From Capitalist Realism to Anarchist Idealism, Part Two
Capital as Abomination, the "Unnameable Thing"
This is Part Two of an ongoing thought-stream. Here are links to Part One, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.
I don’t understand how I missed Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism until now. Published three years before he committed suicide in 2017, the book synthesizes ideas from a range of critical theorists (Lyotard, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Zizek, etc) into a short, poignant, Leftist manifesto. I first encountered it in a series of Instagram memes. The meme-makers blamed Fisher, a British academic, for robbing their lives of any pleasure. This intrigued me.
I learned that Fisher’s last, never-completed work was another manifesto, Acid Communism, bringing together psychedelic insights with a revolutionary action plan (as I did, in a quite different way, in my 2016 book, How Soon Is Now). What exists of Acid Communism is published in a posthumous anthology of Fisher’s work, K-Punk. Like me, Fisher felt that the radical potential of “the Sixties” went unfulfilled while its subversive aesthetic was absorbed into the mainstream: “The Sixties counterculture is now inseparable from its own simulation, and the reduction of the decade to “iconic” images, to “classic” music and to nostalgic reminiscences has neutralized the real promises that exploded then,” he wrote.
Like many critical thinkers, Fisher puts far more focus on analyzing the roots of our contemporary detachment, disempowerment, and collective malaise than on envisioning how we escape from these conditions. He recognizes that his analysis is largely an extension from earlier thinkers such as Theodore Adorno (Minima Moralia) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition). However, he makes important additions to their critiques based on the changing conditions from their time to his. In the eight years since Capitalist Realism was released, conditions have changed, once again. I suspect I will feel compelled to write another follow-up essay to articulate those differences, as I see them now.
The Shock of There Being Nothing New
Fisher begins with the familiar phrase, It is easier to imagine an end to the world than it is to imagine an end to Capitalism. The phrase captures the essence of what he calls 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.” Late-stage techno-capitalism is understood by its subjects as something beyond ideology, something both natural and inescapable.
One central effect of capitalist realism — or what Lyotard called the postmodern condition — is its distorting impact on our perception of time. People lose any sense that they might encounter something truly, meaningfully new, still to come — for example, that we might transform our relationships to one another, or to the world as a whole. Through media or the Internet, people can access any part of the historical and cultural past, but only as cynical spectacle, simulacrum, or pastiche.
The last centuries of Modernism were marked by rapid transformations in the fields of art, music, literature, as well as technology and society itself. Since the Sixties / Seventies, this momentum first slowed down and now seems stagnant. Art and music no longer erupt into totally unexpected configurations, opening new spaces within consciousness, hinting at new social possibilities. Art and culture seem stuck on repeat, merely echoing past breakthroughs via endless baroque elaborations.
We live in a society that appears, as Slavoj Zizek notes, post-ideological: “People no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously.” Yet an ideology continues to function nonetheless, expressed by our participation in the system, through our daily choices and actions. “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 ideological distance, we are still doing them.” Fisher agrees with Zizek that “capitalism in general requires this structure of disavowal.” As long as we feel capitalism is bad and express a level of contempt for it, “we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.” This is capitalist realism.
Accompanying the sense that we are in post-ideological world, Fisher notes, we can’t help but harbor “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?” Certainly, technology keeps evolving — but in a linear direction that tends to further degrade our innate human qualities, rather than enhancing them. (And this degradation, which increases insecurity and anxiety, drives the profit models of companies like Facebook as well as the advertising industry as a whole).
Fisher does a great job of clarifying other, more opaque authors such as Deleuze and Guattari (of Anti-Oedipus fame), who “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’. ... 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 ad hoc basis.” By converting all relations to monetary exchanges, capitalism alienates us from nature and desacralizes the world.
Like The Blob from the 1950s film, capitalism is “a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.” This absorptive capacity creates a problem: Capitalism always needs something outside of itself, something other — the zone of the unknown or unintegrated Real — which it can then colonize and incorporate into itself. But it is running out of anything outside of itself to consume.
