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Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Zero Books)

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Anyone who believes Fisher's book is "Zizek-lite" (as in the case of the reviewer below) has clearly neither read Zizek nor Fisher. Zizek's work unfolds in and through the analysis of the cultural register or symbolic formations. While Fisher certainly has much to say about cultural artifacts, he also deftly analyzes contemporary structures of affectivity (such as the recent rise of depressive and anxiety disorders), as well as how the post-Fordist workplace is structured and what challenges these transformations entail for organizing and pursuing emancipatory politics. The reviewer below misses the key point of Fisher's analysis of students and schools today. Fisher is not setting out to *blame* students or shake his cane and declare with exasperation "these kids today!", but rather to analyze the new forms subjectivity is taking within our contemporary milieu and to analyze how the reigning apathy and ubiquitous (yet unsatisfying hedonism) that characterizes our cultural memory is a product of a social structure in which "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". Just as Voltaire's Candide suggested that we tend our gardens, the new form of subjectivity, discerning no limit to the horizon of capitalism seems to resign itself to dissatisfying small hedonistic pleasures as the only way to render life tolerable within such a hopeless situation. The question, then, is that of how it might become possible to begin imagining an alternative to current historical moment.

What I appreciate most about Fisher's short little book is that it is not yet another cultural or ideological analysis of artifacts, focusing on texts and cultural artifacts like films, but that in manages to weave together this sort of ideology critique, with something like Foucaultian analysis of regimes of subjectivization and the subjectivity they produce, Jamesonian Marxist critique, Deleuze and Guattari's material analysis of desire, and good old fashioned Marxist material analysis of modes of production. Something new is brewing here that is much more than a onesided analysis of the ideological and symbolic, accounting simultaneously for concrete material conditions of production. Fisher's book is a terrific read, often illuminating obscure social, political, and cultural phenomena, proceeding in such a way that what initially seems random and without reason (apathy of students for example) becomes transformed into a genuine *symptom*, thereby opening a space of the political in response to what has been depoliticized. But above all, it is a book that aims straight at the heart of our contemporary malaise characterized by a sense of hopelessness and meaningless, at least doing some of the legwork that would help us to become engaged once again. Your ten dollars will not be wasted. Let us hope that Fisher develops his project in greater and more elaborate detail in the future.

Levi R. Bryant, Collin College

My brother gave me a book a couple of months ago which I've just managed to read. Interestingly, I read the book just days after being involved in an online discussion about politics. It was a late, tangential, and general contribution to a post on the issue of asylum-seekers in Australia. I began my series of reflections (or, perhaps, rants) by declaring that there was a part of me that felt `blah, blah, blah' about the issue. This was not something I wrote with a sense of sardonic superiority nor a cynicism which might have grown from such a position. Rather, I felt disappointed, frustrated and perhaps even exasperated. Moreover, it was an expression of a response to politics that has been growing for some time now; first articulated, I think, in the aftermath of the last federal election in Australia.

Essentially, I am tired of boring, lazy, uncreative, expedient, conservative politics. I am completely uninterested in a politics that is only different in respect to the story within which it locates itself (and even this can seem barely indistinguishable at time). Ironically perhaps, this lament is, I think, a pretty boring, clichéd, glib statement. Yet, the point remains that I want to see, hear and participate in a truly alternative politics. Yet, it seems any time I have a conversation with someone, it is either explicitly stated or implied that `what we have is the best of the admittedly flawed offerings'. What we have, of course, is some kind of liberal capitalism. Can we really not imagine anything else...anything better?

Mark Fisher begins his book, Capitalist Realism, at this point in the story. Chapter 1 is titled, after Jameson and Zizek, `It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism'. As someone who is not at all well-versed in the literature of cultural theorists such as Foucault, Lacan, Baudrillard and Zizek, I found this to be a most apt and profound premise. By capitalist realism, Fisher means `the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it' (p.2). Beginning with a brief cultural analysis of the film, Children of Men, Fisher writes that it poses questions born of anxiety: `how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?' (p.3). While one response to such anxieties might be to hold out a knowingly weak hope that change is actually on the horizon, another might be the opposite, defeatist position of despairing belief that what is now is all there will be. Furthermore, when we can only imagine capitalism as the foundational structure for society, despite its liberal rhetoric of decentralisation and the devolution of power, it becomes a force no different to the totalitarianism of modernist conceptions of dystopias. The all pervasive capitalist realism is a deep and pervasive `sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility' (p.7).

