Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Author: Mark Fisher
Year: 2006 (Zero Books)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/fisher-2006-capitalist-realism.md

Summary

Fisher's Capitalist Realism diagnoses the dominant post-1989 ideology: the widespread sense, captured in the slogan variously attributed to Jameson and Žižek, that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." Capitalist realism is not a style but a pervasive "atmosphere" or "invisible barrier constraining thought and action," the naturalization of capitalism and the business model as the only viable reality. Fisher analyzes its mechanisms through culture (Children of Men, hip hop/neo-noir "machismo of demythologization," Wall-E's interpassivity), the business ontology, the mental-health "plague," and bureaucracy.

Key Claims

• Capitalist realism defined: "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it." "Capitalist realism ... is more like realism in itself."
• Business ontology: over the past thirty years capitalist realism has "installed a 'business ontology' in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business." "Modernization," Badiou notes, "is the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible."
• Precorporation vs. recuperation: the old struggle of détournement vs. recuperation has "been played out"; now we face "precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture." 'Alternative'/'independent' are "styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream."
• Ideology without belief (Žižek): capitalist ideology "consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief ... so long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate." Cinematic anti-capitalism (Wall-E) is "interpassive" — "the film performs our anti-capitalism for us."
• Reflexive impotence / depressive hedonia: students' disengagement is "not apathy ... but reflexive impotence" — "they know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can't do anything about it. But that 'knowledge' ... is a self-fulfilling prophecy." "Depressive hedonia": "an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure."
• Mental health and the privatization of stress: instead of treating distress as individual pathology, "we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people ... are ill?" — a "vast privatization of stress."
• Control societies: following Deleuze, disciplinary enclosure gives way to societies of control (post-discipline, perpetual training, "indefinite postponement"); "the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict."
• Three reasons for the term over postmodernism: (1) political alternatives to capitalism have vanished (the Miners' Strike 1984–85 and "there is no alternative"); (2) modernism is vanquished, returns "only as a frozen aesthetic style"; (3) capital has incorporated its outside and now "seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable."

Connections

Concepts: Capitalist Realism · Precorporation · Ideology · Neoliberal Metropolis · Noopolitics · Spectacle
Authors: Mark Fisher
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: The Architecture of the City (Bismarck) · Communicative Capitalism (Dean)

Direct Quotes

"[I]t is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." (Jameson/Žižek slogan, as cited)

"[W]hat we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation."

"[C]apitalist realism has successfully installed a 'business ontology' in which it is simply obvious that everything in society ... should be run as a business."

"Cynical distance is just one way ... to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously ... we are still doing them." (Žižek, as quoted)

Open Questions

• Does Fisher's account of capitalist realism (and its "required subject") give an architecture-specific purchase — i.e., what is "architectural realism" as the built-environment counterpart of the business ontology?