Mark Fisher (2) (1968–2017)

Capitalist Realism is a powerhouse of a book that effectively dissects, (in its very few pages) the pervasive idea that not only is Neo Liberal Capitalism the best, it is in fact the only possible option for organizing a society. Fisher has an enormous talent for condensing complexities into wonderfully pithy sentences. Below are a couple that really stuck out to me:

“What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing show more without our cooperation.”

“A moral critique of Capitalism, emphasizing he way in which it leads to suffering, 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 utopianism.”

Overall a good, readable, and only occasionally dense, book that encapsulates the contradictions and pitfalls of our current economic model. show less

Reading Capitalist Realism is akin to walking unhappily through the storm of life with only one word for "water", and then hearing seventy finely tuned descriptions for the precise version of sideways-sleeting bullshit that you experience.

The core of Fisher's book is the ideology called capitalism, so successful and omnipresent that it cannot see itself. Having conquered the world with science and imperialism, socialism via force of arms, diplomacy, and public-private partnerships, and show more finally the last sanctums of labor, culture, and personality via the multifarious tools of advertising and public relations, capitalism is left with nothing further to conquer. And for a predator who needs continual motion and prey, that means its own destruction.

Fisher flashes through academic theory, psychoanalysis, media critiques, political analysis, his own life experiences. It's these last where Fisher is most trenchant, precisely describing the ennui of interaction with a consumerist-entertainment matrix which can fulfill any expected need instantaneously, but as soon as an issue becomes complex or worse, unprofitable, casts you in a Kafka-esque decentralized bureaucracy where no one has the power to do anything. Perhaps the best bit is a process of teaching self-assessment, which Fisher reads as a Maoist confession remade in the language of McKinsey Consultants. The goal is to have good numbers, but not too good, and make sure to include some failure so we know you're taking the process seriously, but don't worry, you won't be required to fix them and the won't be used against you*.

Under Fisher's analysis, culture is no longer a domain of communication, but one of endless formless "content", marked most notably by a total absence of meaning. The mental health crisis, the avalanche of discontent, is an individual manifestation of a social patriarchy that cannot set boundaries yet constantly restricts behavior, and a nursemaid state incapable of caring, only of finer gradations of punishment. The centers of power are absence and impotent, incapable of saving this world or building a better one. We see in the failures of Capitalism to make even modest political progress, in its inability to provision real social good like housing, healthcare, and education, even as the screens get better, the entertainment more entertaining, and the data-based monitoring more uncannily invasive.

The thesis is dazzling and dense, but I feel like it works in this case because the details aren't important. What is important is the rage, the despair, the grief, the bone-deep sense that we have to seize the Barricades of Imagination, even if we cannot yet see what they are, if we are to survive.

WE ARE INSIDE THE MACHINE. THE MACHINE IS KILLING US. THE MACHINE IS SHAKING APART.

*offer void if we do decide to use them against you. show less

One wonders, on a meta-philosophical/political level, whether depressed tracts like these, where allusions and metaphors that are meant to carry great theoretical weight are sourced in mere cultural artifacts like Supernanny and Heat and The Godfather etc. etc., simply carry out the reflexive impotence and interpassivity and depressive hedonia that Fisher rallies against. Ok, so I’ve spent a couple of hours re-reading this and I feel like having a cry and then a wank and then after all of show more that maybe another cry - is that all the Post-left postmodern blah blah theorists have to offer? Is this praxis? Is it so tyrannical and Kafkaesque that schools in England have internal controls/Maoist-esque self-criticism so as to lessen the frequency of OFSTED inspections? In a fight against climate catastrophe, or whatever great Capital-instigated crisis you want to point at, am I just meant to rethink the concept of general will? Get rid of bureaucracy? Come come, Mr Fisher, this is weak - leftist populism, maybe a few instances of surrealism’s most essential and despicable act (look to the second manifesto, bang bang), wouldn’t that do the trick? Or must we just endorse a Žižekian quietism, think through things and stand around until we see the light at the end of the tunnel (and being perceptive intellectuals, recognise that it is a train hurtling toward us)? Little works like this seem to only really have a call to action toward paralysis in their affective impact, and are quickly sucked up, “reterritorialised” if you want to be pedantic, by the very structure of Capital itself. I’m rambling. I still like Mark. Rest in Peace Champ. show less

I have very mixed feelings here. This book is an engaging entry point to contemporary left theory (which, caveat emptor, I am not well-versed in, so take this review with that in mind) and makes valuable arguments with respect to mental health as well as the titular relationship between ideology and imagination, but I felt like much of the remainder of the work is imprecise or impressionistic in ways that I found lacking.

To be specific, many of the arguments in the latter half of the book show more seem to me to conflate several different diagnostic factors as roots of the "audit culture"/bureaucratic expansionism that are core to the felt experience of "centerless" corporations and purely symbolic work culture. Despite the book's title, my sense is that Fisher is arguing more specifically that these arise from the particular expression of capitalism circa 2008, not about capital-C Capitalism as an economic system. I say this because many of his diagnoses of audit culture and bureaucracy have a host of interrelated causes. One could point to, for example, financialization and the requirements of public companies to "perform work" as part of their duty to shareholders; the rise of managerialism as a practice in the latter half of the twentieth century, which went well beyond shareholder-driven corporations to happen in schools, hospitals, and so on; or even just look at natural ossification and bureaucratic development of most large organizations as complex technologies require similarly complex organizations to develop them.

What I mean to say is that while Fisher's diagnosis of these problems is accurate, his arguments for the mechanism is unclear and often touted simply as "contemporary capitalism" when it is likely more accurately a whole variety of causes that should be teased apart. One shouldn't come to such a short volume and expect it to hash out the whole scope, but we should also be clear in what this work is: an entryway to future developments. show less