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Title: Capitalist Realism Author: Mark Fisher, (k-punk) Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: capitalism, neoliberalism, history, zizek
Capitalist
Realism
Is There No Alternative?
First published by O Books, 2009
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Text copyright Mark Fisher 2008
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ISBN: 978 1 84694 317 1
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Capitalist
Realism
Is There No Alternative?
Mark Fisher
Winchester, UK
Washington, USA
Mark Fisher is a writer, theorist and teacher. His writing regularly
appears in frieze, New Statesman, The Wire and Sight & Sound. He was a
founding member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. He is now a
Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths,
University of London and a tutor in Philosophy at the City Literary
Institute, London. His weblog can be found at
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org
. He is married and lives in Suffolk.
To my wife, ZĂśe, my parents, Bob and Linda, and the readers of my
website
In one of the key scenes in Alfonso CuarĂłnâs 2006 film Children of Men,
Clive Owenâs character, Theo, visits a friend at Battersea Power
Station, which is now some combination of government building and
private collection. Cultural treasures â Michelangeloâs David, Picassoâs
Guernica, Pink Floydâs inflatable pig â are preserved in a building that
is itself a refurbished heritage artifact. This is our only glimpse into
the lives of the elite, holed up against the effects of a catastrophe
which has caused mass sterility: no children have been born for a
generation. Theo asks the question, âhow all this can matter if there
will be no-one to see it?â The alibi can no longer be future
generations, since there will be none. The response is nihilistic
hedonism: âI try not to think about itâ.
What is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is
specific to late capitalism. This isnât the familiar totalitarian
scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias (see, for example,
James McTeigueâs 2005 V for Vendetta). In the PD. James novel on which
the film is based, democracy is suspended and the country is ruled over
by a self-appointed Warden, but, wisely, the film downplays all this.
For all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in
place could have been implemented within a political structure that
remains, notionally, democratic. The War on Terror has prepared us for
such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in
which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency
becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?)
Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase
attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj ŽiŞek, that it is easier to
imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of
capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by âcapitalist
realismâ: 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. Once, dystopian films and
novels were exercises in such acts of imagination â the disasters they
depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways
of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems
more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative
to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are
by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars
co-exist. In Children of Men, public space is abandoned, given over to
uncollected garbage and stalking animals (one especially resonant scene
takes place inside a derelict school, through which a deer runs).
Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the
destruction of public space but, contrary to their official hopes, there
is no withering away of the state in Children of Men, only a stripping
back of the state to its core military and police functions (I say
âofficialâ hopes since neoliberalism surreptitiously relied on the state
even while it has ideologically excoriated it. This was made
spectacularly clear during the banking crisis of 2008, when, at the
invitation of neoliberal ideologues, the state rushed in to shore up the
banking system.)
The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor
has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no
punctual moment of disaster; the world doesnât end with a bang, it winks
out, unravels, gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to
occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely
detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being:
a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate.
Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be
anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action
is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and
religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate.
But what of the catastrophe itself? It is evident that the theme of
sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement of another
kind of anxiety. I want to argue this anxiety cries out to be read in
cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a
culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer
capable of producing surprises?
Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already
come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbors
only reiteration and re-permutation. Could it be that there are no
breaks, no âshocks of the newâ to come? Such anxieties tend to result in
a bi-polar oscillation: the âweak messianicâ hope that there must be
something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing
new can ever happen. The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing to the
last big thing â how long ago did it happen and just how big was it?
T.S. Eliot looms in the background of Children of Men, which, after all,
inherits the theme of sterility from The Waste Land. The filmâs closing
epigraph âshantih shantih shantihâ has more to do with Eliotâs
fragmentary pieces than the Upanishadsâ peace. Perhaps it is possible to
see the concerns of another Eliot â the Eliot of âTradition and the
Individual Talentâ â ciphered in Children of Men. It was in this essay
that Eliot, in anticipation of Harold Bloom, described the reciprocal
relationship between the canonical and the new. The new defines itself
in response to what is already established; at the same time, the
established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliotâs
claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with
the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested
and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.
The fate of Picassoâs Guernica in the film â once a howl of anguish and
outrage against Fascist atrocities, now a wall-hanging â is exemplary.
Like its Battersea hanging space in the film, the painting is accorded
âiconicâ status only when it is deprived of any possible function or
context. No cultural object can retain its power when there are no
longer new eyes to see it.
We do not need to wait for Children of Menâs near-future to arrive to
see this transformation of culture into museum pieces. The power of
capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes
and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its âsystem of
equivalenceâ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are
religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value.
Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their
lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft,
and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion
of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of
previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts.
Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is
more like realism in itself. As Marx and Engels themselves observed in
The Communist Manifesto,
[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor,
of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water
of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange
value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms,
has set up that single, unconscionable freedom â Free Trade. In one
word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it
has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of
ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the
consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.
Yet this turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to
spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism.
In claiming, as Badiou puts it, to have âdelivered us from the âfatal
abstractionsâ inspired by the âideologies of the pastââ, capitalist
realism presents itself as a shield protecting us from the perils posed
by belief itself. The attitude of ironic distance proper to postmodern
capitalism is supposed to immunize us against the seductions of
fanaticism. Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to
pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism. âWe live in a
contradiction,â Badiou has observed:
a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian â where all
existence is evaluated in terms of money alone â is presented to us as
ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established
order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have
decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not
live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But weâre lucky that we donât
live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But itâs
better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But itâs not
criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we
donât make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill
Iraqis with our airplanes, but we donât cut their throats with machetes
like they do in Rwanda, etc.
The ârealismâ here is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a
depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a
dangerous illusion.
In their account of capitalism, surely the most impressive since Marxâs,
Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality
which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the
âunnamable Thingâ, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies
âwarded off in advanceâ. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings
with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no
longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles
all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis. The limits
of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and redefined)
pragmatically and improvisationally. This makes capitalism very much
like the Thing in John Carpenterâs film of the same name: a monstrous,
infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing
anything with which it comes into contact. Capital, Deleuze and Guattari
says, is a âmotley painting of everything that ever wasâ; a strange
hybrid of the ultra-modern and the archaic. In the years since Deleuze
and Guattari wrote the two volumes of their Capitalism And
Schizophrenia, it has seemed as if the deterritorializing impulses of
capitalism have been confined to finance, leaving culture presided over
by the forces of reterritorialization.
This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing
new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious âend of historyâ
trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Fukuyamaâs thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may
have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level
of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even
when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a âterminal
beachâ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant
city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean
rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzscheâs most prescient pages are those
in which he describes the âoversaturation of an age with historyâ. âIt
leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself, he
wrote in Untimely Meditations, âand subsequently into the even more
dangerous mood of cynicismâ, in which âcosmopolitan fingeringâ, a
detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is
the condition of Nietzscheâs Last Man, who has seen everything, but is
decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.
Fukuyamaâs position is in some ways a mirror image of Fredric Jamesonâs.
Jameson famously claimed that postmodernism is the âcultural logic of
late capitalismâ. He argued that the failure of the future was
constitutive of a postmodern cultural scene which, as he correctly
prophesied, would become dominated by pastiche and revivalism. Given
that Jameson has made a convincing case for the relationship between
postmodern culture and certain tendencies in consumer (or post-Fordist)
capitalism, it could appear that there is no need for the concept of
capitalist realism at all. In some ways, this is true. What Iâm calling
capitalist realism can be subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism as
theorized by Jameson. Yet, despite Jamesonâs heroic work of
clarification, postmodernism remains a hugely contested term, its
meanings, appropriately but unhelpfully, unsettled and multiple. More
importantly, I would want to argue that some of the processes which
Jameson described and analyzed have now become so aggravated and chronic
that they have gone through a change in kind.
Ultimately, there are three reasons that I prefer the term capitalist
realism to postmodernism. In the 1980s, when Jameson first advanced his
thesis about postmodernism, there were still, in name at least,
political alternatives to capitalism. What we are dealing with now,
however, is a deeper, far more pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of
cultural and political sterility. In the 80s, âReally Existing
Socialismâ still persisted, albeit in its final phase of collapse. In
Britain, the fault lines of class antagonism were fully exposed in an
event like the Minersâ Strike of 1984-1985, and the defeat of the miners
was an important moment in the development of capitalist realism, at
least as significant in its symbolic dimension as in its practical
effects. The closure of pits was defended precisely on the grounds that
keeping them open was not âeconomically realisticâ, and the miners were
cast in the role of the last actors in a doomed proletarian romance. The
80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and
established, when Margaret Thatcherâs doctrine that âthere is no
alternativeâ â as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could
hope for â became a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy.
Secondly, postmodernism involved some relationship to modernism.
Jamesonâs work on postmodernism began with an interrogation of the idea,
cherished by the likes of Adorno, that modernism possessed revolutionary
potentials by virtue of its formal innovations alone. What Jameson saw
happening instead was the incorporation of modernist motifs into popular
culture (suddenly, for example, Surrealist techniques would appear in
advertising). At the same time as particular modernist forms were
absorbed and commodified, modernismâs credos â its supposed belief in
elitism and its monological, top-down model of culture â were challenged
and rejected in the name of âdifferenceâ, âdiversityâ and
âmultiplicityâ. Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of
confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing
of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can
periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an
ideal for living.
Thirdly, a whole generation has passed since the collapse of the Berlin
Wall. In the 1960s and 1970s, capitalism had to face the problem of how
to contain and absorb energies from outside. It now, in fact, has the
opposite problem; having all-too successfully incorporated externality,
how can it function without an outside it can colonize and appropriate?
For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of
alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism
seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable. Jameson used to
report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into the very
unconscious; now, the fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming
life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer
worthy of comment. It would be dangerous and misleading to imagine that
the near past was some prelapsarian state rife with political
potentials, so itâs as well to remember the role that commodification
played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth century.
Yet the old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between
subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are
dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously
seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their
precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires,
aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the
establishment of settled âalternativeâ or âindependentâ cultural zones,
which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as
if for the first time. âAlternativeâ and âindependentâ donât designate
something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact
the dominant styles, within the mainstream. No-one embodied (and
struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. 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 clichĂŠ scripted in advance, knew that even
realizing it is a clichĂŠ. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain is precisely
the one that Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general,
Cobain found himself in âa world in which stylistic innovation is no
longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to
speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the
imaginary museumâ. Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed
would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could
feed. But the high existential angst of Nirvana and Cobain belongs to an
older moment; what succeeded them was a pastiche-rock which reproduced
the forms of the past without anxiety.
Cobainâs death confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rockâs utopian
and promethean ambitions. When he died, rock was already being eclipsed
by hip hop, whose global success has presupposed just the kind of
precorporation by capital which I alluded to above. For much hip hop,
any ânaĂŻveâ hope that youth culture could change anything has been
replaced by the hard-headed embracing of a brutally reductive version of
ârealityâ. âIn hip hopâ, Simon Reynolds pointed out in a 1996 essay in
The Wire magazine,
ârealâ has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompro-mised music
that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message
for crossover. âRealâ also signifies that the music reflects a ârealityâ
constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized
racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the
police. âRealâ means the death of the social: it means corporations who
respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits
but by âŚ. downsizing (the laying-off the permanent workforce in order to
create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers
without benefits or job security).
In the end, it was precisely hip hopâs performance of this first version
of the real â âthe uncompromisingâ â that enabled its easy absorption
into the second, the reality of late capitalist economic instability,
where such authenticity has proven highly marketable. Gangster rap
neither merely reflects pre-existing social conditions, as many of its
advocates claim, nor does it simply cause those conditions, as its
critics argue â rather the circuit whereby hip hop and the late
capitalist social field feed into each other is one of the means by
which capitalist realism transforms itself into a kind of anti-mythical
myth. The affinity between hip hop and gangster movies such as Scarface,
The Godfather films, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction arises
from their common claim to have stripped the world of sentimental
illusions and seen it for âwhat it really isâ: a Hobbesian war of all
against all, a system of perpetual exploitation and generalized
criminality. In hip hop, Reynolds writes, âTo âget realâ is to confront
a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where youâre either a winner or a
loser, and where most will be losersâ.
