Episode 203 - Transcript

So I HIGHLY recommend listening to last episode on neoliberalism because everything in this episode builds off of THAT one. We’re gonna talk about how the hyperfocus on the individual, the use of competition as the main organizing principle of society, the primary goal of getting the GOVERNMENT out of the way of the people INNOVATING…how all of this gets COMBINED with postmodernism in a way that LEAVES us in a spot… that Mark Fisher thinks is INCREDIBLY difficult to move away from if you wanted to.

And to just begin with an EXAMPLE of the type of INSTINCTS postmodernism brings out in people…let’s talk about ETHICS for a second. Maybe one of the most fundamental questions you can ask in philosophy: what is it that makes something right or wrong? 

By they way gonna be sprinkling in some episodes here soon ON ethical reasoning, hoping it’ll be helpful to DEMONSTRATE for people what philosophy can bring to these conversations, which is a lot. But the question for NOW is: what do you think the average person LIVING in postmodern society would say if you asked them…how do you determine what right or WRONG is in a given situation?

And I think MOST people…a GOOD percentage of specifically YOUNG people alive today if you PRESSED them HARD enough on it would say that they think morality…is something that’s RELATIVE. 

They’ll say who am I to claim… that one culture is better or worse than any OTHER culture. THEIR values make sense to THEM…MY values make sense to ME. I can’t appeal to anything objectively BETTER about mine than theirs…and I CERTAINLY, as someone born into a postmodern type of subjectivity, have to be VERY skeptical of any sort of GRAND NARRATIVE that’s been constructed out there that tries to make CLAIMS about moral objectivity. Those don’t EXIST to me. So therefore, morality is relative. 

And then if you ask those SAME PEOPLE okay: well if that’s the CASE… then how should we be TREATING other people or cultures that see things differently than YOU do. And again for a lot of young people LIVING in a postmodern society their answer is often…that we should treat them with TOLERANCE. 

And it makes SENSE: see because in a world where every moral conclusion is equally valid…then, of COURSE, you should be TOLERANT of people to be able hold whatever positions they WANT to. 

And with this TOLERANT RELATIVISM that’s super common…while all this SOUNDS really great…and yes, there’s people who’d say this is the PINNACLE of moral wisdom, everybody else is just a religious nut job, CERTAINLY people that would say that. 

But there’s OTHER people out there that would say to this person… that this tolerant relativism is actually…a glaring contradiction. That it’s SUCH A contradiction that it actually becomes an indefensible, philosophical position…because if every person and every culture out there is equally correct about morality…then that would mean that even the most INTOLERANT cultures, would have to be right as well. Which then makes your ADDITIONAL belief that TOLERANCE is the CORRECT way to be BEHAVING in this world…it makes it INCOMPATIBLE with TRUE moral relativism. 

And again SOME people would say… that the reason YOUNG people would be the ones that you see HOLDING this kind of position… is because they often times haven’t really been TESTED yet in life…where there’s a LINE in the sand and they’re FORCED to TAKE SIDES in difficult, moral issues, that NEED a decision to be made. 

In fact, on that SAME note: to SOME people…Tolerant Relativism if you wanted to break it down…is REALLY something you see MOSTLY… in privileged, wealthy, WESTERN societies…because they would say the ONLY type of person that can HOLD that position for very long… are people that live in societies that are PEACEFUL enough… that they don’t really HAVE some group that opposes their entire existence that they feel they need to DEFEND themselves against. 

You know they’d say it’s funny… how your moral relativism starts to FADE a bit the second there’s a dude with an axe on your doorstep…it’s a pretty difficult act to pull off when you’re watching your family get dismembered in front of you to say your beliefs, my beliefs…let’s just call it halfsies halfsies why don’t we. 

Again there’s SOME people out there that would say that TRUE moral reasoning…. ONLY actually begins…when someone DECLARES a set of moral universals…and then is mature enough to recognize the WEIGHT and COMPLEXITY that comes along with DOING something like that.

You know as we talked about a couple episodes ago to Zizek: EVEN WITHIN something like postmodernism… that on the surface is SKEPTICAL of ANY of these universals…in the sense that postmodernism ELEVATES DIFFERENCE and CELEBRATES it as the most important factor…to someone like Zizek…this is NOT a postmodernist REJECTING universals…to HIM this is JUST creating a UNIVERSAL out of DIFFERENCE. 

