The Mark Fischer Experience - Capitalist Realism

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...the quality of life going to go down. What you'd also see if that were the case Mark Fischer thinks, is the expansion of what he calls "the audit culture" that's a plague that's been spreading across the globe recently. An everyday example of what he means by "the audit culture" is: just think of the person that's working at a company who's part of a team of some sort and and they have these meetings that they go to three times a week. And at these meetings, they got to have something to show for themselves and what they've been working on all that week to the rest of the team. Now, for the sake of this example, let's also say that this is not someone who works with 100% of their time every week when they're at work. Let's say they're coming up on 10 years at the company, and and they're kind of proud of this actually, but when it comes down to it they really spend 60 to 70% of their time scrolling through Facebook or YouTube or whatever it is. And let's say this person has not lost their job at this company as a member of this team because the skill they've gotten really good at over the years is being able to show up to these meetings and demonstrate to the group all that they've been working on this week, you know, the spreadsheet that I've created, all the obstacles I've run into... God, they were really bad this week, and don't worry don't worry, I got a great plan for how I'm going to be moving forward the second this meeting ends, I swear! I'm a good member of the team.

Again, the service they're providing isn't even that good, and they know this. But in a sense, it doesn't even really matter in this Society because we're in a neoliberal situation within capitalist realism where the goal is not to provide "good services to people" but is instead the expansion of capital for the sake of capital. It doesn't matter if you're actually providing a good service. What matters is that there's a quantifiable metric that can demonstrate to the Auditors that work is being done, even when it's not actually really being done that much. So, in a sense, the person who's doing this isn't even really a "bad employee," they're just smart. They've just locked in on what's actually important to their employer's performance metrics, not actually getting real work done. And, to Mark Fischer, this audit culture is something you'll see pop up in a lot of unexpected ways all across people's lives, not just in the workplace. But nonetheless, it originates in this overall ethos we have in the Western World Of neoliberalism.

The Smoking Gun for a lot of critics of neoliberalism is the 2008 financial collapse around subprime mortgages. See, what they say is, that if the role of government under neoliberalism was really just to ensure competition and free markets, then the best goods or services would have to rise to the Top. If a company provided a bad service and got themselves into a place where they were failing because of bad business practices, then they'd have to be left to fail in a truly free market. But what happened in 2008 is that companies that sold bad loans were bailed out by taxpayer dollars and the government. In other words, to the critics of neoliberalism, this was a very public visible example of what had been going on since the beginning of neoliberalism. This is not the government ensuring competition and free markets, this is the government meddling in certain markets and rigging them for certain companies that have the resources to manipulate the government in their favor. This is essentially social welfare for the rich in a system that generally doesn't even believe in social welfare for the poor. Or, as a Critic, Noam Chomsky, said all the way back in the 90s over a decade before any of this happened, that what we can expect under neoliberalism is "socialized losses and privatized gains".

Now, I want to pause here and just do some accounting of what's been said so far. Neoliberalism obviously has a lot of different components to it but with all this talk of Economics, one of the ones that can be pretty easy to overlook is just how much thinking in this way causes people to focus on the individual as the main building block that we're going to be constructing our societies around. We all know what it feels like to do that in the Western World, you know, born into a neoliberal society. Especially, if you're not very close with your family you can just live your life purely as an individual, only having to think about yourself. You know what life is to you is the goals that you have, the things you want. Then, you can find yourself getting older, starting a family and feeling like, "oh wow, the family is also an important social unit that we build our societies around, look at how much meaning I can find in my life where instead of being 100% of an individual, I'm 20% of a family." Point is, this is a different scale scale of life, that people often find meaning in. But anyway, it's just a unique challenge we have as people in Western culture just because of how our world is set up. To not fall into this place where you're too indexed on the individual side of things. And this is why the interpretive version of dialectics can be such a powerful tool when critiquing Western Society in particular. You know it's definitely important to look at something individually for what it is, for sure, but it's also undeniably important if you want to understand things at a deeper level to pay attention to what a thing is in relation to all the other things around it. In a sense, within dialectics, these are often the things that define what something actually is in a particular context (narrative).