The same neo-noir worldview can be found in the comic books of Frank
Miller and in the novels of James Ellroy. There is a kind of machismo of
demythologization in Miller and Ellroyâs works. They pose as unflinching
observers who refuse to prettify the world so that it can be fitted into
the supposedly simple ethical binaries of the superhero comic and the
traditional crime novel. The ârealismâ here is somehow underscored,
rather than undercut, by their fixation on the luridly venal â even
though the hyperbolic insistence on cruelty, betrayal and savagery in
both writers quickly becomes pantomimic. âIn his pitch blacknessâ, Mike
Davis wrote of Ellroy in 1992, âthere is no light left to cast shadows
and evil becomes a forensic banality. The result feels very much like
the actual moral texture of the Reagan-Bush era: a supersaturation of
corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interestâ. Yet this
very desensitization serves a function for capitalist realism: Davis
hypothesized that âthe role of L.A. noirâ may have been âto endorse the
emergence of homo reaganusâ.
In the cases of gangster rap and Ellroy, capitalist realism takes the
form of a kind of super-identification with capital at its most
pitilessly predatory, but this need not be the case. In fact, capitalist
realism is very far from precluding a certain anti-capitalism. After
all, and as ŽiŞek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is
widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in
Hollywood films will turn out to be the âevil corporationâ. Far from
undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually
reinforces it. Take Disney/ Pixarâs Wall-E (2008). The film shows an
earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting
it. Weâre left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations â
or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large â is responsible for this
depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld
exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces,
carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop
from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication
much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer
takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather
invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema
audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right
wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for
attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than
challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what
Robert Pfaller has called âinterpassivityâ: the film performs our
anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with
impunity. 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. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or
Stalinism without propaganda â but capitalism can proceed perfectly
well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it. Ĺ˝iĹžekâs
counsel here remains invaluable. âIf the concept of ideology is the
classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledgeâ, he argues,
then todayâs society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing
ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological
truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. 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. And at this level, we are of
course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is
just one way ⌠to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological
fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an
ironical distance, we are still doing them.
Capitalist ideology in general, ŽiŞek maintains, consists precisely in
the overvaluing of belief â in the sense of inner subjective attitude â
at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our
behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad,
we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According
to ŽiŞek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal.
We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth,
yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely
depends upon the prior disavowal â we are able to fetishize money in our
actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards
money in our heads.
Corporate anti-capitalism wouldnât matter if it could be differentiated
from an authentic anti-capitalist movement. Yet, even before its
momentum was stalled by the September 11^(th) attacks on the World Trade
Center, the so called anti-capitalist movement seemed also to have
conceded too much to capitalist realism. Since it was unable to posit a
coherent alternative political-economic model to capitalism, the
suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to
mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities
tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organization,
there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making
a series of hysterical demands which it didnât expect to be met.
Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to
capitalist realism, and the anti-capitalist protests share rather too
much with hyper-corporate events like 2005âs Live 8, with their
exorbitant demands that politicians legislate away poverty.
Live 8 was a strange kind of protest; a protest that everyone could
agree with: who is it who actually wants poverty? And it is not that
Live 8 was a âdegradedâ form of protest. On the contrary, it was in Live
8 that the logic of the protest was revealed in its purest form. The
protest impulse of the 60s posited a malevolent Father, the harbinger of
a reality principle that (supposedly) cruelly and arbitrarily denies the
ârightâ to total enjoyment. This Father has unlimited access to
resources, but he selfishly â and senselessly â hoards them. Yet it is
not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of
the Father; and one of the successes of the current global elite has
been their avoidance of identification with the figure of the hoarding
Father, even though the ârealityâ they impose on the young is
substantially harsher than the conditions they protested against in the
60s. Indeed, it was of course the global elite itself â in the form of
entertainers such as Richard Curtis and Bono â which organized the Live
8 event. To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting
our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of
Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance
onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of
oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a
hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without
our co-operation. 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.
The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live
Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that âcaring individualsâ could end
famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or
systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were
told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy.
Bonoâs Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic
intermediary. âPhilanthropy is like hippy music, holding handsâ, Bono
proclaimed. âRed is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like
hard commerceâ. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism
â on the contrary, Product Redâs âpunk rockâ or âhip hopâ character
consisted in its ârealisticâ acceptance that capitalism is the only game
in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of
particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that
western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic
global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy
the right products.
âCapitalist realismâ is not an original coinage. It was used as far back
as the 1960s by a group of German Pop artists and by Michael Schudson in
his 1984 book Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion, both of whom were
making parodic references to socialist realism. What is new about my use
of the term is the more expansive â even exorbitant â meaning that I
ascribe to it. Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined
to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising
functions. It 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.
If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance
are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come
from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it
leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine
and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the
hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as
naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is
shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say,
capitalismâs ostensible ârealismâ turns out to be nothing of the sort.
Needless to say, what counts as ârealisticâ, what seems possible at any
point in the social field, is defined by a series of political
determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful
until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still
thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has
sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense.
Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully
installed a âbusiness ontologyâ in which it is simply obvious that
everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run
as a business. As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to
Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always
destroy the appearance of a ânatural orderâ, must reveal what is
presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as
it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem
attainable. It is worth recalling that what is currently called
realistic was itself once âimpossibleâ: the slew of privatizations that
took place since the 1980s would have been unthinkable only a decade
earlier, and the current political-economic landscape (with unions in
abeyance, utilities and railways denationalized) could scarcely have
been imagined in 1975. Conversely, what was once eminently possible is
now deemed unrealistic. âModernizationâ, Badiou bitterly observes, âis
the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible. These
âreformsâ invariably aim at making impossible what used to be
practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the
dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be soâ.
At this point, it is perhaps worth introducing an elementary theoretical
distinction from Lacanian psychoanalysis which ŽiŞek has done so much to
give contemporary currency: the difference between the Real and reality.
As Alenka Zupancic explains, psychoanalysisâs positing of a reality
principle invites us to be suspicious of any reality that presents
itself as natural. âThe reality principleâ, Zupancic writes,
is not some kind of natural way associated with how things are ... The
reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim
that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that
presents itself as empirical fact (or biological, economic...) necessity
(and that we tend to perceive as non-ideological). It is precisely here
that we should be most alert to the functioning of ideology.
For Lacan, the Real is what any ârealityâ must suppress; indeed, reality
constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an
unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the
fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one
strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s)
underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.
Environmental catastrophe is one such Real. At one level, to be sure, it
might look as if Green issues are very far from being âunrepresentable
voidsâ for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of
resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into
advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental
catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist
realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the
earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point
slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the
market (In the end, Wall-E presents a version of this fantasy â the idea
that the infinite expansion of capital is possible, that capital can
proliferate without labor â on the off world ship, Axiom, all labor is
performed by robots; that the burning up of Earthâs resources is only a
temporary glitch, and that, after a suitable period of recovery, capital
can terraform the planet and recolonize it). Yet environmental
catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of
simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be
assimilated into the system. The significance of Green critiques is that
they suggest that, far from being the only viable political-economic
system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human
environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is
neither coincidental nor accidental: capitalâs âneed of a constantly
expanding marketâ, its âgrowth fetishâ, mean that capitalism is by its
very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.
But Green issues are already a contested zone, already a site where
politicization is being fought for. In what follows, I want to stress
two other aporias in capitalist realism, which are not yet politicized
to anything like the same degree. The first is mental health. Mental
health, in fact, is a paradigm case of how capitalist realism operates.
Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a
natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a
natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and
1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and
Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as
schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural,
but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of
much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is
the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most
treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has
convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental
distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries
like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with Jamesâs claims, I want
to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress
(and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as
incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress,
instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has
taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it
become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young
people, are ill? The âmental health plagueâ in capitalist societies
would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works,
capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it
appearing to work is very high.
The other phenomenon I want to highlight is bureaucracy. In making their
case against socialism, neoliberal ideologues often excoriated the
top-down bureaucracy which supposedly led to institutional sclerosis and
inefficiency in command economies. With the triumph of neoliberalism,
bureaucracy was supposed to have been made obsolete; a relic of an
unlamented Stalinist past. Yet this is at odds with the experiences of
most people working and living in late capitalism, for whom bureaucracy
remains very much a part of everyday life. Instead of disappearing,
bureaucracy has changed its form; and this new, decentralized, form has
allowed it to proliferate. The persistence of bureaucracy in late
capitalism does not in itself indicate that capitalism does not work â
rather, what it suggests is that the way in which capitalism does
actually work is very different from the picture presented by capitalist
realism.
In part, I have chosen to focus on mental health problems and
bureaucracy because they both feature heavily in an area of culture
which has becoming increasingly dominated by the imperatives of
capitalist realism: education. Through most of the current decade, I
worked as a lecturer in a Further Education college, and in what
follows, I will draw extensively on my experiences there. In Britain,
Further Education colleges used to be places which students, often from
working class backgrounds, were drawn to if they wanted an alternative
to more formal state educational institutions. Ever since Further
Education colleges were removed from local authority control in the
early 1990s, they have become subject both to âmarketâ pressures and to
government-imposed targets. They have been at the vanguard of changes
that would be rolled out through the rest of the education system and
public services â a kind of lab in which neoliberal âreformsâ of
education have been trialed, and as such, they are the perfect place to
begin an analysis of the effects of capitalist realism.
By contrast with their forebears in the 1960s and 1970s, British
students today appear to be politically disengaged. While French
students can still be found on the streets protesting against
neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse,
seem resigned to their fate. But this, I want to argue, is a matter not
of apathy, nor of cynicism, but of reflexive impotence. They know things
are bad, but more than that, they know they canât do anything about it.
But that âknowledgeâ, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of
an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Reflexive impotence amounts to an unstated worldview amongst the British
young, and it has its correlate in widespread pathologies. Many of the
teenagers I worked with had mental health problems or learning
difficulties. Depression is endemic. It is the condition most dealt with
by the National Health Service, and is afflicting people at increasingly
younger ages. The number of students who have some variant of dyslexia
is astonishing. It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager
in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a
sickness. This pathologization already forecloses any possibility of
politicization. By privatizing these problems â treating them as if they
were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individualâs neurology
and/or by their family background â any question of social systemic
causation is ruled out.
Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of
what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually
characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition Iâm referring
to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by
an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a
sense that âsomething is missingâ â but no appreciation that this
mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure
principle. In large part this is a consequence of studentsâ ambiguous
structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of
disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services.
In his crucial essay âPostscript on Societies of Controlâ, Deleuze
distinguishes between the disciplinary societies described by Foucault,
which were organized around the enclosed spaces of the factory, the
school and the prison, and the new control societies, in which all
institutions are embedded in a dispersed corporation.
Deleuze is right to argue that Kafka is the prophet of distributed,
cybernetic power that is typical of Control societies. In The Trial,
Kafka importantly distinguishes between two types of acquittal available
to the accused. Definite acquittal is no longer possible, if it ever was
(âwe have only legendary accounts of ancient cases [which] provide
instances of acquittalâ). The two remaining options, then, are (1)
âOstensible acquittalâ, in which the accused is to all and intents and
purposes acquitted, but may later, at some unspecified time, face the
charges in full, or (2) âIndefinite postponementâ, in which the accused
engages in (what they hope is an infinitely) protracted process of legal
wrangling, so that the dreaded ultimate judgment is unlikely to be
forthcoming. Deleuze observes that the Control societies delineated by
Kafka himself, but also by Foucault and Burroughs, operate using
indefinite postponement: Education as a lifelong process... Training
that persists for as long as your working life continues... Work you
take home with you⌠Working from home, homing from work. A consequence
of this âindefiniteâ mode of power is that external surveillance is
succeeded by internal policing. Control only works if you are complicit
with it. Hence the Burroughs figure of the âControl Addictâ: the one who
is addicted to control, but also, inevitably, the one who has been taken
over, possessed by Control.
Walk into almost any class at the college where I taught and you will
immediately appreciate that you are in a post-disciplinary framework.
Foucault painstakingly enumerated the way in which discipline was
installed through the imposition of rigid body postures. During lessons
at our college, however, students will be found slumped on desk, talking
almost constantly, snacking incessantly (or even, on occasions, eating
full meals). The old disciplinary segmentation of time is breaking down.
The carceral regime of discipline is being eroded by the technologies of
control, with their systems of perpetual consumption and continuous
development.
The system by which the college is funded means that it literally cannot
afford to exclude students, even if it wanted to. Resources are
allocated to colleges on the basis of how successfully they meet targets
on achievement (exam results), attendance and retention of students.
This combination of market imperatives with bureaucratically-defined
âtargetsâ is typical of the âmarket Stalinistâ initiatives which now
regulate public services. The lack of an effective disciplinary system
has not, to say the least, been compensated for by an increase in
student self-motivation. Students are aware that if they donât attend
for weeks on end, and/or if they donât produce any work, they will not
face any meaningful sanction. They typically respond to this freedom not
by pursuing projects but by falling into hedonic (or anhedonic)
lassitude: the soft narcosis, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation,
all-night TV and marijuana.
Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many â and
these are A-level students mind you â will protest that they canât do
it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that itâs boring. 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 âboringâ. What we
are facing here is not just timeâhonored teenage torpor, but the
mismatch between a post-literate âNew Fleshâ that is âtoo wired to
concentrateâ 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. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way
that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp â and the logic of the
consumer system encourages this misapprehension â that the
indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
An illustration: I challenged one student about why he always wore
headphones in class. He replied that it didnât matter, because he wasnât
actually playing any music. In another lesson, he was playing music at
very low volume through the headphones, without wearing them. When I
asked him to switch it off, he replied that even he couldnât hear it.
Why wear the headphones without playing music or play music without
wearing the headphones? Because the presence of the phones on the ears
or the knowledge that the music is playing (even if he couldnât hear it)
was a reassurance that the matrix was still there, within reach.
Besides, in a classic example of interpassivity, if the music was still
playing, even if he couldnât hear it, then the player could still enjoy
it on his behalf. The use of headphones is significant here â pop is
experienced not as something which could have impacts upon public space,
but as a retreat into private âOedIpodâ consumer bliss, a walling up
against the social.
The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is
twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus.
Studentsâ 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 Jamesonâs analysis in âPostmodernism and Consumer
Societyâ. Jameson observed there that Lacanâs theory of schizophrenia
offered a âsuggestive aesthetic modelâ for understanding the fragmenting
of subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment-industrial
complex. âWith the breakdown of the signifying chainâ, Jameson
summarized, âthe Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of
pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and
unrelated presents in timeâ. Jameson was writing in the late 1980s â
i.e. the period in which most of my students were born. What we in the
classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical,
anti-mnemonic blip culture â a generation, that is to say, for whom time
has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.
If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of
control is the debtor-addict. Cyberspatial capital operates by addicting
its users; William Gibson recognized that in Neuromancer when he had
Case and the other cyberspace cowboys feeling insects-under-the-skin
strung out when they unplugged from the matrix (Caseâs amphetamine habit
is plainly the substitute for an addiction to a far more abstract
speed). If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism â a
consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of
hyperme-diated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may
in many cases amount to a post-lexia. Teenagers process capitalâs
image-dense data very effectively without any need to read
âslogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine
informational plane. âWriting has never been capitalismâs thing.
Capitalism is profoundly illiterateâ, Deleuze and Guattari argued in
Anti-Oedipus. âElectric language does not go by way of the voice or
writing: data processing does without them bothâ. Hence the reason that
many successful business people are dyslexic (but is their post-lexical
efficiency a cause or effect of their success?)
Teachers are now put under intolerable pressure to mediate between the
post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the
demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass examinations etc). This is
one way in which education, far from being in some ivory tower safely
inured from the âreal worldâ, is the engine room of the reproduction of
social reality, directly confronting the inconsistencies of the
capitalist social field. Teachers are caught between being
facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers
want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority
figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by
students as authority figures exacerbates the âboredomâ problem, since
isnât anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring?
Ironically, the role of disciplinarian is demanded of educators more
than ever at precisely the time when 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.
It is worth stressing that none of the students I taught had any legal
obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the
lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical
encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier,
safer option. 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, the logic insists â get into debt so you can get the same
McJob you could have walked into if youâd left school at sixteenâŚ
Jameson observed that âthe breakdown of temporality suddenly releases
[the] present of time from all the activities and intentionalities that
might focus it and make it a space of praxisâ. But nostalgia for the
context in which the old types of praxis operated is plainly useless.
That is why French students donât in the end constitute an alternative
to British reflexive impotence. That the neoliberal Economist would
deride French opposition to capitalism is hardly surprising, yet its
mockery of French âimmobilizationâ had a point. âCertainly the students
who kicked off the latest protests seemed to think they were re-enacting
the events of May 1968 their parents sprang on Charles de Gaulleâ, it
wrote in its lead article of March 30, 2006.
They have borrowed its slogans (âBeneath the cobblestones, the beach!â)
and hijacked its symbols (the Sorbonne university). In this sense, the
revolt appears to be the natural sequel to [2005]âs suburban riots,
which prompted the government to impose a state of emergency. Then it
was the jobless, ethnic underclass that rebelled against a system that
excluded them. Yet the striking feature of the latest protest movement
is that this time the rebellious forces are on the side of conservatism.
Unlike the rioting youths in the banlieues, the objective of the
students and public-sector trade unions is to prevent change, and to
keep France the way it is.
Itâs striking how the practice of many of the immobilizers is a kind of
inversion of that of another group who also count themselves heirs of
68: the so called âliberal communistsâ such as George Soros and Bill
Gates who combine rapacious pursuit of profit with the rhetoric of
ecological concern and social responsibility. Alongside their social
concern, liberal communists believe that work practices should be (post)
modernized, in line with the concept of âbeing smartâ. As Ĺ˝iĹžek
explains,
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.
Taken together, the immobilizers, with their implicit concession that
capitalism can only be resisted, never overcome, and the liberal
communists, who maintain that the amoral excesses of capitalism must be
offset by charity, give a sense of the way in which capitalist realism
circumscribes current political possibilities. Whereas the immobilizers
retain the form of 68-style protest but in the name of resistance to
change, liberal communists energetically embrace newness. ŽiŞek is right
to argue that, far from constituting any kind of progressive corrective
to official capitalist ideology, liberal communism constitutes the
dominant ideology of capitalism now. âFlexibilityâ, ânomadismâ and
âspontaneityâ 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.
In any case, resistance to the ânewâ is not a cause that the left can or
should rally around. Capital thought very carefully about how to break
labor; yet there has still not yet been enough thought about what
tactics will work against capital in conditions of post-Fordism, and
what new language can be innovated to deal with those conditions. It is
important to contest capitalismâs appropriation of âthe newâ, but to
reclaim the ânewâ canât be a matter of adapting to the conditions in
which we find ourselves âweâve done that rather too well, and
âsuccessful adaptationâ is the strategy of managerialism par excellence.
The persistent association of neoliberalism with the term âRestorationâ,
favored by both Badiou and David Harvey, is an important corrective to
the association of capital with novelty. For Harvey and Badiou,
neoliberal politics are not about the new, but a return of class power
and privilege. â[I]n France,â Badiou has said, ââRestorationâ refers to
the period of the return of the King, in 1815, after the Revolution and
Napoleon. We are in such a period. Today we see liberal capitalism and
its political system, parliamentarianism, as the only natural and
acceptable solutionsâ. Harvey argues that neoliberalization is best
conceived of as a âpolitical project to re-establish the conditions for
capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elitesâ.
Harvey demonstrates that, in an era popularly described as
âpost-politicalâ, class war has continued to be fought, but only by one
side: the wealthy. âAfter the implementation of neoliberal policies in
the late 1970s,â Harvey reveals,
the share of national income of the top 1 per cent of income earners
soared, to reach 15 per cent ... by the end of the century. The top 0.1
per cent of income earners in the US increased their share of the
national income from 2 per cent in 1978 to over 6 per cent by 1999,
while the ratio of the median compensation of workers to the salaries of
CEOs increased from just over 30 to 1 in 1970 to nearly 500 to 1 by
2000.... The US is not alone in this: the top 1 per cent of income
earners in Britain have doubled their share of the national income from
6.5 per cent to 13 per cent since 1982.
As Harvey shows, neoliberals were more Leninist than the Leninists,
using think-tanks as the intellectual vanguard to create the ideological
climate in which capitalist realism could flourish.
The immobilization model â which amounts to a demand to retain the
Fordist/disciplinary regime â could not work in Britain or the other
countries in which neoliberalism has already taken a hold. Fordism has
definitively collapsed in Britain, and with it the sites around which
the old politics were organized. At the end of the control essay,
Deleuze wonders what new forms an anti-control politics might take:
One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the
unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the
disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to
adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance
against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough
outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of
marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being âmotivatedâ; they
re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. Itâs up to them to
discover what theyâre being made to serve, just as their elders
discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines.
What must be discovered is a way out of the motivation/demotivation
binary, so that disidentification from the control program registers as
something other than dejected apathy. One strategy would be to shift the
political terrain â to move away from the unionsâ traditional focus on
pay and onto forms of discontent specific to post-Fordism. Before we
analyse that further, we must consider in more depth what post-Fordism
actually is.
âA guy told me one timeâ, says organized crime boss Neil McCauley in
Michael Mannâs 1995 film Heat, âDonât let yourself get attached to
anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you
feel the heat around the cornerâ. One of the easiest ways to grasp the
differences between Fordism and post-Fordism is to compare Mannâs film
with the gangster movies made by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin
Scorsese between 1971 and 1990. In Heat, the scores are undertaken not
by Families with links to the Old Country, but by rootless crews, in an
LA of polished chrome and interchangeable designer kitchens, of
featureless freeways and late-night diners. All the local color, the
cuisine aromas, the cultural idiolects which the likes of The Godfather
and Goodfellas depended upon have been painted over and re-fitted.
Heatâs Los Angeles is a world without landmarks, a branded Sprawl, where
markable territory has been replaced by endlessly repeating vistas of
replicating franchises. The ghosts of Old Europe that stalked Scorsese
and Coppolaâs streets have been exorcised, buried with the ancient
beefs, bad blood and burning vendettas somewhere beneath the
multinational coffee shops. You can learn a great deal about the world
of Heat from considering the name âNeil McCauleyâ. It is an anonymous
name, a fake passport name, a name that is bereft of history (even as,
ironically, it echoes the name of British historian, Lord McCaulay).
Compare âCorleoneâ, and remember that the Godfather was named after a
village. McCauley is perhaps the part that De Niro played that is
closest to the actorâs own personality: a screen, a cipher, depthless,
icily professional, stripped down to pure preparation, research, Method
(âI do what I do bestâ). McCauley is no mafia Boss, no puffed-up chief
perched atop a baroque hierarchy governed by codes as solemn and
mysterious as those of the Catholic Church and written in the blood of a
thousand feuds. His Crew are professionals, hands-on
entrepreneur-speculators, crime-technicians, whose credo is the exact
opposite of Cosa Nostra family loyalty. Family ties are unsustainable in
these conditions, as McCauley tells the Pacino character, the driven
detective, Vincent Hanna. âNow, if youâre on me and you gotta move when
I move, how do you expect to keep a marriage?â Hanna is McCauleyâs
shadow, forced to assume his insubstantiality, his perpetual mobility.
Like any group of shareholders, McCauleyâs crew is held together by the
prospect of future revenue; any other bonds are optional extras, almost
certainly dangerous. Their arrangement is temporary, pragmatic and
lateral â they know that they are interchangeable machine parts, that
there are no guarantees, that nothing lasts. Compared to this, the
goodfellas seem like sedentary sentimentalists, rooted in dying
communities, doomed territories.
The ethos espoused by McCauley is the one which Richard Sennett examines
in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the
New Capitalism, a landmark study of the affective changes that the
post-Fordist reorganization of work has brought about. The slogan which
sums up the new conditions is âno long termâ. Where formerly workers
could acquire a single set of skills and expect to progress upwards
through a rigid organizational hierarchy, now they are required to
periodically re-skill as they move from institution to institution, from
role to role. As the organization of work is decentralized, with lateral
networks replacing pyramidal hierarchies, a premium is put on
âflexibilityâ. Echoing McCauleyâs mockery of Hanna in Heat (âHow do you
expect to keep a marriage?â), Sennett emphasizes the intolerable
stresses that these conditions of permanent instability put on family
life. The values that family life depends upon â obligation,
trustworthiness, commitment â are precisely those which are held to be
obsolete in the new capitalism. Yet, with the public sphere under attack
and the safety nets that a âNanny Stateâ used to provide being
dismantled, the family becomes an increasingly important place of
respite from the pressures of a world in which instability is a
constant. The situation of the family in post-Fordist capitalism is
contradictory, in precisely the way that traditional Marxism expected:
capitalism requires the family (as an essential means of reproducing and
caring for labor power; as a salve for the psychic wounds inflicted by
anarchic social-economic conditions), even as it undermines it (denying
parents time with children, putting intolerable stress on couples as
they become the exclusive source of affective consolation for each
other).