So from THAT perspective: another way to VIEW this whole MORALITY thing…is that maybe it’s IMPOSSIBLE for someone to NOT be following moral universals…it’s just possible for people to not be AWARE of the ones they’re supporting…or to live in a place that’s PEACEFUL enough to not REQUIRE you to look at yours deeper. 

And again it’s INTERESTING: that could BE because you live in a really safe, peaceful country…it could ALSO just be you MANUFACTURING a peaceful environment like that in your LIFE, by surrounding yourself with FRIENDS who all AGREE with you. 

But anyway: as we DO on this podcast… let’s PROCEED from here as though this is the case. That a VERY important piece of making ANY sort of PROGRESS in the world…is GOING to require people to DECLARE certain moral universals…and then to be able to ACT on them without having to apologize for them constantly. 

Well IF that is TRUE…then it would make TOTAL SENSE to Mark Fisher why the cultural LOGIC of postmodernism…LEAVES us in a PLACE he thinks…where we are COMPLETELY STUCK…in the present. 

In fact at CERTAIN places in his work he CALLS the western world a society that has a memory condition: the western world has what’s called anterograde amnesia. 

And on the off chance you’re listening to this show and you DON’T have an encyclopedic knowledge of memory disorders, the GOOD news is: there’s a MOVIE that can help illustrate his point here. Mark Fisher compares how we are as a society…to the character named Leonard…in the movie Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan in the year 2000. Maybe you’ve SEEN it before.

The main character is a guy named Leonard…that can’t FORM new memories. Importantly in the movie he’s ALSO a guy whose wife was murdered not too long ago. 

And he remembers EVERYTHING about his life up until a certain POINT…but once he gets sick, no matter how hard he tries, he just doesn’t remember anything BEYOND that. Now in the movie…he’s ALSO trying to SOLVE the murder of his wife, so whenever he gets a piece of information he doesn’t want to forget that could help him figure it out…he tattoos it on his body, he takes a bunch of pictures, he makes notes about it…he essentially is a man…that has a MAJOR MYSTERY that he needs to solve that is SUPER important to him, but is constantly living in this HAZE where he CAN’T form new memories has to be SKEPTICAL of everything around him and lives pretty much every day in a state of confusion. 

To Mark Fisher…this DESCRIBES the life of a modern person maybe BETTER than it first may seem, and it CERTAINLY describes the condition of society overall. We are LIVING in a state of CULTURAL amnesia…where we CAN’T remember our PAST, which then makes it IMPOSSIBLE to accurately diagnose the present, and even MORE difficult to be able to IMAGINE a different social future that may be better off for people. 

THINK of the CONFUSION that postmodernism often LEAVES people in. When you QUESTION…GRAND NARRATIVES about the world you live in…and MORE than that: when QUESTIONING narratives and universals BECOMES something that’s VERY important to you that you’re naturally SKEPTICAL towards…then what comes at the COST of that often times are the things that TRADITIONALLY, have GIVEN people a clear sense of IDENTITY all throughout human history: that is the METANARRATIVES that UNIFY societies together around certain common stories we have about reality. 

As an example: THINK of how this applies to HISTORY…as ONE of those common stories societies usually have. There’s ONE version of history that’s taught to people in CLASSROOMS…that centers history around great WARS that have taken place. Memorizing a bunch of dates…THIS is when Napoleon invaded Russia…THIS is when the Magna Carta was signed…in other words: HUMAN HISTORY… is just a progression of different great leaders… SEIZING territory from each other. 

And there’s a CRITICISM of that view that is well received by people in post modern society that says: well THAT’S not the whole story of what humanity is! We’re talking about ALL human BEINGS here…HUMAN history is JUST as much the summer romance between two people that fall in love…the life of a street vendor in 9th century baghdad…the stories of a lighthouse keeper, stranded in a lighthouse, alone, in horrible conditions just to keep ships safe as they’re passing through. This PERSON would say there’s an INFINITE number of WAYS that history can be interpreted…and OUR responsibility is to SUBVERT the existing narratives and tell the stories of the voiceless from the past! And again this is generally seen as a REALLY NICE sentiment to people LIVING in a postmodern world. 

But what that ALSO brings along with it some people say…is a CREATIVE LICENSE to able to REINTERPRET human history…and PRESENT it in a way that just BENEFITS whatever political ends you’re trying to JUSTIFY. 

