Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism
(Zero Books, 2022) [a]
'The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction ...
From a situation in which nothing can happen,
suddenly anything is possible again.'
I.
It's arguable that since his death in 2017, Mark Fisher has gone from being merely a cult figure within certain academic circles to something resembling a posthumous spiritual leader to an entire generation; one who is "quoted feverishly by his disciples" [b].
That's not his fault, I suppose - I can't imagine Fisher would have wanted faithful followers forever asking themselves What would Mark think? when confronted with the latest political or cultural development.
But we are where we are and the fact is that, today, Fisher has become an enormous cult and it amuses me to think of him doing his best Kenneth Williams impression up in Heaven, telling the angels of his status [c].
As one might imagine, there are an ever-increasing number of articles, essays, books, and films made about him and his work; particularly his seminal debut text, Capitalist Realism (2009), and it's this slim volume I would like to discuss here ... [d]
II.
The title of the opening chapter provides the book's tagline: "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the
end of capitalism." (1)
It's a borrowed phrase by which Fisher refers to the fact that capitalism is more than an economic arrangement of society or a political ideology; that it has become a singular reality that is so all-encompassing that we mistake it for the natural order or inevitable way of the world.
This, in turn, makes alternative models either unimaginable or seem foolish and utopian.
It's a neat trick: though Wilde might say that capitalism's passing itself off as natural is merely an irritating political pose.
Nevertheless, pose or not, it remains a huge problem for those who, like Fisher, want to bring about revolutionary change and a form of what he later calls acid communism - something which, apparently, will unleash post-capitalist desire, raise levels of consciousness, and reclaim the creative ideas and countercultural energies of the world before neoliberalism.
For the record, I'm broadly sympathetic to this line of thinking. I don't accept the argument that capitalism is in fact natural and aligns with the human condition by fostering competition and the innate desire to trade, invest, own property and aspire to a materially more comfortable existence.
Or, if this is in fact a valid argument, then, for me, it simply reinforces the Nietzschean idea that man is a bourgeois compromise and, as anti-humanist philosophers, we are obliged to value that which lies overman [e].
Having said that, I'm a little more cautious - maybe even a little more liberal - than I was thirty years ago when developing my own politics of desire in the philosophy department at Warwick University [f], and just as I wince at some of the things I wrote then, so too do I cringe at some of the things in Fisher's book.
Capitalism may not be the same as the Real, but I seriously doubt there's anything particularly acidic (or in any way unmediated) about communism ...
III.
One of the pleasures of reading Fisher is that he doesn't seem to make any hard and fast distinction between fiction and theory, or the world of thought and that of feeling.
I can see how this might irritate those readers who, like Jürgen Habermas, believe that the false assimilation of one enterprise to another robs both of their substance, purpose, and productivity [g], but, for me - as a lover of Nietzsche and Lawrence - I approve of this intertextual promiscuity.
Like Fisher, I think that philosophy, the arts, and politics have a profound and congenial relation to one another and that the best writers are those who produce a text that is radically and openly figurative, drawing upon all manner of considerations; including those ideas and images found within popular culture that were previously regarded as unacceptable or irrelevant to serious critical debate.
Fisher's devising of a highly idiosyncratic mode of accessible (but never simplistic) language in his writings - and its application to a wide variety of contemporary issues - is undoubtedly one of his strong points (and it's something I have tried to replicate in my own manner here on Torpedo the Ark).
The key thing is this: in Capitalist Realism Fisher is essentially trying to imagine an alternative reality principle; one that is capable of providing new forms of practice, new attitudes, and new historical possibilities - even if, by his own admission, "for most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism" (8) isn't really an issue.
Further, he wants to provide an authentic sense of solidarity and community; to "fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere", as Deleuze and Guattari would say [h]. For Fisher, it's not capital which is the essence of reality; but the complex and shifting world of relationships between people [i].
But - and this is what worries me - hasn't Fisher's book already succumbed to the fate that met Picasso's Guernica in Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006); the dystopian film that Fisher discusses in chapter 1?
That is to say, hasn't Capitalist Realism - "once a howl of anguish
and outrage" (4) - simply morphed into another popular bestseller "accorded 'iconic' status" (4); just another cultural artefact available for free delivery with Amazon Prime? [j]
IV.
Am I mistaken, or does Fisher hanker after something to believe in?
That's a concern if true (and would explain how he ends up promoting acid communism). We will need to be on the lookout for signs of religiosity when (re-)reading through Capitalist Realism.
