Capitalist Realism: a Summary
May 2, 2020
Here’s my thousandish-word summary of Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism (Fisher, 2009).
TS Eliot first made the point that culture’s ability to produce the new is dependent on its capacity to store and transmit collective memory. Innovation depends on a sense of tradition, otherwise there is nothing to innovate against. By destabilising the material conditions of life and through its commodification of culture capitalism has undermined this capacity; consequently cultural innovation has become impossible. Since exchange-value is privileged over use-value, the value attributed to a cultural product is dependent on its alienation, in Marx’s sense: its abstraction from its life-world—from its function and significance within the social context of the individuals and communities that produce it—and re-situation within a system of general exchange. This corresponds to a shift in the way we encounter cultural products from a mode of participation to a mode of spectatorship. Culture ceases to be a participatory forum for shared projects of self-narration, instead becoming a factory for aesthetic objects produced for passive consumption.
This is no less true of intellectual and political products. Anticapitalism becomes something consumable—this itself is an effect of capitalism. The villain of the Hollywood film is now the evil corporation, or even consumerism itself (cf. Wall E). This is a reflection of the overvaluation of belief relative to action, i.e. the privileging of exchange-value over use-value in the particular case of the conviction. The role of conviction as cultural capital takes precedence over its role as a motivation to act. It becomes more important to perform your beliefs than to act on them; to express a cynical belief is now a worse crime than to act cynically. ‘Being negative’ becomes the ultimate faux pas, while acting in a way that is insensitive, unkind, or flaky is barely worthy of comment.
Capitalist realism is the name of a pervasive atmosphere forming the horizon of thought and action. Explicit criticism of this atmosphere is ineffective, because it has successfully installed an implicit reality principle according to which capitalism is the least bad system that we can have, given the way we are. To be threatened in this atmosphere capitalism must be challenged on its internal inconsistency. The existence of poverty, for example, is not a threat, as the reality principle declares it inherent to human nature. The existence of eco-catastrophe is a threat, however, as it is a necessary consequence of the infinite growth model essential to capitalism. Two other potential threats are the mental health epidemic and the prevalence of bureaucracy, which capitalism was supposed to do away with.
Political action today is muted by reflexive impotence: the sense that although things are bad there is nothing we can do which will make them better. The affective correlate of reflexive impotence is depressive hedonia: the inability to do anything other than pursue pleasure. The ubiquity of depressive hedonia is an effect of what Deleuze identified as a shift from the disciplinary systems described by Foucault to even more decentralised, cybernetic forms of power. These control societies operate according to a logic of indefinite postponement, in which the societal norms are internalised (the paternal superego is publicly denied at the same time as being privately assimilated). This form of control has the character of addiction, with indefinite postponement of satisfaction producing a stable oscillation between shame and insatiability. Capital deprives us of our apparatus of self-narration, and hence of our capacity to either identify with the past or to form visions of the future. The gap it leaves fuels both reflexive impotence in the domain of politics and addiction cycles in the domain of consumption.
All memory is reduced to formal memory, pure methodology and professionalism (cf. Jason Bourne). Flexibility and the ability to adapt to new circumstances are valued above all else: anything that ties you down—relationships, family, attachments to particular places—are factors limiting your ability to flourish. The family is destroyed at exactly at the moment it becomes an essential respite from the strains of living with permanent instability. These kind of tensions fuel the boom and bust cycles characteristic of late capitalism. Social systemic causes of mental health problems are difficult to see because mental stress itself has been privatised.
Control societies demand that their subjects express themselves, making affective as well as productive demands on workers. Doublespeak infuses bureaucratic standards: a ‘satisfactory’ grade is in fact unsatisfactory. These hidden expectations belong to the big Other, the free-floating aggregate of what everyone thinks they should want based on what they think everyone else does want. Existing within these structures requires constant work to both interpret and satisfy these expectations. The result is the increased primacy of PR and marketing: that which is consumed by the big Other. Capitalist individualism implicitly claims to have dispensed with the big Other, but the opposite is true in practice. One of the mechanisms of control societies is to trick us into identifying our own desires with those of the big Other, while officially its existence is denied (no one can tell you what you should want—you do you). Cybernetic control circuits such as reality TV and social media switch out our own desires for the desires of the big Other.
In a society in which instability is the status quo, the ability to forget carries a premium. Since the Real is unthinkable, consensus reality is reduced to a tissue of inconsistencies. What counts as sanity in this situation is the ability to accept contradictions without question, as the dreamer does. This loss in narrative memory gives way to an emphasis on formal memory, or memory through methodology. At the level of culture this plays out as a reliance on familiar forms while the rapidity of change in content actually increases (cf. Marvel films). The inability to create shared memories leads to an over reliance on established forms, and hence to a stagnation in cultural innovation.
Big Government serves as a scapegoat to be blamed for its failure to act as a centralising power, precisely because of the centerlessness of capital. It is not possible to vent anger anywhere else. The center is missing, yet we cannot stop searching for it. We are presented with a false dichotomy between centralised collective responsibility and decentralised individual responsibility, masking the fact that responsibility actually lies with a diffuse impersonal structure, both collective and decentralised.
Neoliberal ideology is defined by its identification of self-interest with virtue, raising happiness to the status of a moral duty. When merged with an absent sense of narrative progression, self-interest collapses into the fulfilment of known desire. Since any pretence to occupy the position of the paternal superego—to tell you what you should want—is treated with mockery, there is a lack of culture that seeks to challenge existing preferences. This situation represents cultural stasis, because in reality we often do not know or understand our own desires. This is why our most profound projects are exploratory, strivings toward encounters with the unfamiliar and the weird. In its privatisation of desire and its corresponding mockery of the challenging, capitalist realism deprives us of a culture capable of growth.
References
- Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.