For example in MY country the United States…the FOUNDING FATHERS of our country, who WERE any of these dudes with buckles on me shoes and powdered wigs? Like what’s the TRUE answer to that question?

Well in MANY cases in postmodern society…it all depends on what side of the political aisle you LAND on…ONE side of it interprets history in a way where these men were some of the greatest political minds to have ever LIVED on planet earth, launching the greatest experiment in nation building that has EVER been launched. Now it’s ALSO possible to see these men as SLAVE owners, bigots, people that were actively complicit in the extermination of the native americans, and MUCH MORE. But WHICH one of these is TRUE? 

And you’ll SEE this happen when it comes to MOST of a postmodern subject’s view of history. Where DEPENDING on what STORY you believe about the recent PAST of the place you live in…that will DETERMINE the way that you see the present, and then what you think the next, best MOVES are for the future. But if nobody can AGREE on what their HISTORY is…then HISTORY isn’t a METANARRATIVE anymore that UNIFIES a society…HISTORY just becomes this fragmented STORY that’s used as an INSTRUMENT to prove your political bias. The SAME events, the SAME historical FIGURES…the MEANING of them will COMPLETELY CHANGE depending on who’s EVOKING them.

And here’s the point: HISTORY is not the ONLY example of a metanarrative that’s been deconstructed to the point that it no longer has the same unifying potential as in former societies. From shared rituals, community bonds, a shared conception of truth more generally, MOST things that unify your understanding of what your culture is all about, and who YOU are as a person WITHIN that culture. I mean there’s a REASON SEVERAL, modern day philosophers… have DESCRIBED the world we live in… as Schizophrenic. 

Because that’s obviously not a CLINICAL diagnosis they’re making…it’s a metaphor for the TYPE of experience that’s often available for people, where there’s a BREAKDOWN… of these unifying metanarratives...that help us develop a CLEAR sense of who we ARE…and an obvious, DEFINED POSITION within the world around us with clear boundaries to it. 

Feeling confused, like you DON’T REALLY know what’s going on, and you don’t know who or what to read to FIGURE out what’s going on, and you think the ONE thing that’s for sure is that people that CLAIM to know what’s going on, are CLEARLY idiots, and you feel like every year sort of blends into the next with no REAL prospects on the horizon for different ways of living that may come about in the future…this is a COMMON complaint…of people LIVING in postmodern culture…and it’s BECAUSE postmodernism…at bottom…IS the critique of the critique. It is a reaction video to a reaction video about reality. It is FUNDAMENTALLY, NOT ABOUT CONSTRUCTING any NEW cultural forms…it’s about DECONSTRUCTION. It’s about the elevation of DIFFERENCE to the level of the universal. 

This is what MAKES the critique so EFFECTIVE…but it ALSO COMES with certain social effects. It becomes VERY difficult to go EXTERNAL to yourself to find MEANING…or to DECLARE universals and look to the FUTURE as a way out. So, what HAPPENS…is when people can’t go EXTERNAL they turn INWARD towards NARCISSISM…and because they can’t go FORWARDS they turn BACKWARDS towards nostalgia. 

And THIS is going to be the other part of this unique BLEND we talked about last episode that is going to LEAD us to this state of affairs called Capitalist Realism.

Where everything we talked about LAST episode with neoliberalism, the focus is on the individual and the expansion of CAPITAL for the sake of CAPITAL…gets combined with postmodernism…that puts people in a HAZE where they are CONFUSED and INCAPABLE of ORIENTING themselves in TIME…let ALONE being able to imagine a different social future. 

To put it ANOTHER way: we are STUCK for Mark Fisher in a confused, narcissistic PRESENT moment…with NO conception of what the future should look like.

And as HE said: Capitalist Realism’s IMPOSSIBLE to define in a single sentence…the best way to SHOW people what Capitalist Realism is…is just to give them example, after example… that they can see in the world all around them. So that’s what I’m going to try to do here. To show through examples how IN this postmodern, neoliberal VACUUM that’s been created…how we ACCEPT the FALSE reality that CAPITALISM…is NOT an economic system…it’s just simply the WAY the world is, with no hope of changing it. 

But again let’s give some examples that support that theory: where Mark Fisher’s coming from is that every ERA of thought whether that’s postmodern, modern, medieval, renaissance WHATEVER IT IS…every one of these eras of thought… have ARTWORK that’s created during that TIME that corresponds with the THINKING of that time. In a sense you can tell a LOT about the THINKING of a particular time period by looking at the artwork that comes out of it. 