Thus, despite the language of freedom and liquidity key to capitalism (think free-market), capitalist realism should, according to Fisher, be seen as something structural and, it seems to me, public. By this, I mean that, while the individual is primary in neo-liberalism (be it negative self-interest or `positive' individual responsibility for world-wide poverty), the power of capitalist realism is one that defies the very notion of the individualism its rhetoric affirms. With reference to Zizek, Fisher writes about the ways in which capitalist realism flourishes in a post-ideological world where individuals' internalised beliefs become paramount to any overarching political or cultural structure. Therefore, we may see the way in which a particular ideological foundation may be having a negative effect on the world's poor, acknowledge that it is unjust, but continue to participate in giving life to that particular ideological foundation (justifiably) because we ourselves believe it to be bad. Put another way, `so long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue in capitalist exchange' (p.13).

Essentially, all this is to say that perhaps the insidious nature of capitalist realism is that, while it purports to be free of any `big brother' or top-down totalitarian tendencies, it actually functions in a way that perpetuates heavy bureaucracy and fails to come close to eradicating economic elites through competition as the neo-liberal ideologues would like us to believe. In fact, Fisher uses the education sector in the UK as an example of the way in which, though marketisation promised to deliver `friction-free' exchanges, has only caused greater concern with measurement of performance resulting in `additional layers of management and bureaucracy' (p.42). Furthermore, these managers at the top of organisations enjoy a much greater slice of national income than in the days of democratic socialism (p.29). Yet Fisher is not suggesting that the alternative is to look back to previous political times and, indeed, return to them. He writes, `It's well past time for the left to cease limiting its ambitions to the establishing of a big state' (p.77) and instead, it needs to seek ways to actually do what neo-liberals said capitalism could do: reduce bureaucracy. The way to respond to the capitalist failures such as the global financial crisis is not return to old ways of thinking, but a `spur of renewal' (p.79).

There is much more that the book offers as an analysis of the current cultural and political malaise in which we now find ourselves. It does not seek to provide answers with any specificity. Rather, it provokes the reader to actually consider carefully the question `is there no alternative' to capitalism? Moreover, assuming that we can be imaginative enough to assume there is an alternative, Fisher invites us to be creative and speculate as to what the alternatives might be. Such questions invite us, I believe, to imagine what is the goal - the telos - to which we are directed? They invite us to indeed imagine a better alternative. My next book review will focus on the very question of to what or whom we intend our `desire' and how we do this as an alternative to the dominant systems.

I found Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" an excellent introduction to Neo-Marxist thought. Yes, it lacks a strong central thesis. Yes, it's too short to really delve deep enough. Yes, Fisher sometimes seems to be merely parroting Slavoj Zizek.

Yet overall I thought Fisher had some key insights, particularly in regard to various paradoxes within capitalism. If for no other reason, this book is worth having for its simple-yet-deadly descriptions of capitalist malaise. Fisher is also a great writer, and I couldn't help but love quotes like, "Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombiemaker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us."

I would say that if you are very familiar with Badiou, Deleuze & Guattari, Jameson, Zizek, and Marx himself, then maybe this brief book doesn't have a lot to offer. But to laypeople, undergraduates, or philosophy dilettantes, I think this work will prove to be intriguing and thought-provoking. I dare to think that even "professional" philosophers will find more than a couple tidbits to mull over. And as Zizek himself said, the work is in fact "compulsively readable." Give it a shot.

Mark Fisher in his new book Capitalist Realism affirms the exhaustion and collapse into decadence of a world that is not only artificial but is itself the productive force of an artificiality that affirms its own negative complicity within an endgame from which there is neither a final outcome to be expected nor an escape into some Utopian future as an outlying myth: but only a final collapse into a world of last men without affect who can truly say with Nietzsche's Last Man: "We have invented happiness," blinking robotically to the rhythm of the vast megamachine of Capitalist Realism.

Fisher recounts the dismal tale of Kurt Cobain for whom the last men were the embodied cliche of his own nihilistic life: "In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliche scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliche" (15). [1] Like a dead man in an imaginary museum Cobain adapted to the masks of an unreasoning culture to show forth the zombie styles of an age of revolt that was itself never a revolt, but only another decadence of hyperstylization of the transglobal machine that feeds upon such detritus with a relish that makes any form of rebellion seem nothing more than a final capitulation and affirmation of megacapital's very power of inscripting and incorporating all rebellions. Hip-Hop becomes a form of gangster capitalism within which a desensitized world stripped of all sentimental illusions is seen for 'what it really is': a Hobbesian war of all against all, a system of perpetual exploitation and generalized criminality (18).