According to Marxist economist Christian Marazzi, the switch from
Fordism to post-Fordism can be given a very specific date: October 6,
1979. It was on that date that the Federal Reserve increased interest
rates by 20 points, preparing the way for the âsupply-side economicsâ
that would constitute the âeconomic realityâ in which we are now
enmeshed. The rise in interest rates not only contained inflation, it
made possible a new organization of the means of production and
distribution. The ârigidityâ of the Fordist production line gave way to
a new âflexibilityâ, a word that will send chills of recognition down
the spine of every worker today. This flexibility was defined by a
deregulation of Capital and labor, with the workforce being casualized
(with an increasing number of workers employed on a temporary basis),
and outsourced.
Like Sennett, Marazzi recognizes that the new conditions both required
and emerged from an increased cybernetization of the working
environment. The Fordist factory was crudely divided into blue and white
collar work, with the different types of labor physically delimited by
the structure of the building itself. Laboring in noisy environments,
watched over by managers and supervisors, workers had access to language
only in their breaks, in the toilet, at the end of the working day, or
when they were engaged in sabotage, because communication interrupted
production. But in post-Fordism, when the assembly line becomes a âflux
of informationâ, people work by communicating. As Norbert Wiener taught,
communication and control entail one another.
Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream.
Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform
divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are
nervous systems. 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
âprecarityâ, as the ugly neologism has it. Periods of work alternate
with periods of unemployment. Typically, you find yourself employed in a
series of short-term jobs, unable to plan for the future.
Both Marazzi and Sennett point out that the disintegration of stable
working patterns was in part driven by the desires of workers â 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 Capitalâs mobilization and metabolization of the desire
for emancipation from Fordist routine. Especially in the UK, the
traditional representatives of the working class â union and labor
leaders â found Fordism rather too congenial; its stability of
antagonism gave them a guaranteed role. But this meant that it was easy
for the advocates of post-Fordist Capital to present themselves as the
opponents of the status quo, bravely resisting an inertial organized
labor âpointlesslyâ invested in fruitless ideological antagonism which
served the ends of union leaders and politicians, but did little to
advance the hopes of the class they purportedly represented. Antagonism
is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but
internally, in the psychology of the worker, who, as a worker, is
interested in old-style class conflict, but, as someone with a pension
fund, is also interested in maximizing the yield from his or her
investments. There is no longer an identifiable external enemy. The
consequence is, Marazzi argues, that post-Fordist workers are like the
Old Testament Jews after they left the âhouse of slaveryâ: liberated
from a bondage to which they have no wish to return but also abandoned,
stranded in the desert, confused about the way forward.
The psychological conflict raging within individuals cannot but have
casualties. Marazzi is researching the link between the increase in
bi-polar disorder and post-Fordism and, 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
âinteriorâ of capitalism. With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles,
capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar,
periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance
of âbubble thinkingâ) and depressive come-down. (The term âeconomic
depressionâ is no accident, of course). To a degree unprecedented in any
other social system, capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods
of populations. Without delirium and confidence, capital could not
function.
It seems that with post-Fordism, the âinvisible plagueâ of psychiatric
and affective disorders that has spread, silently and stealthily, since
around 1750 (i.e. the very onset of industrial capitalism) has reached a
new level of acuteness. Here, Oliver Jamesâs work is important. In The
Selfish Capitalist, James points to significant rises in the rates of
âmental distressâ over the last 25 years. âBy most criteriaâ, James
reports,
rates of distress almost doubled between people born in 1946 (aged
thirty-six in 1982) and 1970 (aged thirty in 2000). For example, 16 per
cent of thirty-six-year-old women in 1982 reported having âtrouble with
nerves, feeling low, depressed or sadâ, whereas 29 per cent of thirty
year-olds reported this in 2000 (for men it was 8 per cent in 1982, 13
per cent in 2000).
Another British study James cites compared levels of psychiatric
morbidity (which includes neurotic symptoms, phobias and depression) in
samples of people in 1977 and 1985. âWhereas 22 per cent of the 1977
sample reported psychiatric morbidity, this had risen to almost a third
of the population (31 per cent) by 1986â. Since these rates are much
higher in countries that have implemented what James calls âselfishâ
capitalism than in other capitalist nations, James hypothesizes that it
is selfish (i.e. neoliberalized) capitalist policies and culture that
are to blame. Specifically, James points to the way in which selfish
capitalism stokes up
both aspirations and the expectations that they can be fulfilled. ... In
the entrepreneurial fantasy society, the delusion is fostered that
anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual
likelihood of this occurring has diminished since the 1970s â a person
born in 1958 was more likely than one born in 1970 to achieve upward
mobility through education, for example. The Selfish Capitalist toxins
that are most poisonous to well-being are the systematic encouragement
of the ideas that material affluence is they key to fulfillment, that
only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to
anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic
or social background â if you do not succeed, there is only one person
to blame.
Jamesâs conjectures about aspirations, expectations and fantasy fit with
my own observations of what I have called âhedonic depressionâ in
British youth.
It is telling, in this context of rising rates of mental illness, that
New Labour committed itself, early in its third term in government, to
removing people from Incapacity Benefit, implying that many, if not
most, claimants are malingerers. In contrast with this assumption, it
doesnât seem unreasonable to infer that most of the people claiming
Incapacity Benefit â and there are well in excess of two million of them
â are casualties of Capital. A significant proportion of claimants, for
instance, are people psychologically damaged as a consequence of the
capitalist realist insistence that industries such as mining are no
longer economically viable. (Even considered in brute economic terms,
though, the arguments about âviabilityâ seem rather less than
convincing, especially once you factor in the cost to taxpayers of
incapacity and other benefits.) Many have simply buckled under the
terrifyingly unstable conditions of post-Fordism.
The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation
of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of
course strictly commensurate with its de-politicization. Considering
mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous
benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capitalâs drive towards
atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain
chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which
multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals
(we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental
illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about
their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is
constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is
why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a
social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental
illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist
realism.
It does not seem fanciful to see parallels between the rising incidence
of mental distress and new patterns of assessing workersâ performance.
We will now take a closer look at this ânew bureaucracyâ.
anti-production
Mike Judgeâs unjustly undercelebrated film Office Space (1999) is as
acute an account of the 90s/00s workplace as Schraderâs Blue Collar
(1978) was of 70s labor relations. Instead of the confrontation between
trade union officials and management in a factory, Judgeâs film shows a
corporation sclerotized by administrative âanti-productionâ: workers
receive multiple memos from different managers saying the exact same
thing. Naturally, the memo concerns a bureaucratic practice: it aims to
induce compliance with a new procedure of putting âcover sheetsâ on
reports. In keeping with the âbeing smartâ ethos, the management style
in Office Space is a mixture of shirtsleeves-informality and quiet
authoritarianism. Judge shows this same managerialism presides in the
corporate coffee chains where the office workers go to relax. Here,
staff are required to decorate their uniforms with âseven pieces of
flairâ, (i.e. badges or other personal tokens) to express their
âindividuality and creativityâ: a handy illustration of the way in which
âcreativityâ and âself-expressionâ have become intrinsic to labor in
Control societies; which, as Paolo Virno, Yann Moulier Boutang and
others have pointed out, now makes affective, as well as productive
demands, on workers. Furthermore, the attempt to crudely quantify these
affective contributions also tells us a great deal about the new
arrangements. The flair example also points to another phenomenon:
hidden expectations behind official standards. Joanna, a waitress at the
coffee chain, wears exactly seven pieces of flair, but it is made clear
to her that, even though seven is officially enough, it is actually
inadequate â the manager asks if she wants to look the sort of person
âwho only does the bare minimum.â
âYou know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair,â Joanna
complains, âwhy donât you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?â
âWell,â the manager replies, âI thought I remembered you saying that you
wanted to express yourself.â Enough is no longer enough. This syndrome
will be familiar to many workers who may find that a âsatisfactoryâ
grading in a performance evaluation is no longer satisfactory. In many
educational institutions, for instance, if after a classroom observation
a teacher is graded as âsatisfactoryâ, they will be required to
undertake training prior to a reassessment.
Initially, it might appear to be a mystery that bureaucratic measures
should have intensified under neoliberal governments that have presented
themselves as anti-bureaucratic and anti-Stalinist. Yet new kinds of
bureaucracy â âaims and objectivesâ, âoutcomesâ, âmission statementsâ â
have proliferated, even as neoliberal rhetoric about the end of
top-down, centralized control has gained pre-eminence. It might seem
that bureaucracy is a kind of return of the repressed, ironically
re-emerging at the heart of a system which has professed to destroy it.
But the resurgence of bureaucracy in neoliberalism is more than an
atavism or an anomaly.
As I have already indicated, there is no contradiction between âbeing
smartâ and the increase of administration and regulation: they are two
sides of labor in Control societies. Richard Sennett has argued that the
flattening of pyramidal hierarchies has actually led to more
surveillance of workers. âOne of the claims made for the new
organization of work is that it decentralizes power, that is, gives
people in the lower ranks of organization more control over their own
activitiesâ, Sennett writes. âCertainly this claim is false in terms of
the techniques employed for taking apart the old bureaucratic behemoths.
The new information systems provide a comprehensive picture of the
organization to top managers in ways which give individuals anywhere in
the network little room to hideâ. But it isnât only that information
technology has granted managers more access to data; it is that the data
itself has proliferated. Much of this âinformationâ is provided by
workers themselves. Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie describe some of
the bureaucratic measures with which a lecturer must comply when putting
together a module for an undergraduate degree in British universities.
âFor each moduleâ, De Angelis and Harvie write,
the âmodule leaderâ (ML, i.e., lecturer) must complete various
paperwork, in particular a âmodule specificationâ (at the moduleâs
start) which lists the moduleâs âaims and objectivesâ, ILOs, âmodes and
methods of assessmentâ, amongst other information; and a âmodule reviewâ
document (at the end of the module), in which the ML reports their own
assessment of the moduleâs strengths and weaknesses and their suggested
changes for the following year; a summary of student feedback; and
average marks and their dispersion.
This is only the beginning, however. For the degree program as a whole,
academics must prepare a âprogram specificationâ, as well as producing
âannual program reportsâ, which record student performance according to
âprogression ratesâ, âwithdrawal ratesâ, location and spread of marks.
All studentsâ marks have to be graded against a âmatrixâ. This
auto-surveillance is complemented by assessments carried out by external
authorities. The marking of student assignments is monitored by
âexternal examinersâ who are supposed to maintain consistency of
standards across the university sector. Lecturers have to be observed by
their peers, while departments are subject to periodic three or four day
inspections by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA).
If they are âresearch activeâ, lecturers must submit their âbest four
publicationsâ every four or five years to be graded by panel as part of
the Research Assessment Exercise (replaced in 2008 by the equally
controversial Research Excellence Framework). De Angelis and Harvie are
clear that these are only very sketchy accounts of only some of the
bureaucratic tasks that academics have to perform, all of which have
funding implications for institutions. This battery of bureaucratic
procedures is by no means confined to universities, nor to education:
other public services, such as the National Health Service and the
police force, find themselves enmeshed in similar bureaucratic
metastases.
This is in part a consequence of the inherent resistance of certain
processes and services to marketization. (The supposed marketization of
education, for instance, rests on a confused and underdeveloped analogy:
are students the consumers of the service or its product?) The idealized
market was supposed to deliver âfriction freeâ exchanges, in which the
desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for
intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to
assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which,
by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably
required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have
is not a direct comparison of workersâ 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. Indeed, an anthropological study
of local government in Britain argues that âMore effort goes into
ensuring that a local authorityâs services are represented correctly
than goes into actually improving those servicesâ. This reversal of
priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be
characterized without hyperbole as âmarket Stalinismâ. What late
capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of
achievement over actual achievement. As Marshall Berman explained,
describing Stalinâs White Sea Canal project of 1931-33:
Stalin seems to have been so intent on creating a highly visible symbol
of development that he pushed and squeezed the project in ways that only
retarded the development of the project. Thus 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 to carry
twentieth-century cargoes; consequently, the canal has never played any
significant role in Soviet commerce or industry. All the canal could
support, apparently, were tourist steamers, which in the 1930s were
abundantly stocked with Soviet and foreign writers who obligingly
proclaimed the glories of the work. The canal was a triumph of
publicity; but 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 â and the project would
have been a genuine tragedy, rather than a brutal farce in which real
people were killed by pseudo-events.