And MANY art critics out there AGREE… that the TYPE of art that typically comes out of a POSTMODERN type of subjectivity…is what’s called pastiche. PASTICHE meaning that it incorporates DIFFERENT cultural forms from the past, from OTHER eras…and then REMIXES them TOGETHER…into an art that ATTEMPTS to create something NEW out of them. 

In other words: REMIXING, REINTERPRETING, SAMPLING, RESURRECTING OLD cultural forms…warming them up in the microwave and then passing them off as something NEW and CREATIVE…THIS BECOMES a HALLMARK…of postmodern art. 

There’s an example I saw years ago to illustrate this and I couldn’t find who it was but this guy had a BRILLIANT example to show what Mark Fisher’s talking about here…he just brought up a list of the highest grossing movies from the year 2019, again this was a few years ago. So as I read this list ask yourself when were these cultural forms originally created. #1 was Avengers Endgame, Two is the Lion King, Three is Frozen 2, Four is spider man, Five is Captain Marvel, Six is Joker, Seven is Star wars, Eight is Toy Story, Nine is Aladdin and ten is Jumanji. 

Now EVERY ONE of those EXCEPT for Frozen 2…is a REMIX of OLDER cultural FORMS…a REMIXING of art… that was created during a DIFFERENT time… where the artists AT that time were actually taking risks and creating things that were new. Even Frozen 2 you could say with a LITTLE interpretation is just a remake of what Disney’s been doing for decades, not the LEAST of which it’s a remake of what they did in the FIRST frozen movie. 

Point is this is NOT new stuff…this is OLD stuff…being REMIXED in the present. 

Now I want to give a couple more examples of this, but QUICK point just so I can progressively, build an organized case for Mark Fisher’s point here…I’ve been working on my communication lately…: NOTICE…how these movies are all BOTH… older cultural forms that are being remixed…and how they’re ALSO the movies…that produce the most CAPITAL for the studios that MAKE them…by selling nostalgia. 

JUST that. Okay…NEXT example:

How bout one from the realm of music: Mark Fisher would say 50 years ago…right around the year 1970…there was a distinct SOUND that music used to have, ALL music from a while ago. 

What he MEANS is you can HEAR a SONG from back then…and you can be INSTANTLY reminded of a specific PERIOD in MUSIC. The 1970’s sound VERY different than the 1980’s which sound TOTALLY different than the 1990’s. And that’s BECAUSE, WITHIN THOSE YEARS…MULTIPLE, creative, visionary, STYLISTIC changes OCCURRED in music… where you can SEE it CLEAR as DAY that Motley Crue sounds NOTHING like Nirvana. And Nirvana sounds NOTHING like Huey Lewis and the News. 

In fact you GO BACK FAR enough…you pay attention…and there can be a DIFFERENCE between the music of the summer of 75 and the summer of 76. ONE YEAR…is SOMETIMES enough to notice a TOTALLY DIFFERENT LOOK…on what music can SOUND like. Where you HEAR it and you’re like WOW…that’s different. I’m gonna have to listen to this AGAIN to be able to fully INTERNALIZE all this. This is the experience some would say of listening to TRUE ARTWORK.

But now COMPARE the level of CHANGE from 1970 to 1990, 20 YEARS…to the TWENTY FOUR year difference between music from the year 2000…and 2024. 

Not…as much of a CHANGE. Some would say not much of a change at ALL. 

So what happened? Mark Fisher might START to explain this by saying it’s ALMOST like… a lot of musicians are REINTERPRETING and REMIXING older cultural forms…rather than creating ANYTHING you could call truly subversive or new. The examples here…are EVERYWHERE. It feels weird even needing to single certain ones OUT, but I’ll TAKE ones just from the last few weeks for the sake of having a discussion right NOW. 

Look at the Eminem song that came out a couple weeks ago: the CHORUS is a remix of abracadabra by the steve miller band from 1982…with a guest verse from a CHARACTER eminem used to play in his music back in 1999. With CONSTANT callbacks to older songs and older music videos all throughout it. 

Look at Taylor Swift and the concert series she just put on that was the highest grossing concert tour of all time, made over a BILLION dollars. It’s called the ERAS tour. A nostalgic REMIX of different ERAS of the last 20 years of her making music. Look at Blink 182…just dropped a new CD, where both in form AND in content…it is an almost CONSTANT REFERENCE to another PERIOD of their career twenty years ago when the world was a different place. 

