Mark Fisher and Cultural Realism

Mark Fisher (1968-2017) was a cultural critic, who had been a lecturer at Goldsmiths College. He is best known for the book Capitalist Realism (2009).

Fisher’s thinking is based around the arts, and responding to them, and identifying political and cultural themes from them. He believes in late capitalism – which presumably suggests that capitalism is about to end, although his definition of “capitalist realism” is far more bleak:

What I mean by “capitalist realism”: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system but also that is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.

[Capitalist Realism, chapter 1]

It is as if there are two ways of examining the present day: either in terms of economics, the kind of thing you read about in the Financial Times, about central banks, governments, and policy institutions, or in terms of cultural catastrophe, a landscape inhabited by Frederic Jameson, Michel Foucault,  Badiou, Deleuze, and so on.  But I don’t think he always really means what he is saying. He continues with a quote from Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto:

[Capital] has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

But is it as simple as that? Is this a Ruskinian plea for a value-based rather than money-based society? Does the statement still apply today? Donald Trump is busy replacing free trade by protectionism, and is this reinstating any of the “indefeasible chartered freedoms” of US farmers? Not very likely, I would guess. But perhaps if you stay in the land of the cultural critics, your readers won’t challenge what you say about economics.

Fisher’s innovation is to link the doom-laden vision of the cultural critics to recent pop music and culture. The horrors of the present day are best revealed in SF movies such as Children of Men (2006). Fisher believes that the world in 2007 is even beyond Jameson’s Postmodernism – that today (2007) there are no political alternatives to capitalism. For Fisher, Kurt Cobain represented “the despondency of the generation that had come after history”. The trouble is that every generation has seized on iconic figures who died young and who can therefore represent a kind of “pure” comment on society without having sold out.  And using pop music as a kind of indicator of where we are in the world is a very suspect activity. And dystopian movies are fun for a few minutes, but hardly a basis for examining how society should work.

 He makes some powerful points – for example, the moment that a painting such as Picasso’s Guernica enters a museum, it becomes ‘iconic’, but at the same time loses its power: “the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts”. But to be honest, the book reads like (and indeed at times copies word for word from) his blog, and like most blogs, it is rather fleeting. It references all the right writers and artists, but doesn’t seem to have a structured argument, just a lot of name-dropping. It’s a shame, because he appears to be potentially a bringing up to date of Gramsci’s idea of hegemony – the way that the state, without any overt instruments, nevertheless manages to control the way people think.  Perhaps I am misreading Fisher, and there are positive recommendations there somewhere. But I haven’t seen any so far.