You know, it's not uncommon in modern Western capitalist Society, we'll walk into a store, we'll see a pair of shoes we want and it's possible to see that pair of shoes just as a pair of shoes and think nothing else about it. Now there's another way of viewing what that pair of shoes is that considers the materials it's made out of, how they were harvested, transported, the design process that went into the shoes, the people that put them together, shipped them across the world, the people that stocked and sold the shoes to you as well. As this complex network of social relations that make the value and meaning of those shoes. Whatever they are, and the culture you're wearing them in, you can look at it this way, too. But again, in the western world it's very possible almost intuitive to our way of thinking to see them as just a pair of shoes.

Well, to Mark Fischer, we run the risk of doing this exact same thing with individuals. In Western culture, too, we see people as just an individual, a collection of choices that they're making values that they hold. But just like with the shoes, it becomes easier for us in the West to ignore the social relationships, or the structural setup to the world that have huge impacts on who a person is. And there's a balance, right? We want to be able to hold people accountable for their actions. And we certainly don't want to give people a blanket pass, that Society is to blame for everything that's messed up in their life. But, being self-aware that we exist in this neoliberal ethos that tells people if anything's messed up in your life, it's your job to work harder and fix it, can this tendency ever go too far?

Mark Fischer thinks one of the ways that it does is, when it comes to the way we often look at and treat mental illness, more specifically depression as an example, he had a lot to say about in particular. To Mark Fischer, we privatize depression in our society in a way that's honestly ridiculous from any other perspective, because what's often the experience of somebody who's struggling with depression in a neoliberal society. They're told in so many words, "look, that sucks, and all I get it, but this is a "you problem" you're dealing with. You have a chemical imbalance. You have a family history with this. You need to pull yourself together, get off the couch, force yourself to go for a run, drag yourself into one of these "professionals" that'll prescribe you these pills you can take to bring your brain chemistry back to normal. You owe it to the people around you to work harder on your depression."

But, as Mark Fischer says, "hey, even if we can say this person right here has a chemical imbalance, what does that have anything to do with what's causing that chemical imbalance? I mean, isn't it possible that the society you live in has something to do with the fact you feel horrible every day? Does it have nothing to do with it? Is the assumption that, you know, you were just born and no matter what Society you were born into, you were always going to have a chemical imbalance like this? We know there's different mental illnes rates in different countries. We know they've taken depressed people out of one environment, moved them into a different environment, and their depression gets better. But, no no, we treat this in our society like a private malfunction that's going on in your brain, with nothing more to think about. Now, be a good citizen and just take the pills that big pharma has made for you."

No, we're idiots. Mark Fisher thinks "if we're not considering that the society people are living in has an effect on this. Mental health is at crisis levels in the Western World, why is that? And to return this back to the beginning of the episode where we said, "look, I get that there's problems in the world as it is, but at least this isn't any of the other ways of setting things up where things get really bad."

If this is the best option we got, why, Mark Fischer would ask, "are there so many young people who are sick? Then why is one of the main conversations we're having that we need to figure out what to do with these tens of thousands of people that are struggling mentally, that are queuing up all around our society? Is this just a private issue? Do do we just got to go out and motivate these people more to get them off the couch? Or is there something fundamentally wrong when it comes to neoliberalism as one piece of this blend that's going to produce a way of thinking about the world that leads to capitalist realism? 