Now I need to be CLEAR here: NONE of this is saying anything BAD about these artists…it may SOUND that way because it’s saying that they’re not creating anything new, but hopefully by using three super talented artists as the examples… it will show that this is NOT a MORAL judgment that’s being made…this is a CULTURAL observation...the POINT is these are GENERATIONAL artists… that are all selling NOSTALGIA to their fans. So you HAVE to ask the question: WHY is NOSTALGIA…something that is IN such high demand? 

ONE more example before we get deeper INTO this. 

Let’s take this from movies, to music…to now VIDEO games, ANOTHER form of art you could look at in the world around you…and ask yourself: when a team of GAME developers is sitting in the creative room coming up with ideas for their next game. And when they’re left with a choice to either risk millions of dollars developing a game that at the end of the day may not take off, or get ANY sort of traction, and BEST case scenario its gonna get roasted by online gamers that HOLD this kind of art to a high standard because they CARE a lot ABOUT it. It’s an interesting question: DOES the company RISK the millions of dollars to be able to create something new? Or do they take a CLASSIC game that they made a few DECADES ago…and REMIX it with higher resolutions, new textures, and an HD soundtrack? Do they DO that instead… because they KNOW… there’s going to be good PERCENTAGE of people that already LOVE the game that will want to experience that nostalgia for a different time. 

To TIE all of these examples we just gave TOGETHER…Mark Fisher has a famous quote. He says that to LIVE in the 21st century…is to have 20th century culture…DELIVERED to you through 21st century technology. It is to have the IDEAS and the ART of the 20th century…shown in 4k…or streamed with high speed internet. 

Again for Mark Fisher, 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 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 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 just gonna be a MICRO example of all this. This SAME thing applies to the way that we think about creative ideas…when it comes to the realm of politics and making our SOCIETIES better. 

Because think about ALL that CHANGES when a culture DOESN’T move forward and is incapable of developing new cultural forms. Mark Fisher 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 someone to hear a song…and be brought BACK in their mind to the summer of 75. Oh…I remember listening to that song, they’ll say, I was studying for my GED exam that summer. And then I remember the NEXT year the songs of 76 I was listening to when I started my job at the MEAT packing plant. Good times back then in my life. 

See in a way, to Mark Fisher…this WAY…of EXPERIENCING TIME…is an important part of HOW human beings make SENSE of our lives– we HAVE these SNAPSHOTS in TIME we remember… that are DISTINCT to a particular cultural moment. And then we look BACK on these moments…and USE them as an important PART, of how we STRUCTURE the narrative of our LIVES. 

But what HAPPENS when we don’t HAVE the ability to USE these anymore because everything is a REMIX of something old?

Well as Mark Fisher 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…THAT thing is OLD…old to the point that it’s EMBARRASSING…I mean with all due respect grandpa, get that CD outta my FACE you were listening to from 20 years ago, we gotta move ON from this as a culture. 

No 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 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, there’s only different perspectives, and morality is ENTIRELY relative. When you combine that with HISTORY being used as just a tool to confirm political bias, when you combine that with the fact that we have no distinct moments in time to help us understand the narrative of our lives…this ALL LEADS for Mark Fisher 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 Fisher: 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 1950’s for example…what if technology could eventually make it so that we don’t have to work as much as we do now? Or what if robots could help us around the house so we don’t have to do as many of the CHORES we don’t like doing? Or what if we could colonize the MOON or other planets and start spreading ourselves all across the GALAXY? Gah 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 from the 1950’s… were just way ahead of their TIME and they DREAMED UP the PERFECT future for us that we’ve NEVER decided to deviate from…and it’s just taken us a really long TIME to bring this stuff about…these are some BIG GOALS they dreamed up!

But ANOTHER way of explaining it is that we have the EXACT same GOALS 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 look like. 

Just…imagine an alternative timeline, of the last 50 years or so where the specific BLEND of postmodernism and neoliberalism we’ve been talking about…was NOT the primary set of ideas that was informing people’s thinking. It’s worth asking: COULD there have BEEN…DIFFERENT social futures, that could’ve GAINED popularity and totally REIMAGINED what it is to ORGANIZE a human society…could that have happened… if people were THINKING in a different way? If people saw their HISTORY in a different way? If people saw their POSITION in society through a different lens?

