Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism and K-Punk

A phenomenology of neoliberalism

Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism

Mark Fisher, a British intellectual of working-class origin, is the author of a short book that’s held in high esteem by millennial leftists: Capitalist Realism. I first heard of Fisher from my young socialist friends who quoted him as the source of the striking dictum that it’s now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Capitalist Realism does open with this dictum but it attributes it to Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson. Fisher spent much of his short life — he committed suicide at the age of 48 in 2017 — in the circles of class-conscious British academia. When I read about his life and read his book I could not help being stirred to a deep sympathy. My criticism of his thought is therefore combined with an implicit self-criticism; my interpretation of his work is likewise shaped by the myths of the oppositional outsider that have molded my own wishful self-image.

Fisher is for me the type of the radical outsider, a touch of Georg Büchner mixed with the romantic loner departed too early, a type that abounds among popular musicians. Fisher wrote extensively and eloquently about popular music and culture. He was well-read in critical theory, poststructuralist, and Frankfurt School. He wrote brilliantly without any taint of the academic social climber. What surprises me, however, is that there is so little reference to political developments beyond the predictable disparagements of Thatcher, Blair, and the War on Terror. There is so little attention to the mechanics of exploitation and oppression, nothing like Matthew Desmond’s exposure of the business plan behind evictions and homelessness or the systematically criminal functioning of private equity.

Fisher is passionately opposed to the reign of Capital, but the details of that reign hardly interest him. He leaps from his cultural reading to a general judgment of the world-historical impasse. This is evident in his fascination with the film by Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men (2006). Fisher is in agreement with the director’s decision to remain vague about the cause of the disaster of childlessness which has been visited upon the world. He is content that the authoritarian regime in the film is hardly fleshed out. What counts is the critic’s interpretation that childlessness is a metaphor for cultural sterility, for the inability of neoliberalism to give birth to anything new or surprising.

This is a complaint that merits some reflection. Since it is in the very essence of consumer capitalism to produce new things all the time, we assume that Fisher means: fundamentally new, qualitatively new, or to be more precise: new in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary sense. Fisher and his readers may think that the radically new popular music of the 60s accompanied and was of a piece with the “revolution” of the 60s, so that the musical sterility of our time is a piece with the triumph of the neoliberal order. Like the inexplicably gloomy and authoritarian England of Children of Men, this is an irrationally depressing thought, or better: it’s a state of depression projected onto the external world.

This of course doesn’t mean that he is wrong. Phenomenology and Existentialism have taught us to read moods as modes of knowing the world. I assume that many of us, perhaps particularly many millennials, know the same depressing state of mind. Many who long for a more humane world share Fisher’s foreboding. The realism he has in mind is imposed by a totalizing neoliberalism that offers no exit from the omnipresence of consumer culture. Even the representation of rebellion is simply one more consumer entertainment option which is as popular as it is inconsequential.

To anyone who has taught mature students recently his depiction of languid young people on a steady structureless diet of junk food and video games has the ring of truth. They might want Nietzsche but only in the same way they might want to eat a hamburger. Everything is on the same consumer level.  Fischer died before the effects of social media reached their zenith, but he could see their consequences in people always adrift and always connected. Everything is transformed into a commodity. In one of my favorite recent novels, Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex trilogy, Capital triumphs over culture by subsuming its independent vestiges, turning the vinyl record store owner into a street bum and treating its women as chattel. Capital undermines everything free and egalitarian in popular culture. In Capitalist Realism, no one can breathe or think free of the mentality of commodification. Rebellion is just one more marketable consumer choice that means nothing.

Beyond the reality of Capitalist Realism lies the unrepresentable Real of total destruction: “capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment” (18). It seems that this unrepresentability of the Real pervades the existing society. Bureaucracy is an all-pervasive decentralized control that turns means and measurements into ends in themselves. Precarity is the norm. Mental illness rises with the neoliberal order. “Work and life become inseparable” (34). “Capitalist realism . . . entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment” (54). This is reflected in the popularity of the identity-challenged film, the Bourne films, Memento, or The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (58).

Equally devastating is Fisher’s take on the faux opposition of the “Twitter Left” in Exiting the VampireCastle. The asides of K-Punk can be read as an intellectual autobiography in the form of marginalia, ranging from what he considers the most formative readings between the ages of thirteen and seventeen and extending to his depressive take on the petty back-biting of the so-called Twitter left. I am glad that I read this. Now I understand better that my young friends’ hostility toward liberals is less of an identitarian essentializing than a protest against a mentality “where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent” (662):

The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups—the more “marginal” the better—into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering—those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly. (663)

If only Fisher will have succeeded in conveying the truth that mental suffering is not something that plays out only in the personal or particular sphere but is a social phenomenon that should elicit a social response of solidarity, his life and death will not have been in vain.