Sadly for him, one of the things he can't believe in anymore is pop culture; the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994 "confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock's utopian and promethean ambitions" (10) and as for hip-hop, well, that was pretty much stillborn and complicit with capitalist realism from the get-go.
Likewise, movies and comic books became equally hopeless; a mixture of neoliberalism and neo-noir (although that's a pretty seductive combination if, like me, you happen to like Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Frank Miller's Batman).
V.
Chapter 2 of Capitalist Realism poses an interesting question: 'What if you held a protest and everyone came?'
Though it's perhaps a question that any teenager who ever decided to throw an open house party when their parents went away for the weekend might be able to answer. I refer readers to the 2012 teen comedy film directed by Nima Nourizadeh, Project X, which tells the story of three friends who attempt to gain popularity by throwing a party which then quickly escalates out of their control.
I would remind readers also of Nietzsche's warning against the attempt to turn a subtle revolutionary idea into a mass movement by dumbing down one's philosophy and painting "great al fresco stupidities" [k] on the walls.
I'm not saying this is what Fisher has done. But he does give the impression at times of being a political and social fantasist, inviting a revolutionary overturning of the global economy in the belief that "fair humanity will then rise up as though of its own accord" [l].
In such a dangerous (and delusional) dream, says Nietzsche, one hears "an echo of Rousseau's superstition, which believes in a miraculous primeval but as it were buried goodness of human nature and ascribes all the blame for this burying to the institutions of culture" [m].
Unfortunately, history has taught us that whilst mass uprisings and revolutions can unleash "the most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages" [n], they can neither perfect man nor society.
That said, Fisher is smart and honest enough to recognise that the anti-capitalist protest movement - with its hysterical demand for the impossible - invariably just reinforces capitalism itself: "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 [...]" (14)
Fisher particularly loathes Live 8 [o], which he describes as "a strange kind of protest; a protest that everyone could agree with" (14) and one which "the logic of the protest was revealed in its purest form" [14]; basically, a chance to scream at Daddy (or the Man).
For it is "not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of the Father" (14) and he explicitly tells his readers the harsh truth that they themselves are complicit "in planetary networks of oppression" (15) - even when pumping their fists in the air or singing along with Bono and the boys at Wembley.
Fisher writes:
"What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, ad the zombies it makes are us." (15)
What this means, therefore, is that in order to reclaim real political agency, one must first of all accept one's "insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder" (15).
This, for me, is Fisher at his most Landian - and I like it. His exposure of the myth that caring individuals "could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganisation" (15) - provided they bought the right products - is brutal and brilliant.
VI.
Chapter 3 returns us to the question of capitalism and the Real ...
And a confession from Fisher that not only was the phrase about it being easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism not his - it was earlier used by both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek - but neither is the term capitalist realism an original coinage:
"It was used as far back as the 1960s by a group of German Pop artists and by Michael Schudson in his 1984 book Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion, both of whom were making parodic references to socialist realism." (16)
I don't really have a problem with borrowings like this and, besides, Fisher doesn't just adopt the term, he ascribes a more expansive (and more exorbitant) meaning to it. For Fisher, capitalist realism "cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions" (16).
It is in fact, "more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action" (16).
Fisher at this point openly reveals his hand, in a crucial passage worth quoting:
"If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism [...] only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort." (16)
Quite simply, I don't agree with that. I don't think it makes much difference whether capitalism is consistent or inconsistent, real or false - any more than whether God is an actual entity or virtual being. Marxists have been droning on for years about the many internal contradictions of capitalism and how these would one day trigger a crisis from which it would be impossible to recover - and yet, here we are.
Unfortunately for those who pin their hopes on this idea, contradictions have not caused a terminal collapse because the system is highly adaptive and able to stumble on from one crises to the next, sustaining production and restoring profitability, even without ever resolving the underlying issues (such as massive inequality).
The masses are not going to be spurred into revolutionary action when it is revealed to them that capitalism is a fraud, anymore than the faithful simply abandoned God following the announcement of his death. Nietzsche famously concedes that God's posthumous shadow or ghost would be encountered for thousands of years, meaning humanity would continue to uphold the same moral values long after faith in the existence and authority of an actual deity had vanished (that's why the revaluation he called for will not happen overnight) [p].
Similarly, the overcoming of capitalism isn't as easy as simply revealing its structural inconsistencies and internal conflicts. Perhaps it will even require the kind of accelerationism that Fisher probably subscribed to when under the influence of Nick Land during his days at Warwick and involvement with the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit).