Yet, this fake anti-capitalism becomes in another form the resinscription of its dark and inherent premises, as seen in many Hollywood movies in which the bad old corporation is pitted as the enemy only to become a virtual scapegoat for our own apathetic inability to dislodge ourselves from its oppressive affectivity. We can watch these films with impunity, allowing the anti-capitalist gambit to play itself out on the screen, leaving us alone to continue consuming to our heart's delight the very commodities that are being satirized. Yet, in the end, it is us who are being satirized as spectators at our own banquet, eating ourselves alive in a world of competitive anachronisms. As he states it the "role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief (18-19). Or as Fisher, quoting Zizek, states: "The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself." (19)

In a Gothic twist he typifies our fantasmatic "complicity in planetary networks of oppression", saying: "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 labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us" (21). We are already always living in a Gothic novel, one that we have all had a part in making and contributing too. Each of us is a part of that strange machine of culture that has made of us all zombies in a bad B-rated flick, caught up in a mindless pursuit of critiques against the bad old corporate elite we have ourselves become the very guardians of its implicit and invisible laws. Instead of abandoning the world we have turned it inside out, shaping it to our most human(izing) desires. Instead of a public world everything has been privatized, even our views of the planet itself; it has become another politicized entity to be incorporated into our artificial diagnosis: there is no real world only the world as it is for-us. This human world is itself the very artificial world that we have created and are now in process of exploiting even as we try to defend it against its capitalist masters.

Hooked into a matrix of material signifiers we pursue pleasure like anhedonic artifacts of an alien species. Neither fully apathetic nor filled with that artificial gaze of the melancholic we drift among the commodified corpuscles of a transglobal machine like neuronal pulsations in an artificial brain. Instead of producers we are the produced. We no longer work for a living, it works us; we being only the embodied assemblage of its broken toolsets. We have all become bureaucrats in a machine without rules, and the masters who might have once known the rules have long ago been interred in the black hole of the command center that is itself invisible and beyond human reach. We have all become a part of "Kafka's purgatorial vision of a bureaucratic labyrinth without end chimes... [the] New bureaucracy takes the form not of a specific, delimited function performed by particular workers but invades all areas of work, with the result that -as Kafka prophesied -workers become their own auditors, forced to assess their own performance" (53-54). He quips: "The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration" (58).

Like replaceable parts in a global machine we learn to subordinate ourselves to this new capitalist realism, "to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment" (60). Invisible in the machine like bits of data to be recalled from our dormancy in the data banks of this transglobal system, we exist as objects in a subterranean network of crossreferencing matrices, which appear and dissapear as other entities in the system call us out, assigning us whatever task we need to perform, only to withdraw us and place us back into the dark pockets of non-entity, caged and silent, where we live in utter anhedonia until the next task is assigned. Our identities are just a commodity like everything else, to be switched on and off as needed; otherwise put back to sleep in the slippage of all objects enfolded within their own dark hibernation. Memory is no longer tolerated, instead the impossible grafting of fake memories are the order of the day in this late capitalist society. As Fischer tells us here, "memories prior to the onset of the condition are left intact, but sufferers are unable to transfer new memories into long term memory; the new therefore looms up as hostile, fleeting, un-navigable, and the sufferer is drawn back to the security of the old. The inability to make new memories: a succinct formulation of the postmodern impasse ...." (66).

When an inmate of the system suddenly awakens it is like a trauma, a cut in the system's very materiality. Yet, as we discover with all other entities locked up in their own mindless enclave, asleep and without thought, there can be no communication, no liberation, only anger: "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. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself" (70). Like the dark Wizard of Oz that never existed to begin with, we follow our own illusory road to the center of the system only to discover that "the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there -it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility" (71). Like Kafka's K we continue our search around the Castle seeking a way to communicate with the great powers hidden in its dark labyrinth, but unlike K we are always already bound to a wheel of capital whose center is everywhere and horizon nowhere.