Neoliberalism is the piece of this that is going to encourage a surface level individualistic, overly competitive, overly moralizing account of everything and everyone around you. I say overly moralizing there, because there's a narrative of "good versus evil" that people start projecting onto things in the world when they're not thinking about the world at a structural level. What I mean is, when you're hyperfocused on the individual, and you're not thinking about the social relationships that produce the bad results you see in the world, it becomes incredibly easy for someone to assume that this "bad outcome" I see in the world world must be being caused by "bad people". When in fact, it could just be an unintended consequence of a system we need to pay more attention to. I mean, it's worth asking. How many conspiracy theories are out there that claim there's a handful of people maliciously orchestrating events all around the world? You know, pulling the puppet strings, just trying to hurt people? How many of those are actually just unintended byproducts of bad incentive structures in a political and economic system? Anyway, this is a larger conversation, obviously. But the point is, when you privatize this stuff, when you turn what is actually a matter of Economic and political incentives into some battle between "good versus evil" that's going on, or that it's just a handful of bad politicians that drink the blood of children. when people ignore the structural components that are at work here, then they run the risk of spending their entire lives chasing a ghost, trying to chase down a group of people at the top they need to prosecute, to be able to stop all this. You know, trying to correct for a cause to the problem that doesn't actually exist, which then makes the problem effectively unsolvable if we live in an open society that relies on an informed and educated population. Now again, what we've talked about here today has only been about half of the way we orient ourselves towards reality that leads to what Mark Fischer calls "capitalist realism". And if the problems of neoliberalism seem like they narrow people's Focus, just wait until he hear about how he thinks postmodernism collides into all this, and makes Imagining the future seem impossible. At that point, we'll also be able to go deeper into what exactly is meant by capitalist realism as a state of affairs. He thinks it's moved Beyond postmodernism as well, as talk deeper about at least one way out of this that Mark Fischer was considering towards the end of his life. That episode (below)

We're trapped in the "nostalgiac pastiche" of Post-Modern Art & Culture with a cancelled future.  Call us all Sir Mix-a-Lot.

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For Mark Fischer, we are caught in a perpetual state of the present. Postmodernism puts us in a collective haze, skeptical of grand narratives, not able to declare universals, and to create truly subversive artwork that gives us an entirely new look. And then, this is met with Market fundamentalism and the default set of values of capitalist realism that everything, including art, should be about the expansion of capital for the sake of capital. In other words, art in our world of capitalist realism is no longer about taking risks anymore. It's no longer about moving things forward. And the fact is, these days it is just good business for artists to sell people Nostalgia. And it's not because they're bad people, artists sell nostalgia in our time because remembering pleasant moments from the past becomes High art if you're living in a society where people can't possibly imagine a different future for themselves. And if it's not obvious by this point, art is going to just be a micro example of all this. The same thing applies to the way we think about creative ideas, when it comes to the realm of politics and making our societies better. Because, think of all that changes when a culture doesn't move forward and is incapable of developing new cultural forms.

Mark Fischer says, as one example, think of how this changes the experience of the way most people see time. Let's go back to our music example. From before just a few decades ago, it was possible for somebody to hear a song and be brought back in their mind to the summer of '75, "oh oh, I remember listening to that song," they'll say. "I was studying for my GED exam that summer. And then I remember next year, the songs of '76. I was listening to those when I started my new job at the meat packing plant. Good Times back then, in my life meat packing plant, GED, mhm?"

See, in a way, to Mark Fischer, this way of experiencing time is an important part of how human beings make sense of our lives. We have these snapshots in time that we remember, that are distinct to a particular cultural moment. And then, we look back on these moments, and we use them as an important part of how we structure "The Narrative of our lives". But what happens when don't have the ability to use these anymore because everything is a remix of something old? Well, as Mark Fischer says, the experience of the person living in this culture in the last 20 years or so is that time starts to become blurry. We live in a world he says, "where there's no criteria anymore for obsolescence," meaning there's no real point where you can look at something within culture from 20 years ago and say, "No no no, that thing is old all right. Old to the point that it's embarrassing now. I mean, with all due respect, Grandpa get that CD out of my face that you were listening to from 20 years ago. We got to move on from this as a culture now."

No, in our world, things just become retro or vintage or fall into some other category. And, by the way, fashion becomes yet another example of this culture you can see all around you that's constantly being remixed and recycled. People no longer have these clear boundaries between things that make them culturally Obsolete. And when you combine that fact with us having no clear boundaries for what the truth is, you know, "there's only different perspectives, morality is entirely relative." When you combine that with history being used just as a tool to confirm political bias, when you combine that with the fact that we have no distinct moments in time to help understand "The Narrative of Our Lives," this all leads for Mark Fischer to an experience of reality that can feel very blurry and confusing. It All Leads to what he famously calls "the slow cancellation of the future". See, to Mark Fischer, we used to be able to dream about the future in past generations. All throughout history, people have imagined different social Futures, and then done things to bring them about. Even as recently as a couple Generations ago, people still dreamed about a different world than the one they were living in.