But… it DIDN’T happen. And that’s because the way we see the FUTURE…has FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED from the way FORMER generations saw the future. Again, The future has been canceled. The FUTURE to Mark Fisher…has essentially become an aesthetic STYLE that we TACK ONTO things…where it’s not really about the FUTURE in ANY sort of revolutionary sense or having ANYTHING to do with TIME. 

He compares the way we think about the future…to the way we think about a FONT. Kind of a weird way to say it…but the future to us is like a style of FONT. We think of the “future” as a style, the same way we think of something like “gothic” as a style…you know, where you’re scrolling through different fonts on your computer, you see a gothic one and you know it's gothic, because it LOOKS a certain way… 

It has certain curves to the letters, it’s BOLDED, no serif decorations, THAT’S how you know a font is GOTHIC. Well the concept of the FUTURE… has become something very SIMILAR for US, to Mark Fisher. 

When WE think of the FUTURE in our time…we just RECYCLE and REMIX…our GRANDPARENTS ideas of what the future was. Think of the popular movies that try to depict the future today…all they’re REALLY doing…is they’re just taking what FUTURISTIC movies were from DECADES ago…robots and aliens and LED lights, electronic sound effects, you know back when THAT kind of stuff was ACTUALLY creative and imagining a different future.

In theory, we COULD imagine something entirely DIFFERENT…but INSTEAD we just throw this futuristic FONT onto a movie, and we MAKE something that looks “futuristic”…in other words: we just take THOSE older cultural forms and cobble them together into something that’s a slightly different REMIX of what our GRANDPARENTS made…again, just 20th century ideas…delivered through 21st century technology.

As I mentioned before for Mark Fisher this is NOT just artwork… this extends to the political realm as well.

Remember in one of the Zizek episodes we BEGAN by talking about the political categories of left and right… and how the RIGHT fundamentally is trying to preserve existing institutions or go back to a time when they think things were better… and how the left is fundamentally trying to SUBVERT existing institutions and bring about a world that THEY think is better. 

Well for people on the right…it’s EXPECTED there’d be an element of nostalgia to their political views…again for THEM it’s about the preservation of what’s GOOD. But for people on the LEFT in today’s world…when you’re living in a place… where it’s so DIFFICULT for people to DECLARE moral universals, to construct NEW grand narratives, and to IMAGINE a different social FUTURE…where is someone on the left supposed to go… OTHER than backwards towards nostalgia?

See we LIVE during a time to Mark Fisher… where EVEN the 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 Fisher 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…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 Fisher…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 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…we live in a state of what Derrida and Fisher call the Hauntology of the present. A mix between the words Haunt and ontology. And there’s a lot more to Hauntology in Derrida’s work, we could do an entire episode on it, but the POINT here today… is how this concept enables Mark Fisher’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, in ways where people OFTEN don’t even REALIZE that it’s going on…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 that 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…THAT becomes the thing that you REALLY can’t DENY about our world…you either make money, or you STARVE to death.

Then on a more BROAD scale what starts to happen is that people start to learn to accept…the inevitability of Capitalism…they SEE capitalism NOT as the current, socio-economic system that we’re using to organize society, something that can 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 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..”

Once again the MANTRA of our time that we’re ALL supposed to be very PROUD of walking around all day is that YEAH, the system we HAVE isn’t that GREAT…but AT LEAST it isn’t any of that OTHER stuff. SHOW ME SOMEONE out there with a revolutionary plan…and I’ll show YOU someone who wants to be a DICTATOR…or a person whose ideas are DOOMED to FAIL, to get ANOTHER 100 million people killed in the name of a utopian vision. 

THIS is the spirit of revolution, of our time…in CONTRAST to the way FORMER generations used to think about it. And what this TURNS INTO…the FURTHER entrenched people GET into this way of thinking is that Capitalism… isn’t just ONE way of organizing things…it is THE way… that HUMANS organize things naturally. 

After ALL they’ll say…selfishness and greed…THESE things are just a part of our human NATURE…NOT neoliberal values that have been INCENTIVIZED in the recent past for the sake of economic growth. You know FORGET about all the examples of human beings naturally HELPING each other…screwing somebody else over and then saying well it’s just survival of the fittest out there…this is just the NATURAL way of the jungle, my friend. These qualities have been NATURALIZED, recently. 