But what to do? Along with Zizek, Fisher tells us that it's "well past time for the left to cease limiting its ambitions to the establishing of a big state. But being 'at a distance from the state' does not mean either abandoning the state or retreating into the private space of affects and diversity which Zizek rightly argues is the perfect complement to neoliberalism's domination of the state. It means recognizing that the goal of a genuinely new left should be not be to take over the state but to subordinate the state to the general will. This involves, naturally, resuscitating the very concept of a general will, reviving -and modernizing -the idea of a public space that is not reducible to an aggregation of individuals and their interests" (83). Is there an alternative to capital realism? Are we not locked in a zero space, a site strewn with the rubble of ideological styles from other ages that are more like artifacts in a virtual museum, not to be used or studied but to be pondered as new art works in an aesthetic vacuum? Or is there a possibility of something new? As he tells us capitalist realism "is 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" (22).

As Fisher tells us one of the problems of the Left is "its tendency to keep going over Kronsdadt or the New Economic Policy rather than planning and organizing for a future that it really believes in" (85). He continues, saying, "The failure of previous forms of anti-capitalist political organization should not be a cause for despair, but what needs to be left behind is a certain romantic attachment to the politics of failure, to the comfortable position of a defeated marginality" (85). Instead of embracing a politics of failure we must recognize that the "dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again" (87-88). Or, as Slavoj Zizek is always telling us, quoting from Mao: "There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent."






1. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books 2010)

Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" is a fast read, augmented by its fragmented inter-disciplinary analysis of how postmodernism/late capitalism has developed over the last decade. It's entertaining and educational, with several heavyweight philosophers quoted at length throughout the book.

Every page offers an interesting take on a particular facet of society touched by postmodernism (and by this point, that's all of them). There are critiques of Web 2.0 culture, modern pop culture, hipster culture, and corporate culture. Fisher pulls material from Deleuze, Zizek, Foucault, and Kafka, synthesizing heady, academic topics with ease.

One particular passage struck me as being incredibly relevant to modern internet culture. I couldn't quite put my finger on why I thought internet memes grotesque until Fisher spelled it out:

"The effect of permanent structural instability, the 'cancellation of the long term', is invariably stagnation and conservatism, not innovation. ...the affects that predominate in late capitalism are fear and cynicism. These emotions do not inspire bold thinking or entrepreneurial leaps, they breed conformity and the cult of the minimal variation, the turning out of products which very closely resemble those that are already successful."

What better way to describe internet memes than as the "cult of the minimal variation?" Come to think of it, that's a great way to describe quite a few Web 2.0 ventures!

I recommend this book to anyone interested in a quick primer on the ongoing evolution of postmodernism. If you'd like to see modern society as it is and where it's headed, "Capitalist Realism" is an excellent place to start.

Fisher makes a concise and compelling argument for the politicization of some of the symptoms of capitalist ideology, such as the widespread nature of mental health problems and stifling bureaucracy and audits. In doing so he begins pulling apart some of the latent tensions in today's capitalist system, exposing them as outright contradictions. Curiously he devotes very little space to the ongoing politicization of the ecological crises. But the issues he does address are presented from many different angles: cultural, Marxist, psychoanalytic, social, etc. Not surprisingly, Fisher's argumentation is along the same lines as Zizek's, and he does cite Zizek frequently, as well as a host of other philosophers and cultural critics.

But what distinguishes Fisher's writing from Zizek is that it is much more accesible and clearly written. Even a less diligent reader will be able to nod along to Fisher's writing, instead of scratching his or her head at every paragraph. And unlike some similar literature, this short book is refreshingly optimistic, revealing hidden opportunities for an ideological revolution. If you are concerned about today's social and economic structure--as you should be--but haven't written a thesis on the post-Fordist economy (yet), you need to read this book!

Whilst I may agree with some of the sentiment in this book, I have never come across a piece of written work that makes so many assumptions without evidence (ok, at best you might say there is some circumstantial or example-led evidence). The ranting nature almost made me go to McDonalds.

Capitalism has it's issues, and there are alternatives. This book does not shed any forward thinking light on either of these areas.

Fisher's entire book, carries the stain of derrivative theory and post modern critical theory (despite the authors move away from the term). The author relies very heavily, not to mention less than critically, upon Deleuze and Guatarri, who the author treats oddly as a singular gramatical unit. The book is at it's absolute worst during a chapter that may as well be "kids these days" wherein the author has a Werther's Original(TM) and waxes poetic about the youth movements up until the 80s, afterwhich every aspect is top to bottom symptomatic of totalized Capitalism. One finds such rants about lack of focus and ennui of the youth in shallow thinkers throughout from Grecco-Roman times onward. There are plenty of great books analyzing current socio-economic structures. There is no reason to buy this book.