Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

by Mark Fisher

It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’.

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.

Not rewarded by academics same way they are by modern rewards (phone, tv, etc)

the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.

pop is experienced not as something which could have impacts upon public space, but as a retreat into private ‘OedIpod’ consumer bliss, a walling up against the social.

Students’ incapacity to connect current lack of focus with future failure, their inability to synthesize time into any coherent narrative, is symptomatic of more than mere demotivation. It is, in fact, eerily reminiscent of Jameson’s analysis in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’.

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.

many learning differences are social constructed / inability to prrform under capitalism

disciplinary structures are breaking down in institutions. With families buckling under the pressure of a capitalism which requires both parents to work, teachers are now increasingly required to act as surrogate parents, instilling the most basic behavioral protocols in students and providing pastoral and emotional support for teenagers who are in some cases only minimally socialized.

Deleuze says that Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation,

Pay to get employed

Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralized bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and cooperation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.

‘Flexibility’, ‘nomadism’ and ‘spontaneity’ are the very hallmarks of management in a post-Fordist, Control society.

But the problem is that any opposition to flexibility and decentralization risks being self-defeating, since calls for inflexibility and centralization are, to say the least, not likely to be very galvanizing.

Illusion of control

will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control?

Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines.

Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream.

To function effectively as a component of just–in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or ‘precarity’, as the ugly neologism has it.

the disintegration of stable working patterns was in part driven by the desires of workers – it was they who, quite rightly, did not wish to work in the same factory for forty years. In many ways, the left has never recovered from being wrong-footed by Capital’s mobilization and metabolization of the desire for emancipation from Fordist routine.

if, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, schizophrenia is the condition that marks the outer edges of capitalism, then bi-polar disorder is the mental illness proper to the ‘interior’ of capitalism.

capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of ‘bubble thinking’) and depressive come-down.

No sense of homeostasis

capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.

if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame.

Meritocracy as foundation of capitalism

Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization

Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs).

Medkication will alter behavior to function properly under capitalism

It does not seem fanciful to see parallels between the rising incidence of mental distress and new patterns of assessing workers’ performance.

This syndrome will be familiar to many workers who may find that a ‘satisfactory’ grading in a performance evaluation is no longer satisfactory.

the workers and the engineers were never allowed the time, money or equipment necessary to build a canal that would be deep enough and safe enough

if half the care that went into the public relations campaign had been devoted to the work itself, there would have been far fewer victims and far more real developments

Similarly, hospitals perform many routine procedures instead of a few serious, urgent operations, because this allows them to hit the targets they are assessed on (operating rates, success rates and reduction in waiting time) more effectively.

strip away the forces of anti-production and capitalism disappears with them.

the way in which the abolition of the Symbolic led not to a direct encounter with the Real, but to a kind of hemorrhaging of the Real.

What happens in late capitalism, when there is no possibility of appealing, even in principle, to a final authority which can offer the definitive official version, is a massive intensification of that ambiguity.

The invocation of the idea that ‘there is no alternative’, and the recommendation to ‘work smarter, not harder’, shows how capitalist realism sets the tone for labor disputes in post-Fordism.

but the thought that our so-called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.

This strategy – of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question – has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism,

In conditions where realities and identities are upgraded like software, it is not surprising that memory disorders should have become the focus of cultural anxiety

I have to know certain things … enough to make a decision… but maybe not everything.

What we now begin to feel, therefore – and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension – is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.

It wouldn’t be surprising if profound social and economic instability resulted in a craving for familiar cultural forms,

‘Conservative and Labor governments have discovered that when they give powers to private companies, and those private companies screw up, voters blame the government for giving the powers away, rather than the companies for misusing them’.

Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality.

The demand that we recycle is precisely posited as a pre- or post-ideological imperative; in other words, it is positioned in precisely the space where ideology always does its work.

in making recycling the responsibility of ‘everyone’, structure contracts out its responsibility to consumers, by itself receding into invisibility.

Instead of saying that everyone – i.e. every one – is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that’s the very problem.

it is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects.

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

A Marxist Supernanny would of course turn away from the troubleshooting of individual families to look at the structural causes which produce the same repeated effect.

The problem is that late capitalism insists and relies upon the very equation of desire with interests that parenting used to be based on rejecting.

In a culture in which the ‘paternal’ concept of duty has been subsumed into the ‘maternal’ imperative to enjoy, it can seem that the parent is failing in their duty if they in any way i...

TV now tells you what to feel. It doesn’t tell you what to think any more.

in a world of individualism everyone is trapped within their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations.

Our job as public service broadcasters is to take people beyond the limits of their own self, and until we do that we will carry on declining.