So what that MEANS is if somebody wants to CHANGE things in any significant way…ANY REVOLUTIONARY IDEA that comes along at this point, is GOING to have to find a way to EXPLAIN how it’s their strategy is going to be BETTER when it INTRINSICALLY goes AGAINST the natural INSTINCTS and DESIRES of people, which are most PERFECTLY embodied within capitalist realism. The expansion of capital…for the sake of capital. The things that make the quarterly profit and loss sheet of the company look REALLY GREAT…EXPAND the GDP…but make the lives of PEOPLE slowly worse, the employees stretched a little more thin, paid a little bit less, with the service provided to the customers just a little bit worse.

See…that’s one of the interesting THINGS about Capitalist Realism…it’s one way to move BEYOND postmodernism. Postmodernism…is ALWAYS in reference to Modernism. Which means it ALWAYS needs to be pretty good at CRITIQUING the ideas of modernity or else it doesn’t survive…and there’s a LOT of good IDEAS to CRITIQUE in modernity, it’s a full time job. But Capitalist Realism…gets smuggled in the back door. It doesn’t have to PROVE itself up against most of the good ideas from the history of thought…IT just needs to appeal to people in a confused, narcissistic HAZE…all IT needs to do is say FORGET about all this moral confusion, Cash is KING. Stop THINKING about all this MORALITY stuff, which QUITE frankly is starting to bum me OUT A little…what YOU gotta do is DECLARE the universal…of expanding CAPITAL…for the sake of MORE CAPITAL. You’d be STUPID to QUESTION that…as something that is important for its own sake. And if you DO question it…well maybe you’ve just never really HAD much money…have you smelled it? Have you rolled around in it before?

This logic becomes the GO to strategy…EVEN when that BLEEDS IN to areas that have to do with the lives of people in ways where it just feels WRONG to be using capital expansion as the main thing that we should be considering. 

The examples of this are all the things you’ve heard about a million TIMES living in the world you do: privatized prisons here in the US, healthcare, the WATER supply, food production…we talked about an example last episode of how we privatize DEPRESSION, and people’s mental health more generally, where it’s possible for it to become MORE about the manufacturing and sale of pharmaceuticals than it is about fixing the problem. 

What happens…when it’s NOT ABOUT the PERSON anymore…and it becomes MORE about what looks exciting on a quarterly profit and loss sheet?

The POINT is…this whole ETHOS of the expansion of capital for the sake of capital…absolutely THRIVES in the moral VACUUM that’s CREATED by the unique BLEND of thinking that most people inherit these days. And so does FASCISM TOO, by the way. Because if we LIVE in a world where the system that is PRODUCING the problems is just ACCEPTED as the natural order of things and NOT something that we can politically restructure in a way that’s BETTER…then one common page out of the fascism PLAYBOOK that everyone’s heard BEFORE…is to just find some internal threat, some group of people that are causing all the problems you see around you…and run for office on a platform that you will get RID of that group and solve all the problems, only to GET in power and to NOT solve any of the problems because, surprise, it wasn’t that simple. 

The WHOLE situation…can REALLY be something that starts to make people, ESPECIALLY YOUNG PEOPLE, or people young at heart…feel depressed. To Mark Fisher it’s like Capitalist Realism ROBS the young of their YOUTH. People are left to just ACCEPT the inevitability of the way things are…rather than try to drum up support for what SEEMS like a revolutionary effort that’s doomed to fail. 

There’s a NEW KIND of DEPRESSION that Mark Fisher talks about…something that’s JUST EMERGED for people fairly RECENTLY in human history…he calls it depressive hedonia.

See, as HE says… in the past: people were DEPRESSED…when they couldn’t find ENJOYMENT in ANYTHING around them. 

But in TODAY’S day and age with the realities of materialist, consumer life and of the drug-like DOPAMINE experience of CONSTANTLY consuming ONE piece of media after another, just scrolling to the NEXT thing in your feed…this BECOMES…a NEW kind of depression he says UNIQUELY available to people of THIS time period…where it’s NOT that you CAN’T find enjoyment in things…but that you LIVE in a world that is so EMPTY of possibility, where it’s so DIFFICULT to wake up to a world that you feel an optimistic, meaningful connection to…that again, as a DEFENSE mechanism, depressive hedonia becomes about just ESCAPING into this constant stream of consumer experiences…just to be able to FORGET about the world you live in. And this BECOMES a pretty common PLACE for people to FIND themselves in.

Where is a person’s thinking supposed to go other than what we began LAST episode talking about? Where it’s easier for me to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism? 