In a strange compulsion to repeat, the ostensibly anti-Stalinist
neoliberal New Labour government has shown the same tendency to
implement initiatives in which real world effects matter only insofar as
they register at the level of (PR) appearance. The notorious âtargetsâ
which the New Labour government was so enthusiastic in imposing are a
case in point. In a process that repeats itself with iron predictability
everywhere that they are installed, targets quickly cease to be a way of
measuring performance and become ends in themselves. Anxiety about
falling standards in school examinations is now a regular feature of the
summertime in Britain. Yet if students are less skilled and
knowledgeable than their predecessors, this is due not to a decline in
the quality of examinations per se, but to the fact that all of the
teaching is geared towards passing the exams. Narrowly focused âexam
drillâ replaces a wider engagement with subjects. 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.
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation
from the âtrue spiritâ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be
better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by
its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge
in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous
force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of
course less on what a company âreally doesâ, and more on perceptions of,
and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to
say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at
least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is
by the imposition of market mechanisms.
Here, Ĺ˝iĹžekâs elaboration of Lacanâs concept of the âbig Otherâ is
crucial. The big Other is the collective fiction, the symbolic
structure, presupposed by any social field. The big Other can never be
encountered in itself; instead, we only ever confront its stand-ins.
These representatives are by no means always leaders. In the example of
the White Sea Canal above, for instance, it wasnât Stalin himself who
was the representative of the big Other so much as the Soviet and
foreign writers who had to be persuaded of the glories of the project.
One important dimension of the big Other is that it does not know
everything. It is this constitutive ignorance of the big Other that
allows public relations to function. Indeed, the big Other could be
defined as the consumer of PR and propaganda, the virtual figure which
is required to believe even when no individual can. To use one of
Ĺ˝iĹžekâs examples: who was it, for instance, who didnât know that Really
Existing Socialism (RES) was shabby and corrupt? Not any of the people,
who were all too aware of its shortcomings; nor any of the government
administrators, who couldnât but know. No, it was the big Other who was
the one deemed not to know â who wasnât allowed to know â the quotidian
reality of RES. Yet the distinction between what the big Other knows,
i.e. what is officially accepted, and what is widely known and
experienced by actual individuals, is very far from being âmerelyâ
emptily formal; it is the discrepancy between the two that allows
âordinaryâ social reality to function. When the illusion that the big
Other did not know can no longer be maintained, the incorporeal fabric
holding the social system together disintegrates. This is why
Khrushchevâs speech in 1965, in which he âadmittedâ the failings of the
Soviet state, was so momentous. It is not as if anyone in the party was
unaware of the atrocities and corruption carried out in its name, but
Khrushchevâs announcement made it impossible to believe any more that
the big Other was ignorant of them.
So much for Really Existing Socialism â but what of Really Existing
Capitalism? One way to understand the ârealismâ of capitalist realism is
in terms of the claim to have given up belief in the big Other.
Postmodernism can be construed as the name for the complex of crises
that the decline in the belief in the big Other has triggered, as
Lyotardâs famous formulation of the postmodern condition â âincredulity
towards metanarrativesâ âsuggests. Jameson, of course, would argue that
the âincredulity towards metanarrativesâ is one expression of the
âcultural logic of late capitalismâ, a consequence of the switch into
the post-Fordist mode of capital accumulation. Nick Land gives one of
the most euphoric accounts of the âpostmodern meltdown of culture into
the economyâ. In Landâs work, a cybernetically upgraded invisible hand
is progressively eliminating centralized state power. Landâs 90s texts
synthesized cybernetics, complexity theory, cyberpunk fiction and
neoliberalism to construct a vision of capital planetary artificial
intelligence: a vast, supple, endlessly fissile system which renders
human will obsolete. In his manifesto for nonlinear, decentered Capital,
âMeltdownâ, Land invokes a âmassively distributed matrix-networked
tendency oriented to disabling ROM command-control programs sustaining
all macro- and micro-governmental entities, globally concentrating
themselves as the Human Security Systemâ. This is capitalism as a
shattering Real, in which (viral, digital) signals circulate on
self-sustaining networks which bypass the Symbolic, and therefore do not
require the big Other as guarantor. It is Deleuze and Guattariâs Capital
as âUnnamable Thingâ, but without the forces of reterritorialization and
anti-production which they argued were constitutive of capitalism. One
of the problems of Landâs position is also what is most interesting
about it: precisely that it posits a âpureâ capitalism, a capitalism
which is only inhibited and blocked by extrinsic, rather than internal,
elements (according to Landâs logic, these elements are atavisms that
will eventually be consumed and metabolized by Capital). Yet capitalism
cannot be âpurifiedâ in this way; strip away the forces of
anti-production and capitalism disappears with them. Similarly, there is
no progressive tendency towards an âunsheathingâ of capitalism, no
gradual unmasking of Capital as it âreallyâ is: rapacious, indifferent,
inhuman. On the contrary, the essential role of the âincorporeal
transformationsâ effectuated by PR, branding and advertising in
capitalism suggests that, in order to operate effectively, capitalismâs
rapacity depends upon various forms of sheathing. 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, as
the jeweler Gerald Ratner famously found to his cost. Ratner precisely
tried to circumvent the Symbolic and âtell it how it isâ, describing the
inexpensive jewelry his shops sold as âcrapâ in an after-dinner speech.
But the consequence of Ratner making this judgment official were
immediate, and serious - ÂŁ500m was wiped off the value of the company
and he lost his job. Customers might previously have known that the
jewelry Ratners sold was poor quality, but the big Other didnât know; as
soon as it did, Ratners collapsed.
Vernacular postmodernism has dealt with the âcrisis of symbolic
efficiencyâ in a far less intense way than Nick Land, through
metafictional anxieties about the function of the author, and in
television programs or films which expose the mechanisms of their own
productions and reflexively incorporate discussions of their own status
as commodities. But postmod-ernismâs supposed gestures of
demystification do not evince sophistication so much as a certain
naivety, a conviction that there were others, in the past, who really
believed in the Symbolic. In fact, of course, âsymbolic efficiencyâ was
achieved precisely by maintaining a clear distinction between a
material-empirical causality, and another, incorporeal causality proper
to the Symbolic. Ĺ˝iĹžek gives the example of a judge: âI 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 himâ. However, postmodernismâs
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. Lacan aims at
this paradox with his âles non-dupes errentâ: 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 âbelieves
only his eyesâ misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it
structures our experience of reality.
Much of Baudrillardâs 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 â both of which claimed to present reality in an
unmediated way â would always pose an insoluble dilemma. 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 ârealityâ 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 âhyperrealityâ. Uncannily echoing
Baudrillardâs fixations, the most successful reality television programs
ended up fusing fly on the wall documentary elements with interactive
polling. In effect, there are two levels of ârealityâ in these shows:
the unscripted behavior of the âreal lifeâ participants onscreen, and
the unpredictable responses of the audience at home, which in turn
affect the behavior of the onscreen participants. Yet reality TV is
continually haunted by questions about fiction and illusion: are the
participants acting, suppressing certain aspects of their personality in
order to appear more appealing to us, the audience? And have the
audienceâs votes been accurately registered, or is there some kind of a
fix? The slogan that the Big Brother TV show uses â âYou decideâ â
captures perfectly the mode of control by feedback that, according to
Baudrillard, has replaced old centralized forms of power. We ourselves
occupy the empty seat of power, phoning and clicking in our responses.
TVâs Big Brother had superseded Orwellâs Big Brother. We the audience
are not subjected to a power that comes from outside; rather, we are
integrated into a control circuit that has our desires and preferences
as its only mandate â but those desires and preferences are returned to
us, no longer as ours, but as the desires of the big Other. Clearly,
these circuits are not confined to television: cybernetic feedback
systems (focus groups, demographic surveys) are now integral to the
delivery of all âservicesâ, including education and government.
This returns us to the issue of post-Fordist bureaucracy. There is of
course a close relationship between bureaucracy â the discourse of
officialdom â and the big Other. Witness two of Ĺ˝iĹžekâs own examples of
the big Other at work: a low-level official who, having not been
informed of a promotion, says âSorry, I have not yet been properly
informed about this new measure, so I canât help you...â; a woman who
believed that she was suffering bad luck because of the number of her
house, who could not be satisfied by simply repainting a different
number herself , because âit has to be done properly, by the responsible
state institution...â We are all familiar with bureaucratic libido, with
the enjoyment that certain officials derive from this position of
disavowed responsibility (âitâs not me, Iâm afraid, itâs the
regulationsâ). The frustration of dealing with bureaucrats often arises
because they themselves can make no decisions; rather, they are
permitted only to refer to decisions that have always-already been made
(by the big Other). Kafka was the greatest writer on bureaucracy because
he saw that this structure of disavowal was inherent to bureaucracy. The
quest to reach the ultimate authority who will finally resolve Kâs
official status can never end, because the big Other cannot be
encountered in itself: there are only officials, more or less hostile,
engaged in acts of interpretation about what the big Otherâs intentions.
And these acts of interpretation, these deferrals of responsibility, are
all that the big Other is.
If Kafka is valuable as a commentator on totalitarianism, it is by
revealing that there was a dimension of totalitarianism which cannot be
understood on the model of despotic command. Kafkaâs purgatorial vision
of a bureaucratic labyrinth without end chimes with Ĺ˝iĹžekâs claim that
the Soviet system was an âempire of signsâ, in which even the
Nomenklatura themselves âincluding Stalin and Molotov â were engaged in
interpreting a complex series of social semiotic signals. No-one knew
what was required; instead, individuals could only guess what particular
gestures or directives meant. 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. As an example of this syndrome, let
us turn once more to Further Education. At a meeting between Trade Union
officials, college Principals and Members of Parliament, the Learning
and Skills Council (LSC), the quango at the heart of the FE funding
labyrinth, came in for particular attack. Neither the teachers, nor the
Principals, nor the MPs could determine how particular directives had
generated themselves, since they are not there in government policy
itself. The answer was that the LSC âinterpretedâ the instructions
issued by the Department for Education and Skills. These interpretations
then achieve the strange autonomy peculiar to bureaucracy. On the one
hand, bureaucratic procedures float freely, independent of any external
authority; but that very autonomy means that they assume a heavy
implacability, a resistance to any amendment or questioning.
The proliferation of auditing culture in post Fordism indicates that the
demise of the big Other has been exaggerated. Auditing can perhaps best
be conceived of as fusion of PR and bureaucracy, because the
bureaucratic data is usually intended to fulfill a promotional role: in
the case of education, for example, exam results or research ratings
augment (or diminish) the prestige of particular institutions. The
frustration for the teacher is that it seems as if their work is
increasingly aimed at impressing the big Other which is collating and
consuming this âdataâ. âDataâ has been put in inverted commas here,
because much of the so-called information has little meaning or
application outside the parameters of the audit: as Eeva Berglund puts
it, âthe information that audit creates does have consequences even
though it is so shorn of local detail, so abstract, as to be misleading
or meaningless - except, that is, by the aesthetic criteria of audit
itself.
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 â as Kafka prophesied â workers become their own auditors,
forced to assess their own performance. Take, for example, the ânew
systemâ that OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) uses to inspect
Further Education colleges. Under the old system, a college would have a
âheavyâ inspection once every four years or so, i.e. one involving many
lesson observations and a large number of inspectors present in the
college. Under the new, âimprovedâ system, if a college can demonstrate
that its internal assessment systems are effective, it will only have to
undergo a âlightâ inspection. But the downside of this âlightâ
inspection is obvious â surveillance and monitoring are outsourced from
OFSTED to the college and ultimately to lecturers themselves, and become
a permanent feature of the college structure (and of the psychology of
individual lecturers). The difference between the old/heavy and
new/light inspection system corresponds precisely to Kafkaâs distinction
between ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement, outlined
above. With ostensible acquittal, you petition the lower court judges
until they grant you a non-binding reprieve. You are then free from the
court, until the time when your case is re-opened. Indefinite
postponement, meanwhile, keeps your case at the lowest level of the
court, but at the cost of an anxiety that has never ends. (The changes
in OFSTED inspections are mirrored by in the change from the Research
Assessment Exercise to the Research Excellence Framework in higher
education: periodic assessment will be superseded by a permanent and
ubiquitous measurement which cannot help but generate the same perpetual
anxiety.)
In any case, it is not as if the âlightâ inspection is in any sense
preferable for staff than the heavy one. The inspectors are in the
college for the same amount of time as they were under the old system.
The fact that there are fewer of them does nothing to alleviate the
stress of the inspection, which has far more to do with the extra
bureaucratic window-dressing one has to do in anticipation of a possible
observation than it has to do with any actual observation itself. The
inspection, that is to say, corresponds precisely to Foucaultâs account
of the virtual nature of surveillance in Discipline And Punish. Foucault
famously observes there that there is no need for the place of
surveillance to actually be occupied. The effect of not knowing whether
you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance
apparatus. You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed.
