general will, reviving – and modernizing – the idea of a public space that is not reducible to an aggregation of individuals and their interests.

I thought this was an important point to end on, as a conclusive goal to subvert the established order of self-centeredness and isolated individuality which capitalism relies on in order to thrive unchallenged. The revival of common interest and mutual will would see groups acting for the good of the whole, instead of seeking to fulfil isolated needs of individuals. This would break down the basis of strength capitalist society, the concept of free trade crumbles and suddenly our ability to make an impact in the world depends on more than just the amount of money we are able to lay on the table, but instead on the strength of the group.

 Further Reading on Collective Action and its effect on Capitalism