Fisher
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Capitlism as climaxed secularization
In one of the key scenes in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men, Clive Owen’s character, Theo, visits a friend at Battersea Power Station, which is now some combination of government building and private collection. Cultural treasures – Michelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica, Pink Floyd’s inflatable pig – 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, ‘how all this can matter if there will be no-one to see it?’ The alibi can no longer be future generations, since there will be none. The response is nihilistic hedonism: ‘I try not to think about it’. What is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is specific to late capitalism. (...) Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, 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 ‘capitalist realism’: 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 – 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. The world had arrived at the beginning of the end. And yet, as if it were universal and natural, capitalism has been functioning behind the film's characters. Despite the catastrophe in a dystopian future, the ways of living are the same as ours. The world may come to its end, but the order will not — unless our life ceases. Such is "It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism", as Fisher writes, "Fukuyama’s 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". The symbol of this widespread sense is Children of Men, which is a dystopian film that has no next order. And then, Fisher writes "The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through." A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all. The fate of Picasso’s Guernica in the film – once a howl of anguish and outrage against Fascist atrocities, now a wall-hanging – is exemplary. Like its Battersea hanging space in the film, the painting is accorded ‘iconic’ 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 Men’s 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 ‘system of equivalence’ 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 — 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. Cultural objects were carried from the lifeworld into the museum by capitalism. Thereby, the cultural objects were torn from social, political, and religious values, and were turned into "merely aesthetic objects" — like the mural that has no rite in the museum or Guernica, with no one to see it in the Battersea Power Station. Once, the cultural objects had been associated with people as social, political, and religious objects — they were therefor participant. Yet, around pople within capitalism, there are only, merely, objectively objects — they were therefor "spectator". Thus, "The fate of Picasso’s Guernica in the film – once a howl of anguish and outrage against Fascist atrocities, now a wall-hanging – is exemplary."
Such is, as Fisher writes, "desacralization"— namely, "Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself". In other words, that is secularization. Sinse, by desacralization, "In claiming, as Badiou puts it, to have ‘delivered us from the “fatal abstractions” inspired by the “ideologies of the past”’, capitalist realism presents itself as a shield protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself". Thus, capitalism is the reality that remains after religion, culture, and faith have collapsed. The order of the death of God is therefore inevitably capitalism. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself,’ he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism,’ in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. In other words, as Badiou writes, desacralization and secularization are a liberation from any form of engagement or involvement — namely, a shield against ideologies. Climaxed spectatorialism — that very realism — is the capitalist attitude. Thus, "The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history".
Negative conclusion
‘We live in a contradiction,’ Badiou has observed: 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 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 we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc. (...) The 80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and established, when Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine that ‘there is no alternative’ – as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for – became a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy For capitalist realism, capitalism is a shield against any other order, upon which resignation rests. In other words, the end of history is the negative conclusion. Hence, the slogan is none other than ‘there is no alternative’. Yet, by the radical logic of capitalist realism, the social was polarized between capitalism and all else. For all else is not real within that logic. hr.icon
5. October 6, 1979: 'Don't let yourself get attached to anything'
bi-polar economy
As Franco Berardi argues, bipolar disorder is the "interweaving and interacting of psychic flows and economic processes". Thereby the terms 'mania' and 'depression' include both psychic and economic meanings. Similarly, Fisher regards it as a social pathological problem. 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 'interior' 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 'bubble thinking') and depressive come-down. (The term 'economic depression' 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 'invisible plague' 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.
It does not remain limited to the term 'depression.' In psychological terms, mania refers to a state of heightened energy, optimism, and overconfidence. In economic terms, it describes a collective condition of speculative enthusiasm, in which investors drive prices upward beyond their fundamental value. "We are not dealing here with a linguistic trick", Berardi discerns. This is because, for him, the structure is none other than the finance of late capitalism.
In the 1990s, Prozac culture was intermingled with the new economy. Hundreds of thousands of operators, directors and managers of the occidental economy took innumerable decisions in a state of chemical euphoria and psychopharmacological lightheadedness. But in the long term the organism collapsed, unable to support indefinitely the chemical euphoria that had sustained competitive enthusiasm and productivist fanaticism. Collective attention was supersaturated and this was provoking a collapse of a social and economic kind. As happens in a manic depressive organism, as happens with a patient affected by bipolar disorder, after the financial euphoria of the 1990s, there followed a depression.
(...) anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the 'weak messianic' hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen.
Would you try to heal a coming psychic depression with amphetamine pills, with a shock therapy psychopharmacology? Only a foolish doctor would do this. But the foolish doctor happened actually to sit in the White House, and pharmacological-militaristic therapy was prescribed by George W Bush: war, tax reductions for the wealthy, invitation to go to shopping, and an unprecedented increase in private debt and in public debt. A campaign was launched worldwide against the collective intelligence, against the freedom of research, and against the public school. In the long run healing depression with artificial euphorization cannot work and sooner or later the depressed organism will collapse. The emphasis on competitive life-styles, the permanent excitation of the nervous system prepared the final collapse of the global economy which is now unfolding under the eyes of the astonished mankind. The neoliberal idea of a balance between the various components of the economic system was a flawed theory because it did not consider the systemic effects of the social psyche. Therefore the bipolar economy went from euphoria to panic and is now teetering on the brink of a deep depression. Economists and politicians are worried: they call it a crisis and they hope this is going to evolve like the many previous crises, seeping away, leaving capitalism stronger. I think this time is different. This is not a crisis but the final collapse of a system that has been lasting for five hundred years. Look at the landscape: the big powers of the world are trying to rescue the financial institutions. But the financial collapse has already affected the industrial system, demand is falling, and jobs are lost by the millions. In order to rescue the banks the state is obliged to take money from the taxpayers of tomorrow, and this means that the demand is going to fall further in the coming years. Family spending is plummeting and consequently much of the industrial production is going to be dismissed.
"The schizoanalytic method should be applied as a political therapy in the current situation: the bipolar Economy is falling into a deep depression. What happened during the first decade of the century can be described in psychopathological terms, in terms of panic and depression. "