Yet, in the case of school and university inspections, what you will be
graded on is not primarily your abilities as a teacher so much as your
diligence as a bureaucrat. There are other bizarre effects. Since OFSTED
is now observing the collegeâs self-assessment systems, there is an
implicit incentive for the college to grade itself and its teaching
lower than it actually deserves. The result is a kind of postmodern
capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are
required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration. At one point,
when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light
inspection system, he told us that the problem with our departmental
log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But donât
worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and
will never be acted upon; as if performing self-flagellation as part of
a purely formal exercise in cynical bureaucratic compliance were any
less demoralizing.
In the post-Fordist classroom, the reflexive impotence of the students
is mirrored by reflexive impotence of the teachers. De Angelis and
Harvie report that
practices and requirements of standardisation and surveillance obviously
impose a huge burden of work on academics and few are happy about it.
There have been a number of responses. Managers have frequently
suggested there is no alternative (TINA) and have perhaps suggested that
what we need to do is âwork smarter, not harderâ. This seductive slogan,
introduced to dampen staff resistance to further change which in their
(our) experience has a devastating effects on working conditions,
attempts to couple the need for âchangeâ (restructuring and innovation)
in order to meet the budget pressure and increase âcompetitivenessâ,
with staffâs resistance not only to worsening of their condition of
work, but also to the educational and academic âmeaninglessnessâ of the
âchangesâ.
The invocation of the idea that âthere is no alternativeâ, and the
recommendation to âwork smarter, not harderâ, shows how capitalist
realism sets the tone for labor disputes in post-Fordism. Ending the
inspection regime, one lecturer sardonically remarked, seems more
impossible than ending slavery was. Such fatalism can only be challenged
if a new (collective) political subject emerges.
capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder
âBeing realisticâ may once have meant coming to terms with of a reality
experienced as solid and immovable. Capitalist realism, however, entails
subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable
of reconfiguring itself at any moment. We are confronted with what
Jameson, in his essay âThe Antimonies Of The Postmodernâ, calls âa
purely fungible present in which space and psyches alike can be
processed and remade at willâ. The ârealityâ here is akin to the
multiplicity of options available on a digital document, where no
decision is final, revisions are always possible, and any previous
moment can be recalled at any time. The middle manager I referred to
above turned adaptation to this âfungibleâ reality it into a fine art.
He asserted with full confidence a story about the college and its
future one day â what the implications of the inspection were likely to
be; what senior management was thinking; then literally the next day
would happily propound a story that directly contradicted what he
previously said. There was never a question of his repudiating the
previous story; it was as if he, only dimly remembered there ever being
another story. This, I suppose, is âgood managementâ. It is, also,
perhaps the only way to stay healthy amidst capitalismâs perpetual
instability. On the face of it, this manager is a model of beaming
mental health, his whole being radiating a hail-fellow-well-met
bonhomie. Such cheerfulness can only be maintained if one has a
near-total absence of any critical reflexivity and a capacity, as he
had, to cynically comply with every directive from bureaucratic
authority. The cynicism of the compliance is essential, of course; the
preservation of his 60s liberal self-image depended upon his ânot really
believingâ in the auditing processes he so assiduously enforced. What
this disavowal depends upon is the distinction between inner subjective
attitude and outward behavior I discussed above: in terms of his inner
subjective attitude, the manager is hostile, even contemptuous, towards,
the bureaucratic procedures he supervises; but in terms of his outward
behavior, he is perfectly compliant. Yet it is precisely workersâ
subjective disinvestment from auditing tasks which enables them to
continue to perform labor that is pointless and demoralizing.
The managerâs capacity to smoothly migrate from one reality to another
reminded me of nothing so much as Ursula Le Guinâs The Lathe of Heaven.
It is a novel about George Orr, a man whose dreams literally come true.
In time-honored fairy tale fashion, however, the acts of wish
fulfillment quickly become traumatic and catastrophic. When, for
instance, Orr is induced by his therapist, Dr Haber, into dreaming that
the problem of overpopulation is solved, he wakes to find himself in a
world in which billions have been wiped out by a plague; a plague that,
as Jameson put it in his discussion of the novel, was âa hitherto
nonexistent event which rapidly finds its place in our chronological
memory of the recent pastâ. Much of the power of the novel consists in
its rendering of these retrospective confabulations, whose mechanics are
at once so familiar â because we perform them every night when we dream
â and so odd. How could it ever be possible for us to believe successive
or even co-extensive stories that so obviously contradict one another?
Yet we know from Kant, Nietzsche and psychoanalysis that waking, as much
as dreaming, experience, depends upon just such screening narratives. If
the Real is unbearable, any reality we construct must be a tissue of
inconsistencies. What differentiates Kant, Nietzsche and Freud from the
tiresome clichĂŠ that âlife is but a dreamâ is the sense that the
confabulations we live are consensual. The idea that the world we
experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our
mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our
infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called
interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always
carry an uncanny charge. This extra level of uncanniness is registered
in The Lathe of Heaven when Le Guin has Orrâs reality-warping dreams
witnessed by others â the therapist, Haber, who seeks to manipulate and
control Orrâs ability, and the lawyer, Heather Lelache. What, then, is
it like to live through someone elseâs dream coming true?
[Haber] could not go on talking. He felt it: the shift, the arrival, the
change.
The woman felt it too. She looked frightened. Holding the brass necklace
up close to her throat like a talisman, she was staring in dismay,
shock, terror, out of the window at the view.
[...] What would it do to the woman? Would she understand, would she go
mad, what would she do? Would she keep both memories, as he did, the
true one and the new one, the old one and the true one?
Does she âgo crazyâ? No, not at all: after a few moments of bewildered
fugue, Heather Lelache accepts the ânewâ world as the âtrueâ world,
editing out the point of suture. This strategy â of accepting the
incommensurable and the senseless without question â has always been the
exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play
in late capitalism, that âmotley painting of everything that ever wasâ,
whose dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as
its production and disposal of commodities.
In these conditions of ontological precarity, forgetting becomes an
adaptive strategy. Take the example of Gordon Brown, whose expedient
reinvention of his political identity involved an attempt to induce a
collective forgetting. In an article in International Socialism, John
Newsinger remembers how
Brown told the Confederation of British Industry conference that
âbusiness is in my bloodâ. His mother had been a company director and âI
was brought up in an atmosphere where I knew exactly what was happening
as far as business was concernedâ. He was, indeed he had always been,
one of them. The only problem is that it was not true. As his mother
subsequently admitted, she would never have called herself âa business
womanâ: she had only ever done some âlight administrative dutiesâ for âa
small family firmâ and had given up the job when she married, three
years before young Gordon was even born. While there have been Labor
politicians who have tried to invent working class backgrounds for
themselves before, Brown is the first to try and invent a capitalist
background.
Newsinger contrasts Brown with his rival and predecessor as British
prime minister, Tony Blair, a very different case. While Blair â who
presented the strange spectacle of a postmodern messianism â never had
any beliefs that he had to recant on, Brownâs move from Presbyterian
socialist to New Labour supremo was a long, arduous and painful process
of repudiation and denial. âWhereas, for Blair, the embrace of
neoliberalism involved no great personal struggle because he had no
previous beliefs to dispose of, Newsinger writes, âfor Brown it involved
a deliberate decision to change sides. The effort, one suspects, damaged
his personalityâ. Blair was the Last Man by nature and inclination;
Brown has become the Last Man, the dwarf at the End of History, by force
of will.
Blair was the man without a chest, the outsider the party needed in
order to get into power, his joker hysterical face salesman-smooth;
Brownâs implausible act of self-reinvention is what the party itself had
to go through, his fake-smile grimace the objective correlative of
Labourâs real state now that it has completely capitulated to capitalist
realism: gutted, and gutless, its insides replaced by simulacra which
once looked lustrous but now possess all the allure of decade-old
computer technology.
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 â see, for instance, the Bourne films, Memento,
Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind. In the Bourne films, Jason
Bourneâs quest to regain his identity goes alongside a continual flight
from any settled sense of self. âTry to understand me... ,â says Bourne
in the original novel by Robert Ludlum,
I have to know certain things ... enough to make a decision... but maybe
not everything. A part of me has to be able to walk away, disappear. I
have to be able to say to myself, what was isnât any longer, and thereâs
a possibility that it never was because I have no memory of it. What a
person canât remember didnât exist.... for him.
In the films, Bourneâs transnational nomadism is rendered in an
ultra-fast cutting style which functions as a kind of anti-memory,
pitching the viewer into the vertiginous âcontinuous presentâ which
Jameson argues is characteristic of postmodern temporality. The complex
plotting of Ludlumâs novels is transformed into a series of evanescent
event-ciphers and action set pieces which barely cohere into an
intelligible narrative. Bereft of personal history, Bourne lacks
narrative memory, but retains what we might call formal memory: a memory
â of techniques, practices, actions â that is literally embodied in a
series of physical reflexes and tics. Here, Bourneâs damaged memory
echoes the postmodern nostalgia mode as described by Fredric Jameson, in
which contemporary or even futuristic reference at the level of content
obscure a reliance on established or antiquated models at the level of
form. On the one hand, this is a culture that privileges only the
present and the immediate â the extirpation of the long term extends
backwards as well as forwards in time (for example, media stories
monopolize attention for a week or so then are instantly forgotten); on
the other hand, it is a culture that is excessively nostalgic, given
over to retrospection, incapable of generating any authentic novelty. It
may be that Jamesonâs identification and analysis of this temporal
antimony is his most important contribution to our understanding of
postmodern/post-Fordist culture. â[T]he paradox from which we must set
forth,â he argues in âAntimonies Of The Postmodernâ,
is the equivalence between an unparalleled rate of change on all the
levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of everything
â feelings along with consumer goods, language along with built space â
that would seem incompatible with such mutability... What then dawns is
the realization that no society has ever been as standardized as this
one, and that the stream of human, social and historical temporality has
never flowed quite so homogenously. ... What we now begin to feel,
therefore â and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more
fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its
temporal dimension â is henceforth, where everything now submits to the
perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any
longer.
No doubt this is another example of the struggle between the forces of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization which Deleuze and Guattari
argue is constitutive of capitalism as such. It wouldnât be surprising
if profound social and economic instability resulted in a craving for
familiar cultural forms, to which we return in the same way that Bourne
reverts to his core reflexes. The memory disorder that is the
correlative of this situation is the condition which afflicts Leonard in
Memento, theoretically pure anterograde amnesia. 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....
If memory disorder provides a compelling analogy for the glitches in
capitalist realism, the model for its smooth functioning would be
dreamwork. When we are dreaming, we forget, but immediately forget that
we have done so; since the gaps and lacunae in our memories are
Photoshopped out, they do not trouble or torment us. What dreamwork does
is to produce a confabulated consistency which covers over anomalies and
contradictions, and it is this which Wendy Brown picked up on when she
argued that it was precisely dreamwork which provided the best model for
understanding contemporary forms of power. In her essay âAmerican
Nightmare: Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, and De-democratizationâ,
Brown unpicked the alliance between neoconservatism and neoliberalism
which constituted the American version of capitalist realism up until
2008. Brown shows that neoliberalism and neoconservatism operated from
premises which are not only inconsistent, but directly contradictory.
âHowâ, Brown asks,
does a rationality that is expressly amoral at the level of both ends
and means (neoliberalism) intersect with one that is expressly moral and
regulatory (neoconservatism)? How does a project that empties the world
of meaning, that cheapens and deracinates life and openly exploits
desire, intersect one centered on fixing and enforcing meanings,
conserving certain ways of life, and repressing and regulating desire?
How does support for governance modeled on the firm and a normative
social fabric of self-interest marry or jostle against support for
governance modeled on church authority and a normative social fabric of
self-sacrifice and long-term filial loyalty, the very fabric shredded by
unbridled capitalism?
But incoherence at the level of what Brown calls âpolitical rationalityâ
does nothing to prevent symbiosis at the level of political
subjectivity, and, although they proceeded from very different guiding
assumptions, Brown argues that neoliberalism and neoconservatism worked
together to undermine the public sphere and democracy, producing a
governed citizen who looks to find solutions in products, not political
processes. As Brown claims,
the choosing subject and the governed subject are far from opposites ...
Frankfurt school intellectuals and, before them, Plato theorized the
open compatibility between individual choice and political domination,
and depicted democratic subjects who are available to political tyranny
or authoritarianism precisely because they are absorbed in a province of
choice and need-satisfaction that they mistake for freedom.
Extrapolating a little from Brownâs arguments, we might hypothesize that
what held the bizarre synthesis of neoconservatism and neoliberalism
together was their shared objects of abomination: the so called Nanny
State and its dependents. Despite evincing an anti-statist rhetoric,
neoliberalism is in practice not opposed to the state per se â as the
bank bail-outs of 2008 demonstrated â but rather to particular uses of
state funds; meanwhile, neoconservatismâs strong state was confined to
military and police functions, and defined itself against a welfare
state held to undermine individual moral responsibility.
Although excoriated by both neoliberalism and neoconserva-tivism, the
concept of the Nanny State continues to haunt capitalist realism. The
specter of big government plays an essential libidinal function for
capitalist realism. It is there to be blamed precisely for its failure
to act as a centralizing power, the anger directed at it much like the
fury Thomas Hardy supposedly spat at God for not existing. âTime and
againâ, James Meek observed in an LRB piece on water privatization in
Britain, âConservative 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 themâ. Meek was visiting Tewkesbury, one of
the British towns that was the victim of serious flooding in 2007, a
year after the disaster. On the face of it, the flooding and the
consequent failure of services was the fault of privatized water
companies and house builders, yet Meek found that this was not the way
that most of the local residents saw it. âIn Tewkesburyâ, Meeks wrote,
in general there is more hostility towards the government, the council
and the Environment Agency for not stopping house builders than there is
towards house builders for building houses, or buyers for buying them.
When insurers raise their premiums, more blame is directed at the
government for not spending enough on flood defences than at insurers
for raising the premiums, or at people who choose to live in a
flood-prone valley but donât like paying extra for it.
This syndrome was repeated on a much grander scale with a disaster of a
different kind âthe bank crisis of 2008. The media focus was on the
excesses of individual bankers and on the governmentâs handling of the
crisis, not on the systemic causes of the crisis. I donât for a moment
want to excuse New Labour for its part in such disasters, but it has to
be recognized that focus on government, like the focus on immoral
individuals, is an act of deflection. Scapegoating an impotent
government (running around to clean up the messes made by its business
friends) arises from bad faith, from a continuing hostility to the Nanny
State that nevertheless goes alongside a refusal to accept the
consequences of the sidelining of government in global capitalism â a
sign, perhaps, that, at the level of the political unconscious, it is
impossible to accept that there are no overall controllers, that the
closest thing we have to ruling powers now are nebulous, unaccountable
interests exercising corporate irresponsibility. A case of fetishist
disavowal, perhaps â âwe know perfectly well that the government is not
pulling the strings, but nevertheless...â The disavowal happens in part
because the centerlessness of global capitalism is radically
unthinkable. Although people are interpellated now as consumers â and,
as Wendy Brown and others have pointed out, government itself is
presented as a kind of commodity or service â they still cannot help but
think of themselves as (if they were) citizens.
The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the
centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a
consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct
realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and
another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call
centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together
in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything
ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other
side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the
failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the
call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call
centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that
capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers
werenât the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means
organizations are so fixated on making profits that they canât actually
sell you anything.
The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late
capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR,
the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly
trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must
remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since â as is
very quickly clear to the caller âthere is no-one who knows, and no-one
who could do anything even if they could. 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.
Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is
poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a
decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than
one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak
farce of Kâs encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it
is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center
experience.
Thereâs no fixed exchange with the Castle, no central exchange which
transmits our calls further. When anybody calls up the Castle from here
the instruments in all the subordinate departments ring, or rather they
would ring if practically all the departments â I know this for a
certainty â didnât leave their receivers off. Now and then, however, a
fatigued official may feel the need of a little distraction, especially
in the evenings and at night and may hang the receiver on. Then we get
an answer, but of course an answer thatâs a practical joke. And thatâs
very understandable too. For who would take the responsibility of
interrupting, in the middle of the night, the extremely important work
that goes on furiously the whole time, with a message about his own
private troubles? I canât comprehend how even a stranger can imagine
that when he calls up Sordini, for example, itâs Sordini that answers.
Kâs response anticipates the bewildered frustration of the individual in
the call center labyrinth. Although many of the conversations with call
center operatives appear Dadaistically nonsensical, they cannot be
treated as such, cannot be dismissed as being of no significance.
âI didnât know it was like that, certainly,â said K. âI couldnât know of
all these peculiarities, but I didnât put much confidence in those
telephone conversations and I was always aware that the only things of
any importance were those that happened in the Castle itself.â
âNo,â said the Superintendent, holding firmly onto the word, âthese
telephone replies from the Castle certainly have a meaning, why
shouldnât they? How could a message given by an official from the Castle
not be important?â
The supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored the negative atheology
proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching
for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there â it is
that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility.
This problem is addressed from another angle in a paper by Campbell
Jones entitled âThe Subject Supposed To Recycleâ. In posing the
question, âwho is the subject supposed to recycle?â Jones denaturalizes
an imperative that is now so taken for granted that resisting it seems
senseless, never mind unethical. Everyone is supposed to recycle;
no-one, whatever their political persuasion, ought to resist this
injunction. 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. But the subject
supposed to recycle, Jones argued, presupposed the structure not
supposed to recycle: in making recycling the responsibility of
âeveryoneâ, structure contracts out its responsibility to consumers, by
itself receding into invisibility. Now, when the appeal to individual
ethical responsibility has never been more clamorous â in her book
Frames Of War, Judith Butler uses the term âresponsibi-lizationâ to
refer to this phenomenon â it is necessary to wager instead on structure
at its most totalizing. Instead of saying that everyone â i.e. every one
â is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would
be better to say that no-one is, and thatâs the very problem. The cause
of eco-catastrophe is an impersonal structure which, even though it is
capable of producing all manner of effects, is precisely not a subject
capable of exercising responsibility. The required subject â a
collective subject - does not exist, yet the crisis, like all the other
global crises weâre now facing, demands that it be constructed. Yet the
appeal to ethical immediacy that has been in place in British political
culture since at least 1985 â when the consensual sentimentality of Live
Aid replaced the antagonism of the Miners Strike â permanently defers
the emergence of such a subject.
Similar issues are touched on in a paper by Armin Beverungen on Alan
Pakulaâs 1974 film The Parallax View, which sees The Parallax View as
providing a kind of diagram of the way in which a certain model of
(business) ethics goes wrong. The problem is that the model of
individual responsibility assumed by most versions of ethics have little
purchase on the behavior of Capital or corporations. The Parallax View
is in a sense a meta-conspiracy film: a film not only about conspiracies
but about the impotence of attempts to uncover them; or, much worse than
that, about the way in which particular kinds of investigation feed the
very conspiracies they intend to uncover. It is not only that the Warren
Beatty character is framed/killed for the crime he is investigating,
neatly eliminating him and undermining his investigations with one pull
of a corporate assassins trigger; itâs that, as Jameson noted in his
commentary on the film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, his very tenacity,
quasi-sociopathic individualism, make him eminently frameable.
The terrifying climactic moment of The Parallax View â when the
silhouette of Beattyâs anonymous assassin appears against migraine-white
space â for me now rhymes with the open door at the end of a very
different film, Peter Weirâs The Truman Show. But where the door in the
horizon opening onto black space at the end of Weirâs film connotes a
break in a universe of total determinism, the nothingness on which
existentialist freedom depends, The Parallax Viewâs âfinal open door ...
opens onto a world conspiratorially organized and controlled as far as
the eye can seeâ (Jameson). This anonymous figure with a rifle in a
doorway is the closest we get to seeing the conspiracy (as) itself. The
conspiracy in The Parallax View never gives any account of itself. It is
never focalised through a single malign individual. Although presumably
corporate, the interests and motives of the conspiracy in The Parallax
View are never articulated (perhaps not even to or by those actually
involved in it). Who knows what the Parallax Corporation really wants?
It is itself situated in the parallax between politics and economy. Is
it a commercial front for political interests, or is the whole machinery
of government a front for it? Itâs not clear if the Corporation really
exists â more than that, it is not clear if its aim is to pretend that
it doesnât exist, or to pretend that it does.
There are certainly conspiracies in capitalism, but the problem is that
they are themselves only possible because of deeper level structures
that allow them to function. Does anyone really think, for instance,
that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and
banking class with a whole new set of (âbetterâ) people? Surely, on the
contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure,
and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce
themselves. The strength of Pakulaâs film is precisely to invoke the
shadowy, centerless impersonality proper to a corporate conspiracy. As
Jameson observes, what Pakula captures so well in The Parallax View is a
particular kind of corporate affective tonality:
For the agents of conspiracy, Sorge [conern] is a matter of smiling
confidence, and the preoccupation is not personal but corporate, concern
for the vitality of the network or the institution, a disembodied
distraction or inattentiveness engaging the absent space of the
collective organization itself without the clumsy conjectures that sap
the energies of the victims. These people know, and are therefore able
to invest their presence as characters in an intense yet complacent
attention whose centre of gravity is elsewhere: a rapt intentness which
is at the same time disinterest. Yet this very different type of
concern, equally depersonalised, carries its own specific anxiety with
it, as it were unconsciously and corporately, without any consequences
for the individual villains.
... without any consequences for the individual villains... How that
phrase resonates just now â after the deaths of Jean Charles De Menezes
and Ian Tomlinson and after the banking fiasco. And what Jameson is
describing here is the mortifying cocoon of corporate structure â which
deadens as it protects, which hollows out, absents, the manager, ensures
that their attention is always displaced, ensures that they cannot
listen. The delusion that many who enter into management with high hopes
is precisely that they, the individual, can change things, that they
will not repeat what their managers had done, that things will be
different this time; but watch someone step up into management and itâs
usually not very long before the grey petrification of power starts to
subsume them. It is here that structure is palpable â you can
practically see it taking people over, hear its deadened/ deadening
judgements speaking through them.
For this reason, it is a mistake to rush to impose the individual
ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is
the temptation of the ethical which, as ŽiŞek has argued, the capitalist
system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit
crisis â the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals,
those âabusing the systemâ, rather than on the system itself. But the
evasion is actually a two step procedure â since structure will often be
invoked (either implicitly or openly) precisely at the point when there
is the possibility of individuals who belong to the corporate structure
being punished. At this point, suddenly, the causes of abuse or atrocity
are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible.
This was what happened with the Hillsborough football disaster, the Jean
Charles De Menezes farce and so many other cases. But this impasse â it
is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions,
and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic â is
not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in
capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling
impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate
structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals â but
the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not
like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations
and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is
not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they
are themselves constrained by/ expressions of the ultimate
cause-that-is-not-a-subject: Capital.
Nothing could be a clearer illustration of what ŽiŞek has identified as
the failure of the Father function, the crisis of the paternal superego
in late capitalism, than a typical edition of Supernanny. The program
offers what amounts to a relentless, although of course implicit, attack
on postmodernityâs permissive hedonism. Supernanny is a Spinozist
insofar as, like Spinoza, she takes it for granted that children are in
a state of abjection. They are unable to recognize their own interests,
unable to apprehend either the causes of their actions or their (usually
deleterious) effects. But the problems that Supernanny confronts do not
arise from the actions or character of the children â who can only be
expected to be idiotic hedonists â but with the parents. It is the
parentsâ following of the trajectory of the pleasure principle, the path
of least resistance, that causes most of the misery in the families. In
a pattern that quickly becomes familiar, the parentsâ pursuit of the
easy life leads them to accede to their childrenâs every demand, which
become increasingly tyrannical.
Rather like many teachers or other workers in what used to be called
âpublic serviceâ, Supernanny has to sort out problems of socialization
that the family can no longer resolve. 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 âpaternalâ concept of duty has been
subsumed into the âmaternalâ imperative to enjoy, it can seem that the
parent is failing in their duty if they in any way impede their
childrenâs absolute right to enjoyment. Partly this is an effect of the
increasing requirement that both parents work; in these conditions, when
the parent sees the child very little, the tendency will often be to
refuse to occupy the âoppressiveâ function of telling the child what to
do. The parental disavowal of this role is doubled at the level of
cultural production by the refusal of âgatekeepersâ to do anything but
give audiences what they already (appear to) want. The concrete question
is: if a return to the paternal superego â the stern father in the home,
Reithian superciliousness in broadcasting â is neither possible nor
desirable, then how are we to move beyond the culture of monotonous
moribund conformity that results from a refusal to challenge or educate?
A question as massive as this cannot of course be finally answered in a
short book such as this, and what follows here will amount to a few
starting points and suggestions. In brief, though, I believe that it is
Spinoza who offers the best resources for thinking through what a
âpaternalism without the fatherâ might look like.