Technology, for example. People used to think of it as a thing that could allow us to imagine entirely different ways of organizing ourselves as people. You know, people used to think, back in the 1950s for example, "what if technology could eventually make us so we don't have to work as much as we do right now" or "what if robots could help us around the house so we don't have to do as many chores that we don't like doing" or "what if we could colonize the moon or other planets, you know, start Spreading ourselves across the Galaxy?", who wouldn't love them a little more of us humans on their Planet"? These were revolutionary ideas back in the 1950s. But here we are, almost 75 years later, and where are we? Well, we're more or less dreaming about the exact same stuff they were back then, now. Why is that?

It's actually an interesting line of thinking. One answer you could give to that is to say, "well these people in the 1950s were just way ahead of their time, and they dreamed up the perfect future for us that we've never decided to deviate from, it's just taken us a really long time to bring all this stuff about. These are some big goals they dreamed up back then." But another way of explaining that is to say that we have the exact same goals as they did today because our political imagination has been depleted to a point that sadly, the most we can do these days is just remix and recycle our grandparents ideas of what the future should be looking like.... 

......Revolutionary efforts of people on the left are just remixes of the Revolutionary efforts that their grandparents tried. They have the same sort of tactics, same sort of slogans, same sort of communication style, and from one perspective, all they're really doing is trying to put a new spin on failed revolutionary efforts from the past. And again, in a world where this is the best that protest culture can come up with, then effectively, both sides of the political Spectrum become a form of conservative Nostalgia. Again, 20th century ideas delivered through 21st century technology. 

One way of thinking about it, in the language of Mark Fischer, and originally in the language of the philosopher Jacques Derrida who first came up with this concept, is that we live in a place where we are haunted by the past. And the future the world we live in is haunted by the ideas from the past that don't just magically disappear one day. In fact, they persist. They are reused by us in ways where they take on a new, ethereal kind of meaning that's difficult to fully see sometimes. But we're also haunted, for Mark Fischer, not just by the past, but by the Lost Futures that were supposed to come about, but never did. What he means is, the future worlds that were supposed to be better off for people that former Generations had imagined, those never came to pass. So, in a sense, now we live every day of our lives stuck in this present moment, comparing it to the Futures that never came, and the injustices of the past. That is Our Fate. To live in this time, we live in a state of what Derrida and Fischer call the hauntology of the present. And mixed between the words haunt and ontology, it's kind of clever. And there's a lot more to hauntology and derrida's work. We could do an entire episode on it. But the point here today is, how this concept enables Mark Fischer's description of capitalist realism, which is where all these points are headed. Because when you consider everything about how neoliberalism, postmodernism, and all the ancillary ideas that make these into the primary modes of people's thinking, what is a person supposed to do when they're caught in this narcissistic confused place? Well, what turns out to be a really common thing people choose to do as a defense mechanism is, they just try not to think about it too much, keep their head down, and just focus on making money. I mean, regardless of how confused you are, or aren't, that becomes the thing that you really can't deny about our world. You either make money, or you starve to death. 

This goes on enough at the individual level, then, on a more broad scale, what starts to happen is people start to learn, to accept the inevitability of capitalism. They learn to see capitalism not, as the current socioeconomic system that we're using for a society, something that could be changed if we want it to be changed, but instead no, capitalism is more than that. Capitalism is just the way the world is, at a realism sort of level, hence, Mark Fisher's name, "capitalist realism". As the French philosopher Alain Badiou once described our world, "We live in a contradiction. A brutal State of Affairs, profoundly inegalitarian, where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone is presented to us as ideal.  To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot call it "ideal" or "wonderful", so instead they decided to say that all the rest is horrible.