Capitalist Realism

Definition

Capitalist realism (Mark Fisher) names the dominant post-1989 ideological configuration in which capitalism appears as the only viable political-economic system — "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." It is "not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself": a pervasive "atmosphere" or "invisible barrier constraining thought and action" that naturalizes the business model (a "business ontology") across every sphere. Under capitalist realism, critique is absorbed through "precorporation" rather than recuperation, and ideology operates through disavowal/interpassivity (Žižek) rather than belief.

Key Thinkers

• Mark Fisher — originator of capitalist realism; precorporation, business ontology, reflexive impotence, depressive hedonia.
• (Related, not yet paged: Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Precorporation — the "deepest mechanism" of capitalist realism: the pre-emptive formatting of desire that supersedes recuperation.
• Ideology — the materialized, subject-forming belief-structure capitalist realism exemplifies ("ideology without belief").
• Neoliberal Metropolis — the financialized built environment as capitalist realism's spatial form.
• Noopolitics — the governance of affect/attention central to capitalist realism's psychic management.
• Spectacle — the image-circulation that distracts from any alternative.
• Critical Architecture — the (im)possibility of a critical position under capitalist realism.
• Postcapitalist Desire — Fisher's affirmative complement; the project of re-imagining and re-desiring beyond the closure of capitalist realism.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Capitalist Realism (Fisher 2006)
• Postcapitalist Desire (Fisher 2020)
• Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture
• The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism
• Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
• The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance

Open Questions

• What is "architectural realism" — the built-environment counterpart of the business ontology — and can architecture's critical function survive it?