In Tarrying with the Negative, ŽiŞek famously argues that a certain
Spinozism is the ideology of late capitalism. ŽiŞek believes that
Spinozaâs rejection of deontology for an ethics based around the concept
of health is allegedly flat with capitalismâs amoral affective
engineering. The famous example here is Spinozaâs reading of the myth of
the Fall and the foundation of Law. On Spinozaâs account, God does not
condemn Adam for eating the apple because the action is wrong; he tells
him that he should not consume the apple because it will poison him. For
ŽiŞek, this dramatizes the termination of the Father function. An act is
wrong not because Daddy says so; Daddy only says it is âwrongâ because
performing the act will be harmful to us. In Ĺ˝iĹžekâs view, Spinozaâs
move both deprives the grounding of Law in a sadistic act of scission
(the cruel cut of castration), at the same time as it denies the
ungrounded positing of agency in an act of pure volition, in which the
subject assumes responsibility for everything. In fact, Spinoza has
immense resources for analyzing the affective regime of late capitalism,
the video-drome-control apparatus described by Burroughs, Philip K. Dick
and David Cronenberg in which agency is dissolved in a phantasmagoric
haze of psychic and physical intoxicants. Like Burroughs, Spinoza shows
that, far from being an aberrant condition, addiction is the standard
state for human beings, who are habitually enslaved into reactive and
repetitive behaviors by frozen images (of themselves and the world).
Freedom, Spinoza shows, is something that can be achieved only when we
can apprehend the real causes of our actions, when we can set aside the
âsad passionsâ that intoxicate and entrance us.
Thereâs no doubt that late capitalism certainly articulates many of its
injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. The banning
of smoking in public places, the relentless monstering of working class
diet on programs like You Are What You Eat, do appear to indicate that
we are already in the presence of a paternalism without the Father. It
is not that smoking is âwrongâ, it is that it will lead to our failing
to lead long and enjoyable lives. But there are limits to this emphasis
on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely
feature at all, for instance. What we see instead is a reductive,
hedonic model of health which is all about âfeeling and looking goodâ.
To tell people how to lose weight, or how to decorate their house, is
acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement is to be
oppressive and elitist. The alleged elitism and oppression cannot
consist in the notion that a third party might know someoneâs interest
better than they know it themselves, since, presumably smokers are
deemed either to be unaware of their interests or incapable of acting in
accordance with them. No: the problem is that only certain types of
interest are deemed relevant, since they reflect values that are held to
be consensual. Losing weight, decorating your house and improving your
appearance belong to the âconsentimentalâ regime.
In an excellent interview at the
, the documentary film-maker Adam Curtis identifies the contours of this
regime of affective management.
TV now tells you what to feel.
It doesnât tell you what to think any more. From EastEnders to reality
format shows, youâre on the emotional journey of people â and through
the editing, it gently suggests to you what is the agreed form of
feeling. âHugs and Kissesâ, I call it.
I nicked that off Mark Ravenhill who wrote a very good piece which said
that if you analyse television now itâs a system of guidance â it tells
you who is having the Bad Feelings and who is having the Good Feelings.
And the person who is having the Bad Feelings is redeemed through a
âhugs and kissesâ moment at the end. It really is a system not of moral
guidance, but of emotional guidance.
Morality has been replaced by feeling. In the âempire of the self
everyone âfeels the sameâ without ever escaping a condition of
solipsism. âWhat people suffer from,â Curtis claims,
is being trapped within themselves - 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.
The BBC should realize that. I have an idealistic view, but if the BBC
could do that, taking people beyond their own selves, it will renew
itself in a way that jumps over the competition. The competition is
obsessed by serving people in their little selves. And in a way,
actually, Murdoch for all his power, is trapped by the self. Thatâs his
job, to feed the self.
In the BBC, itâs the next step forward. It doesnât mean we go back to
the 1950s and tell people how to dress, what we do is say âwe can free
you from yourselfâ â and people would love it.
Curtis attacks the internet because, in his view, it facilitates
communities of solipsists, interpassive networks of like-minds who
confirm, rather than challenge, each othersâ assumptions and prejudices.
Instead of having to confront other points of view in a contested public
space, these communities retreat into closed circuits. But, Curtis
claims, the impact of internet lobbies on Old Media is disastrous,
since, not only does its reactive pro-activity allow the media class to
further abnegate its function to educate and lead, it also allows
populist currents on both the left and the right to âbullyâ media
producers into turning out programming that is anodyne and mediocre.
Curtisâs critique has a point, but it misses important dimensions of
what is happening on the net. Contrary to Curtisâs account of blogging,
blogs can generate new discourse networks that have no correlate in the
social field outside cyberspace. As Old Media increasingly becomes
subsumed into PR and the consumer report replaces the critical essay,
some zones of cyberspace offer resistance to a âcritical compressionâ
that is elsewhere depressingly pervasive. Nevertheless, the interpassive
simulation of participation in postmodern media, the network narcissism
of MySpace and Facebook, has, in the main, generated content that is
repetitive, parasitic and conformist. In a seeming irony, the media
classâs refusal to be paternalistic has not produced a bottom-up culture
of breathtaking diversity, but one that is increasingly infantilized. By
contrast, it is paternalistic cultures that treat audiences as adults,
assuming that they can cope with cultural products that are complex and
intellectually demanding. The reason that focus groups and capitalist
feedback systems fail, even when they generate commodities that are
immensely popular, is that people do not know what they want. This is
not only because peopleâs desire is already present but concealed from
them (although this is often the case). Rather, the most powerful forms
of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the
weird. These can only be supplied by artists and media professionals who
are prepared to give people something different from that which already
satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain
kind of risk. The Marxist Supernanny would not only be the one who laid
down limitations, who acted in our own interests when we are incapable
of recognizing them ourselves, but also the one prepared to take this
kind of risk, to wager on the strange and our appetite for it. It is
another irony that capitalismâs âsociety of riskâ is much less likely to
take this kind of risk than was the supposedly stodgy, centralized
culture of the postwar social consensus. It was the public
service-oriented BBC and Channel 4 that perplexed and delighted me with
the likes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Pinter plays and Tarkovsky
seasons; it was this BBC that also funded the popular avant gardism of
the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which embedded sonic experimentalism into
everyday life. Such innovations are unthinkable now that the public has
been displaced by the consumer. The effect of permanent structural
instability, the âcancellation of the long termâ, is invariably
stagnation and conservatism, not innovation. This is not a paradox. As
Adam Curtisâs remarks above make clear, 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. Meanwhile, films
such as the aforementioned Tarkovskyâs Solaris and Stalker -plundered by
Hollywood since as far back as Alien and Blade Runner â were produced in
the ostensibly moribund conditions of the Brezhnevite Soviet state,
meaning that the USSR acted as a cultural entrepreneur for Hollywood.
Since it is now clear that a certain amount of stability is necessary
for cultural vibrancy, the question to be asked is: how can this
stability be provided, and by what agencies?
Itâs well past time for the left to cease limiting its ambitions to the
establishing of a big state. But being âat a distance from the stateâ
does not mean either abandoning the state or retreating into the private
space of affects and diversity which ŽiŞek rightly argues is the perfect
complement to neoliberalismâs 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 â and modernizing â the idea of a public space that is
not reducible to an aggregation of individuals and their interests. The
âmethodological individualismâ of the capitalist realist worldview
presupposes the philosophy of Max Stirner as much as that of Adam Smith
or Hayek in that it regards notions such as the public as âspooksâ,
phantom abstractions devoid of content. All that is real is the
individual (and their families). The symptoms of the failures of this
worldview are everywhere â in a disintegrated social sphere in which
teenagers shooting each other has become commonplace, in which hospitals
incubate aggressive superbugs â what is required is that effect be
connected to structural cause. Against the postmodernist suspicion of
grand narratives, we need to reassert that, far from being isolated,
contingent problems, these are all the effects of a single systemic
cause: Capital. We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop
strategies against a Capital which presents itself as ontologically, as
well as geographically, ubiquitous.
Despite initial appearances (and hopes), capitalist realism was not
undermined by the credit crisis of 2008. The speculations that
capitalism might be on the verge of collapsing soon proved to be
unfounded. It quickly became clear that, far from constituting the end
of capitalism, the bank bail-outs were a massive re-assertion of the
capitalist realist insistence that there is no alternative. Allowing the
banking system to disintegrate was held to be unthinkable, and what
ensued was a vast hemor-rhaging of public money into private hands.
Nevertheless, what did happen in 2008 was the collapse of the framework
which has provided ideological cover for capitalist accumulation since
the 1970s. After the bank bail-outs neoliberalism has, in every sense,
been discredited. That is not to say that neoliberalism has disappeared
overnight; on the contrary, its assumptions continue to dominate
political economy, but they do so now no longer as part of an
ideological project that has a confident forward momentum, but as
inertial, undead defaults. We can now see that, while neoliberalism was
necessarily capitalist realist, capitalist realism need not be
neoliberal. In order to save itself, capitalism could revert to a model
of social democracy or to a Children of Menâlike authoritarianism.
Without a credible and coherent alternative to capitalism, capitalist
realism will continue to rule the political-economic unconscious.
But even if it is now evident that the credit crisis will not lead to
the end of capitalism all by itself, the crisis has led to the relaxing
of a certain kind of mental paralysis. We are now in a political
landscape littered with what Alex Williams called âideological rubbleâ â
it is year zero again, and a space has been cleared for a new
anti-capitalism to emerge which is not necessarily tied to the old
language or traditions. One of the leftâs vices is its endless rehearsal
of historical debates, 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. 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. The credit crisis is an opportunity â but it needs
to be treated as a tremendous speculative challenge, a spur for a
renewal that is not a return. As Badiou has forcefully insisted, an
effective anti-capitalism must be a rival to Capital, not a reaction to
it; there can be no return to pre-capitalist territorialities.
Anti-capitalism must oppose Capitalâs globalism with its own, authentic,
universality.
It is crucial that a genuinely revitalized left confidently occupy the
new political terrain I have (very provisionally) sketched here. Nothing
is inherently political; politicization requires a political agent which
can transform the taken-for-granted into the up-for-grabs. If
neoliberalism triumphed by incorporating the desires of the post 68
working class, a new left could begin by building on the desires which
neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy. For
example, the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism
signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy. What is
needed is a new struggle over work and who controls it; an assertion of
worker autonomy (as opposed to control by management) together with a
rejection of certain kinds of labor (such as the excessive auditing
which has become so central feature of work in post-Fordism). This is a
struggle that can be won â but only if a new political subject
coalesces; it is an open question as to whether the old structures (such
as the trade unions) will be capable of nurturing that subjectivity, or
whether it will entail the formation of wholly new political
organizations. New forms of industrial action need to be instituted
against managerialism. For instance, in the case of teachers and
lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be
abandoned, because they only hurt students and members (at the college
where I used to work, one-day strikes were pretty much welcomed by
management because they saved on the wage bill whilst causing negligible
disruption to the college). What is needed is the strategic withdrawal
of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management: all of the
machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the
delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without.
Instead of the gestural, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like
Palestine, itâs time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and
take the opportunity opened up by the crisis to begin to rid public
services of business ontology. When even businesses canât be run as
businesses, why should public services?
We must convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized
conditions into effective antagonisms. Affective disorders are forms of
captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled
outwards, directed towards its real cause, Capital. Furthermore, the
proliferation of certain kinds of mental illness in late capitalism
makes the case for a new austerity, a case that is also made by the
increasing urgency of dealing with environmental disaster. Nothing
contradicts capitalismâs constitutive imperative towards growth more
than the concept of rationing goods and resources. Yet it is becoming
uncomfortably clear that consumer self-regulation and the market will
not by themselves avert environmental catastrophe. There is a libidinal,
as well as a practical case, to be made for this new ascesis. If, as
Oliver James, ŽiŞek and Supernanny have shown, unlimited license leads
to misery and disaffection, then limitations placed on desire are likely
to quicken, rather than deaden, it. In any case, rationing of some sort
is inevitable. The issue is whether it will be collectively managed, or
whether it will be imposed by authoritarian means when it is already too
late. Quite what forms this collective management should take is, again,
an open question, one that can only be resolved practically and
experimentally.
The long, 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.
Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and
the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces - both physical and
cultural - are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A
cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively
educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure
their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their
interpassive stupor. The informal censorship internalized and propagated
by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity
that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of
imposing. Zero Books knows that another kind of discourse - intellectual
without being academic, popular without being populist - is not only
possible: it is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit
malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of
the academy. Zero is committed to the idea of publishing as a making
public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking,
blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged
theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.