HOSTAGE SITUATION:
NOTES ON MARK FISHER
ThESE NOTES ARE THE SECOND part of the On / with Mark Fisher series. Click here for THE FIRST PART, “The Politics of The Dark Knight Rises: A Discussion”. Click here for THE THIRD PART, “Hope in the Dark: In Memory of Mark Fisher”.
1. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. xii.
2. Mark Fisher, “Good for Nothing”, Occupied Times, 19 March 2014: https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841.
3. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Alresford, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2009), p. 1.
4. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 11.
5. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, pp. 7, 9.
6. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Alresford, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2014), p. 21.
7. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, pp. 21, 24.
8. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, p. 31.
9. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p. 56.
10. Ibid., p. 24.
11. Ibid., p. 22.
12. Ibid., p. 17.
13. Ibid., p. 54.
14. Ibid., p. 9.
15. Fisher, “Good for Nothing”.
16. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, p. 16.
17. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, pp. 54–5.
18. Ibid., p. 1.
19. Ibid., p. 22.
20. Mark Fisher, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (London: Repeater Books, 2018), p. 124.
21. Ibid., p. 767.
Jameson dated this change in outlook to the general post-World War 2 era, whereas Fisher focused on a later period with the landmark dates of 1979–80 (coming to power of Thatcher and Reagan), 1989 (collapse of the Soviet Union) and 2009 (financial crisis). So he was writing about his own lifetime (born 1968) and Jameson was writing about his (born 1934).
Fisher illuminated and denounced our society's partly hidden architecture of repression yet his work is haunted through and through by doubt about whether escape from capitalist-realist capture is actually possible. The doubt even seems present in the subtitle of his book: not Capitalist Realism: There Is an Alternative, but Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Fisher’s life was professionally and spiritually precarious, as he repeatedly explained in the k-punk blog where he made his name, as well as in his books. Whilst he insisted throughout on a viable alternative to capitalist realism, to be created collectively, a persisting sadness and insecurity can always be felt in his writing.
Often confidence in a better future is only expressed in closing remarks that seem tacked on, and so perhaps we don’t always believe Fisher’s optimism. He wrote about “converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger”,2 though he was vague about what this meant in practice. It proved to be impossible in his own case. Fisher committed suicide in 2017.
This fact of his life deserves to be mentioned, without necessarily trying to understand its reasons, because it reminds us that, if we take writers like Fisher and Jameson as seriously as they deserve, capitalist realism isn’t simply a matter of political or cultural theory. It involves a struggle, even a life-and-death struggle, with an ideological machine which paralyses our ability to think “outside the box”, and to live, if it is possible, an uncaptured life. I will come back to the question of what kinds of life capitalist realism allows.
Fisher’s snappier version of Jameson’s remark was: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”3 Capitalist realism is closely linked to the post-1979 neoliberal project in the West to restore the political-economic conditions for the rich to get richer (a process which has accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic).
This project is well served by mass indoctrination of the idea that no economic system can ever, after the collapse of communism, replace capitalism. Capitalist realism is therefore in part sheer propaganda. But capitalist realism is also, as a dominant ideology, something more insidious, pervasive and undermining than propaganda. Here it is useful to refer again to Jameson. In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1988), Jameson suggested that when changes in the world (the obvious contemporary example is the Internet revolution) overwhelm our “perceptual habits”,4 it is such an ongoing shock that we are quickly disoriented and can't recover.
This subjective plight is what troubled Fisher when describing locked-in and locked-down life under capitalist realism. Not only an external force, capitalist realism is also a control program that gets inside us, taking subjectivity hostage. Fisher wrote of exhaustion and demoralisation, entrapment and deadlock,5 closed horizons,6 reflexive impotence, walling-up against the social,7 destruction of solidarity,8 ontological precarity,9 and so on.
These are some major features of capitalist realism as a system which is both environmental and psychological, both objective and subjective:
A. Time and memory are impaired. The inescapable broadcast and online “communicative sensation-stimulus matrix” erodes not only a long view and hope for the future but also a sense of being rooted in history. Time no longer seems deep or multi-dimensional.
Instead, the endless digital-media strobe light creates an “ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture” that makes it almost impossible to “synthesize time into any coherent narrative”.10 Both past and future recede from view. Capitalist realism creates a torn-out, Sisyphean present-time (which one of capitalist realism’s offshoots, mindfulness, theorizes as redemptive).
B. It is Kafkaesque. Paradoxically, the supposedly unregulated free market has spawned new bureaucratic labyrinths (Fisher wrote about contacting call centres and OFSTED inspections). More widely, the loss of former sources of authority, from religion to a sense of public honour, has created the gnawing anxiety of what Kafka in The Trial called “ostensible acquittal" and “indefinite postponement”.11
When all that reigns is “business ontology”,12 when there is no transcendent source of values, we are left “subordinating [ourselves] to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment”.13
C. Disarming and rewiring of rebellious subcultures. Capitalist realism takes the sting out of oppositional practices—for example rock music—through assimilation or even “precorporation”. Thus, so-called independent or alternative music has this century become the main popular style rather than an outsider soundtrack. Fisher used the example of the band Nirvana: “Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV.”14
D. Desire gets hijacked. Neoliberalism succeeded in part because it exploited employees’ desire not to work in hierarchically managed “Fordist” factories. The historical twist was that the ensuing changes to work eventually led to the worse drudgery of labour “flexibility” (exemplified by zero-hours contracts).
The privatization of council housing under Thatcher was another example of the same process of social engineering through bribery or seduction not force. (Force was involved elsewhere, as in the Miners’ Strike.) Again the outcome—the unaffordability of housing today—was much worse than the starting situation had been. The con-tricking of desire also operates on a much more instant, micro level with the addictiveness of online consumerism.
E. ...and meanwhile distress is privatised. Victim-blaming is central to what Fisher called capitalist realism’s “project of resubordination”. This appears especially in the way “mental health” is increasingly discussed without reference to social structures of power (and powerlessness), especially class (which under capitalist realism is downplayed in favour of identity). Distress is instead classified either biochemically or in terms of individual agency (as in CBT or MBT theory). Socioeconomic factors like the destruction of the welfare state are ignored.
At the same time an entrepreneurial mythology of success is constantly trumpeted: what the radical therapist David Smail called “magical voluntarism” is the idea that we all have the ability to change reality or actualise our dreams if only we desire it enough.15 Depression and other forms of suffering in this way become redefined as issues of personal agency, divorced from outside causes, leaving people who are feeling bad already with an added sense of personal failure.
Jameson referred in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” to a “dilemma, which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global, multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects”.16
That the individual mind can’t comprehend the changing conditions of its existence is very painful and disturbing. Mark Fisher’s work suggested various possible subjective responses to the oppressive psychosocial impact of capitalism realism:
A. “[C]ynicism of ... compliance”:17 work, entrepreneurialism, life-as-business.
B. Self-help: including many forms of psychotherapy.
C. Pleasure/thrill-seeking: “nihilistic hedonism”,18 “depressive hedonia”,19 addiction.
D. Mental breakdown: schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder.
E. Escape: going “outside”, suicide.
F. Faith: including Gnosticism and “becoming-Christ”.20
G. Intentional community.
H. “Collective subjectivity”, for example “acid communism”—“[a] new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving”.21
I. “Hauntological melancholia”...