Lucía’s Reviews > Realisme capitalista: No hi ha alternativa? > Status Update

Did the presence of the cameras affect the behavior of those being filmed? Would the publication of poll results affect the future behavior of voters? Such questions were undecidable, and therefore ‘reality’ would always be elusive: at the very moment when it seemed that it was being grasped in the raw, reality transformed into what Baudrillard, in a much misunderstood neologism, called ‘hyperreality’.

Much of Baudrillard’s work was a commentary on this same effect: 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. For Baudrillard, phenomena such as fly on the wall documentaries and political opinion polls – both of which claimed to present reality in an unmediated way – would always pose an insoluble dilemma.

Lacan aims at this paradox with his ‘les non-dupes errent’: those who do not allow themselves to be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction, who continue to believe their eyes, are the ones who err most. A cynic who ‘believes only his eyes’ misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it structures our experience of reality.”

However, postmodernism’s
cynical reduction to reality ... falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point.

Žižek gives the example of a judge: ‘I know very well that things are the way I see them, that this person is a corrupted weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him’.

Really Existing Capitalism is marked by the same division which characterized Really Existing Socialism, between, on the one hand, an official culture in which capitalist enterprises are presented as socially responsible and caring, and, on the other, a widespread awareness that companies are actually corrupt, ruthless, etc. In other words, capitalist postmodernity is not quite as incredulous as it would appear to be

there is no progressive tendency towards an ‘unsheathing’ of capitalism, no gradual unmasking of Capital as it ‘really’ is: rapacious, indifferent, inhuman. On the contrary, the essential role of the ‘incorporeal transformations’ effectuated by PR, branding and advertising in capitalism suggests that, in order to operate effectively, capitalism’s rapacity depends upon various forms of sheathing.

This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.

Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’.

What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself.