Capitalist Realism¶
Metadata¶
- Author: Mark Fisher
- ASIN: B008H3WB36
- ISBN: 1846943175
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008H3WB36
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. — location: 94 ^ref-27566
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. — location: 213 ^ref-23266
Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. — location: 271 ^ref-11291
emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, 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. — location: 274 ^ref-50491
These ‘reforms’ 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 so’. — location: 279 ^ref-33355
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. — location: 286 ^ref-29213
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). — location: 305 ^ref-715
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, — location: 311 ^ref-23205
how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ 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. — location: 313 ^ref-17921
The persistence of bureaucracy in late capitalism does not in itself indicate that capitalism does not work – rather, what it suggests is that the way in which capitalism does actually work is very different from the picture presented by capitalist realism. — location: 320 ^ref-43658
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 can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge’, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. — location: 334 ^ref-59543
By privatizing these problems – treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual’s neurology and/or by their family background – any question of social systemic causation is ruled out. — location: 341 ^ref-47159
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. — location: 356 ^ref-9485
neoliberal politics are not about the new, but a return of class power and privilege. — location: 450 ^ref-28746
We are in such a period. Today we see liberal capitalism and its political system, parliamentarianism, as the only natural and acceptable solutions’. — location: 452 ^ref-17348
neoliberalization is best conceived of as a ‘political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’. — location: 453 ^ref-7893
in an era popularly described as ‘post-political’, class war has continued to be fought, but only by one side: the wealthy. — location: 454 ^ref-4098
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. — location: 461 ^ref-41757
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. — location: 471 ^ref-17862
Sennett emphasizes the intolerable stresses that these conditions of permanent instability put on family life. — location: 502 ^ref-43847
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). — location: 506 ^ref-26632
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 ‘precarity’, as the ugly neologism has it. — location: 522 ^ref-58938
Capital’s mobilization and metabolization of the desire for emancipation from Fordist routine. — location: 528 ^ref-23979
that post-Fordist workers are like the Old Testament Jews after they left the ‘house of slavery’: liberated from a bondage to which they have no wish to return but also abandoned, stranded in the desert, confused about the way forward. — location: 535 ^ref-21439
capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. — location: 542 ^ref-17539
Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function. — location: 542 ^ref-60332
significant rises in the rates of ‘mental distress’ over the last 25 years. — location: 545 ^ref-33456
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 ‘trouble with nerves, feeling low, depressed or sad’, 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). — location: 547 ^ref-56510
a person born in 1958 was more likely than one born in 1970 to achieve upward mobility through education, for example. — location: 557 ^ref-43980
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. — location: 569 ^ref-19281
Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s 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 — location: 571 ^ref-6344
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. — location: 574 ^ref-31723
‘creativity’ and ‘self-expression’ have become intrinsic to labor in Control societies; — location: 588 ^ref-60063
now makes affective, as well as productive demands, on workers. — location: 589 ^ref-822
the attempt to crudely quantify these affective contributions also tells us a great deal about the new arrangements. — location: 589 ^ref-27088
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 – the manager asks if she wants to look the sort of person ‘who only does the bare minimum.’ — location: 591 ^ref-41956
Enough is no longer enough. This syndrome will be familiar to many workers who may find that a ‘satisfactory’ grading in a performance evaluation is no longer satisfactory. — location: 596 ^ref-13168
‘aims and objectives’, ‘outcomes’, ‘mission statements’ – have proliferated, even as neoliberal rhetoric about the end of top-down, centralized control has gained pre-eminence. — location: 600 ^ref-8888
bureaucracy is a kind of return of the repressed, ironically re-emerging at the heart of a system which has professed to destroy it. — location: 601 ^ref-51596
Richard Sennett has argued that the flattening of pyramidal hierarchies has actually led to more surveillance of workers. — location: 605 ^ref-12191
some of the bureaucratic tasks that academics have to perform, all of which have funding implications for institutions. — location: 624 ^ref-1693
(The supposed marketization of education, for instance, rests on a confused and underdeveloped analogy: are students the consumers of the service or its product?) — location: 628 ^ref-62310
What we have is not a direct — location: 632 ^ref-12807
comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. — location: 632 ^ref-9161
work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. — location: 633 ^ref-34152
‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. — location: 635 ^ref-21286
What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. — location: 637 ^ref-1185
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. — location: 647 ^ref-31286
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. — location: 649 ^ref-9825
a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. — location: 657 ^ref-6467
The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, 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. — location: 657 ^ref-9164
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. — location: 665 ^ref-38121
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 ‘merely’ emptily formal; it is the discrepancy between the two that allows ‘ordinary’ social reality to function. — location: 669 ^ref-3963
Khrushchev’s announcement made it impossible to believe any more that the big Other was ignorant of them. — location: 673 ^ref-41445
there is no progressive tendency towards an ‘unsheathing’ of capitalism, no gradual unmasking of Capital as it ‘really’ is: rapacious, indifferent, inhuman. — location: 690 ^ref-43935
the essential role of the ‘incorporeal transformations’ effectuated by PR, branding and advertising in capitalism suggests that, in order to operate effectively, capitalism’s rapacity depends upon various forms of sheathing. — location: 692 ^ref-63909
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, — location: 693 ^ref-53401
Customers might previously have known that the jewelry Ratners sold was poor quality, but the big Other didn’t know; as soon as it did, Ratners collapsed. — location: 699 ^ref-19421
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. — location: 703 ^ref-54831
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. — location: 710 ^ref-10480
A cynic who ‘believes only his eyes’ misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it structures our experience of reality. — location: 711 ^ref-20304
the abolition of the Symbolic led not to a direct encounter with the Real, but to a kind of hemorrhaging of the Real. — location: 713 ^ref-64822
at the very moment when — location: 717 ^ref-35494
it seemed that it was being grasped in the raw, reality transformed into what Baudrillard, in a much misunderstood neologism, called ‘hyperreality’. — location: 717 ^ref-47443
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 – but those desires and preferences are returned to us, no longer as ours, but as the desires of the big Other. — location: 726 ^ref-44578
We are all familiar with bureaucratic libido, with the enjoyment that certain officials derive from this position of disavowed responsibility (‘it’s not me, I’m afraid, it’s the regulations’). — location: 734 ^ref-9049
that this structure of disavowal was inherent to bureaucracy. — location: 737 ^ref-63839
The quest to reach the ultimate authority who will finally resolve K’s 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 Other’s intentions. — location: 737 ^ref-27874
these acts of interpretation, these deferrals of responsibility, are all that the big Other is. — location: 739 ^ref-44851
there was a dimension of totalitarianism which cannot be understood on the model of despotic command. — location: 741 ^ref-57801
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. — location: 745 ^ref-14984
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. — location: 750 ^ref-27129
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: — location: 753 ^ref-9846
work is increasingly aimed at impressing the big Other which is collating and consuming this ‘data’. — location: 755 ^ref-39553
‘the 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. — location: 757 ^ref-34547
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. — location: 767 ^ref-20569
periodic assessment will be superseded by a permanent and ubiquitous measurement which cannot help but generate the same perpetual anxiety.) — location: 771 ^ref-63740
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. — location: 774 ^ref-23364
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. — location: 795 ^ref-33164
Such cheerfulness can only be maintained if one has a near-total absence of any critical reflexivity and a capacity, — location: 808 ^ref-43680
The cynicism of the compliance is essential, of course; the preservation of his 60s liberal self-image depended upon his ‘not really believing’ in the auditing processes he so assiduously enforced. — location: 810 ^ref-54567
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. — location: 812 ^ref-63342
it is precisely workers’ subjective disinvestment from auditing tasks which enables them to continue to perform labor that is pointless and demoralizing. — location: 813 ^ref-41986
This strategy – of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question – has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, — location: 836 ^ref-55376
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. — location: 846 ^ref-63075
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 — location: 858 ^ref-25868
Bourne’s transnational nomadism is rendered in an ultra-fast cutting style which functions as a kind of anti-memory, pitching the viewer into the vertiginous ‘continuous present’ which Jameson argues is characteristic of postmodern temporality. — location: 865 ^ref-25547
where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer. — location: 881 ^ref-13277
The inability to make new memories: a succinct formulation of the postmodern impasse.... — location: 888 ^ref-49284
incoherence at the level of what Brown calls ‘political rationality’ 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. — location: 902 ^ref-11429
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. — location: 907 ^ref-26297
what held the bizarre synthesis of neoconservatism and neoliberalism together was their shared objects of abomination: the so called Nanny State and its dependents. — location: 909 ^ref-24520
‘Conservative 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 them’. — location: 918 ^ref-3455
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 — location: 930 ^ref-12328
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. — location: 932 ^ref-11981
Although people are interpellated now as consumers – and, as Wendy Brown and others have pointed out, government itself is presented as a kind of commodity or service – they still cannot help but think of themselves as (if they were) citizens. — location: 936 ^ref-10661
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 weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. — location: 943 ^ref-33605
Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. — location: 950 ^ref-49539
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 – it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility. — location: 970 ^ref-46490
‘responsibi-lization’ to refer to this phenomenon – it is necessary to wager instead on structure at its most totalizing. Instead of saying that everyone – i.e. every one – is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that’s 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. — location: 979 ^ref-523
the model of individual responsibility assumed by most versions of ethics have little purchase on the behavior of Capital or corporations. — location: 988 ^ref-28738
Who knows what the Parallax Corporation really wants? It is itself situated in the parallax between politics and economy. — location: 1001 ^ref-6552
Is it a commercial front for political interests, or is the whole machinery of government a front for it? It’s not clear if the Corporation really exists – more than that, it is not clear if its aim is to pretend that it doesn’t exist, or to pretend that it does. — location: 1002 ^ref-18524
it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves. — location: 1006 ^ref-59804
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 it’s usually not very long before the grey petrification of power starts to subsume them. — location: 1019 ^ref-40293
that structure is palpable – you can practically see it taking people over, hear its deadened/ deadening judgements speaking through them. — location: 1021 ^ref-3553
it is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. — location: 1023 ^ref-55220
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. — location: 1026 ^ref-9014
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. — location: 1033 ^ref-45844
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). — location: 1066 ^ref-16559
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 ‘sad passions’ that intoxicate and entrance us. — location: 1068 ^ref-16291
television now it’s a system of guidance – 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 “hugs and kisses” moment at the end. It really is a system not of moral guidance, but of emotional guidance. — location: 1085 ^ref-42764
Morality has been replaced by feeling. — location: 1088 ^ref-11288
the media class’s refusal to be paternalistic has not produced a bottom-up culture of breathtaking diversity, but one that is increasingly infantilized. — location: 1108 ^ref-38086
it is paternalistic cultures that treat audiences as adults, assuming that they can cope with cultural products that are complex and intellectually demanding. — location: 1109 ^ref-4552
another irony that capitalism’s ‘society of risk’ is much less likely to take this kind of risk than was the supposedly stodgy, centralized culture of the postwar social consensus. — location: 1116 ^ref-39055
The effect of permanent structural instability, the ‘cancellation of the long term’, is invariably stagnation and conservatism, not innovation. — location: 1120 ^ref-29002
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. — location: 1122 ^ref-14902
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? — location: 1126 ^ref-27469
to subordinate the state to the general will. This involves, naturally, resuscitating the very concept of a general will, reviving – and modernizing – the idea of a public space that is not reducible to an aggregation of individuals and their interests. — location: 1131 ^ref-47479
All that is real is the individual (and their families). The symptoms of the failures of this worldview are everywhere – in a disintegrated social sphere in which teenagers shooting each other has become commonplace, in which hospitals incubate aggressive superbugs – what is required is that effect be connected to structural cause. — location: 1134 ^ref-38560
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. — location: 1137 ^ref-36778
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. — location: 1142 ^ref-37245
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. — location: 1144 ^ref-53076
One of the left’s 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. — location: 1152 ^ref-39918
politicization requires a political agent which can transform the taken-for-granted into the up-for-grabs. — location: 1160 ^ref-31475
When even businesses can’t be run as businesses, why should public services? — location: 1173 ^ref-26924
Affective disorders are forms of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled outwards, directed towards its real cause, Capital. — location: 1174 ^ref-47517
unlimited license leads to misery and disaffection, then limitations placed on desire are likely to quicken, rather than deaden, it. — location: 1180 ^ref-39609
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. — location: 1181 ^ref-56779
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. — location: 1190 ^ref-24068