Fisher wrote: “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. … 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.” This is part of the way that Capitalism becomes inescapable, like an octopus with tentacles extending into the furthest reaches of everyone’s Psyches.
As an example, as I write this, Sotheby’s prepares to auction off a selection of art objects from Burning Man, which was originally meant to provide a model for a liberated culture outside of capitalist exchange. Whatever is “outside” the system eventually gets incorporated into the dominant structure, feeding it a little bit of energy and validation, thereby perpetuating it. The Burning Man community feels no irony in celebrating this.
Another current example is the mainstreaming of the psychedelic experience: Through a protracted process, psychedelics are being re-contextualized and integrated into the mainstream in a way that drains them of dangerous, subversive, or liberating social potential. The goal, finally, is to absorb psychedelics into Capitalism’s financial structure without threatening that structure. As I will explore in future work, it is conceivable that the current trajectory of the psychedelic movement leads toward a kind of Brave New World or, more accurately, “Brave New 1984” scenario, with new molecules and treatments designed to enhance productivity and conformity.
The Kids Are Not Alright: Environment and Mental Health
Fisher considers areas where Capitalism, in its efforts to colonize all aspects of reality, encounters limits of the “Real” (what remains outside of its control). The ecological crisis is, of course, the most glaring example of this. Fisher notes that capitalist realism depends on “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.” While “climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing,” the looming threat of ecological breakdown reveals that capitalism, despite its overwhelming success in taking control of the human and non-human world, is not viable as a long-term political-economic system. If humanity is to survive, an alternative must be found.
Rather than dwelling on the ecological emergency, Fisher turns his attention to the mental health crisis in contemporary society, which, he argues, has political and social causes primarily. Considering young people in Britain, he notes they are gripped by a condition 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.
Contemporary capitalism has catastrophic impacts on mental health. This poses legitimate, serious questions about the nature of this society that point toward its limits. The establishment posits mental health as a purely individual issue, to be resolved through medicalization. Anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication allow sufferers to function in an unhealthy system based on their control, complicity, and ongoing exploitation:
The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de-politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls).
The changing nature of capitalist production, Fisher writes, not only fragments traditional family structures but continually reinforces unhealthy psychological patterns that induce mental illness. This includes bi-polar depression: “With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of 'bubble thinking') and depressive come-down.” And, also, ADD: “If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism — a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture.”
Fisher does a brilliant job of analyzing the impacts of our contemporary post-Fordist information economy on young people. His students are disoriented and disempowered by the blizzard of “technologies of control” in which they are enmeshed. Ubiquitous networks and social media give them incessant Dopamine blips, rob them of any capacity to reflect deeply or think coherently about the larger context, and parasitically drain energy from them:
Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many … will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. … What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate 'New Flesh' that is 'too wired to concentrate' and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp — and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension — that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
The epidemic of depression and other conditions afflicting young people today has a number of interrelated causes, but the underlying cause is the current capitalist system, which engenders isolation, competition, and insecurity. In general, most workers no longer have career security, whether their jobs are in manufacturing, technology, the culture industry, or something else. The workforce has been transformed into a “precariat” who can be replaced or displaced at any moment, This structural change serves the interests of capital at the expense of those caught in its maw.
At the same time, young people are aware that the ecological catastrophe — caused by hyper-consumerism, driven by debt-based economies — looms over their future, however they seek to suppress or shield themselves from this knowledge. These factors engender mental illness, as does the deep structure of contemporary “technologies of control,” such as the inescapable Panopticon of social media (Facebook keeps straining to avoid reckoning with the misery caused by its algorithmic takeover of our collective attention-sphere, despite its own data). Also, people feel there is no way — no meaningful future to move toward — outside of the vision of a technological Singularity promulgated by corporate interests.
In the next part of this essay, we will consider questions around “Post-capitalism”: Where is the outside? What comes after?
Coming Next: From Capitalism Realism to Anarchist Idealism, Part Three
Yeah, but was Fisher actually just trying to drag people into his own pit?