Now Mark Fisher towards the end of his life was working on a potential way OUT of Capitalist Realism. See if WHAT we’ve been TALKING about the last two episodes can be described as a problem created by a DEPLETION of people’s consciousness…which is the way Mark Fisher DESCRIBED it…then the SOLUTION to this problem…would HAVE to involve some sort of REINVIGORATION of consciousness. Or a PROCESS of unforgetting…as Mark Fisher puts it. 

What he meant was that the STRUCTURE of Capitalist Realism, and the ideology we use to organize our experience…it FORCES us to FORGET certain things about REALITY…that ALLOW for Capitalist Realism to continue. 

The title for Mark Fisher as he was working on his last book…to DESCRIBE this method of unforgetting…was Acid Communism. So instead of capitalist REALISM…we have Acid Communism. 

Now…couple THINGS about that name…the COMMUNISM side of it was NOT calling for communism as people are USUALLY familiar with it when it comes to the experiments of the 20th century. To certain thinkers in the postcapitalism space…it would be MORE accurate to call those experiments by their individual names: Stalinism, Maoism, Leninism, etc. 

Reason BEING the things we talked about at the end of one of the Zizek episodes: how communism was NOT for Marx and Engels a state of affairs to be established in the world…but simply “that which abolishes the present state of things”. So any NATION building, or extreme FAILURES in nation building on the other SIDE of a communist revolution should be attributed to the specific project. For Fisher…the word communism is MUCH more intended to represent the attitude that we’re actually trying to find a different way forward that steps FAR outside the bounds of this neoliberal, postmodern trap of thinking. 

Now the ACID part of acid communism is ANOTHER interesting side of this. You ever read about the experiences of people that experiment with psychedelics? Well without trying to put too RIGID of a description on them…one of the common things you’ll hear people report is that after USING them…they look around them specifically at certain things we’ve talked about like the hyperfocus on the perspective of the individual…and that when they’re IN a place under the influence of psychedelics…they just don’t RELATE to that scale of reality as strongly as they do otherwise. A LOT of people report having feelings of interconnectedness with everything…feeling ONE with the universe, part of a larger whole. Feeling like, again, the idea of screwing somebody over and then saying, welp its just business, man. That feels to them like an incredibly bizarre thing that’s SOMEHOW been made into something people see as normal. 

Now Mark Fisher…WASN’T somebody that used psychedelics, went around selling em to people at burning man. That just want him. 

But as someone that was interested in ways to REINVIGORATE people’s consciousness that had been depleted…he WAS INTRIGUED… by the ways that psychedelic culture was so diametrically opposed to MANY of the ways of thinking that are NORMALIZED in capitalist realism. This SAME thing… went for Feminism too as far as he saw it…and also Socialism as a political strategy. And NOTICE he says at one point, how EACH ONE of these things that OPPOSES the current dominant modes of thinking are turned into a caricature, you know it’s possible for people to strawman these things… psychedelic people are often thought of as losers that just wanna get high all the time. Feminists can be thought of as blue haired people that just hate men, and socialists can be seen as people who are just stupid and lack the skills to be able to compete in a capitalist system with the truly talented people, so they think the government should be handing things out. In reality to fisher, each ONE of these offers a pretty strong place to begin if you wanted to imagine alternative ways of structuring a human society…or if you wanted to find the origins of the things we are forced to forget about human existence in order for the GDP to keep growing at the rate it does. 

The bottom line for mark fisher: is that a lot of us need to recognize the seriousness of the matter. To him, we are in a class war every day of our lives in the western world, and many of us don’t realize that we’re losing that war every day. There’s more to his critique of capitalism, as well as a movement of psychedelic socialism that has emerged on the left along the same lines as what he was suggesting with acid communism. I want to reference more ideas from mark fisher and other post capitalist theories, but I want to do that…while ALSO giving some time to solutions that other philosophers suggest for how to fix some of these structural issues, by using capitalism itself as the system to bring it about. So as far as the next few episodes go: Along with the episodes on ethics, this is gonna be where we head next. 

Promise this won’t be the last time you hear the name mark fisher…and while I’ve tried to leave plenty for you to enjoy on your own if you wanted to read his book capitalist realism or any of his later essays…I hope I’ve done a decent enough job of setting up how this unique blend of different ways of thinking…defines for him the plight of the time we’re living in. Hope you enjoyed this one, thanks for supporting the show on patreon, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.