In other words, perhaps the revolutionary path is not to withdraw from the global economy into private fantasy or try to simply side-step the coldest of all cold monsters like a crab, but accelerate the forces that the market economy has itself unleashed:
"To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization. For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character." [q]
From the viewpoint, that is, of the theory and practice developed by Deleuze and Guattari - writing here in Anti-Oedipus (1972) - who argue that, through its process of production, capitalism "produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy" [r], which it is obliged to repress but which, nevertheless, continues to act as capitalism's external (and absolute) limit.
The task, therefore, is to accelerate the process, so that capitalism can no longer bind these schizo-revolutionary forces and flows which it has itself unleashed. Capitalism, like all great historical systems, will thus "perish more as a result of its successes than its failures" [s] or its contradictions. Admittedly, however, this is a risky (potentially fatal) strategy that will require an exterminating angel who scrambles all the codes.
VII.
Finally, we return to the idea of the Real ...
Fisher is right to say that "what counts as 'realistic', what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations" (16). And that the real trick, as we noted earlier, was to naturalise ideological values, magically transforming values into facts.
"As any number of radical theorists [...] have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a 'natural order', must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency [...]" (16)
In other words, radical theorists wish to give the game away - to pull back the curtain, like Toto the dog; or, if you prefer a recent cinematic reference, convince others to pop a red pill. The problem, of course, is that most people, given the choice, prefer blissful ignorance and eating virtual steaks.
Who wants the Real - "a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in fractures" (18) - if it provides none of the comforts of reality - if it risks making one even more depressed (and impoverished) than the illusory world of capitalist realism?
Notes
[a] This is the most recent edition of Fisher's seminal text published in 2009. It comes with a Foreword by Zoe Fisher, an Introduction by Alex Niven, and an Afterword by Tariq Goddard. All page numbers given in this post refer to this edition.
[b] Rosa Abbott, writing in a post titled 'Ghosts of Mark Fisher' (5 Feb 2021), published on her Bad Taste Substack: click here.
[c] I'm referring here to Williams's hilarious interview with Terry Wogan in which he declared himself to be an enormous cult (Wogan BBC TV): click here and go to 1:49.
[d] For some reason, I have resisted doing so until now, despite having previously written about two other books completed by him; Ghosts of My Life (2014) and The Weird and the Eerie (2017) - click here and/or here.
[e] I'm not familiar enough with Fisher's reading of Nietzsche to know for sure how he relates the idea of the Übermensch to his own political thinking (or if he did so). One assumes that he would interpret the concept in communal rather than individualistic terms (i.e., as the realisation of a collectively imagined future that breaks the spell of the capitalist realism and the perpetual present).
[f] Whilst Fisher and I were both doing doctoral research in the philosophy dept. at Warwick in the 1990s - he completed his PhD on cybernetic theory-fiction in 1999 and I submitted my study of Nietzsche-Lawrence-Deleuze the following year - we didn't know one another, nor, I believe, ever cross paths. He was far more involved with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) than I was, even though Nick Land was overseeing my progress in 1994-95.
[g] See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Polity Press, 1994), p. 210.
[h] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 18.
[i] As Alex Niven writes in his Introduction: "At its most basic level, whatever political and theoretical nuances it might otherwise have implied [Capitalist Realism ...] was a book which called for a joining of human hands." [xiv]
[j] This isn't, of course, Fisher's fault; he himself noted that capitalist realism works by rapidly absorbing dissent and neutralising it. And maybe I'm being unduly pessimistic; people on the left still insist the book remains relevant and its central argument remains valid (even if it is not the key to unlocking the future that some had once hoped). To date, Capitalist Realism has sold over 250,000 copies and it has been translated into many different languages.
[k] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 438, p. 161. Nietzsche goes on to quote Voltaire at this point: Quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu ...
[l] Ibid., I. 8. 463, p. 169.
[m] Ibid.
[n] Ibid.
[o] Live 8 was a string of benefit concerts that took place in July 2005, in the G8 states and South Africa, marking the 20th anniversary of Live Aid. The call was to make poverty history. More than a thousand musicians performed at the concerts, which were broadcast on 182 television networks and two thousand radio networks. The BBC estimated the global audience to be around 1.5 billion.
[p] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, III. 108.
[q] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 239.
[r] Ibid., p. 246.
[s] Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life (Routledge, 1997), p. 178.
Parts two and three of this post will follow in due course.
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