Tag: Capitalist Realism

Progress and my Discontent – Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends

The trouble with going to a university like Cambridge is that I could review the Irish author Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends entirely through anecdotes and references to my own friends and acquaintances. Because if there is one thing this book does well above all else it is (re)create a certain type of person, one dominating English faculties the world over. It is funny that this even extends to the cover of my edition of the book. The two girls there look remarkably like an ex-friend of mine, and if you’re anyway connected to that world, you’ll recognize the hair and dress sense too.

A cover of Conversations with Friends shows a drawing of two women
The cover of my edition of Conversations with Friends shows two girls who look weirdly like a girl I was once friends with… It is a girl who populates humanities faculties the world over.

But anecdotes, probably, will not do. Rooney and her work are being praised the world over, a tv-series is in the works, and she’s not even thirty. The question, then, is whether this book is actually any good. At the end of the day, anybody can tape our banal dinnertime conversations, can write down a list of topics that come up again and again. To make a good book it isn’t enough just to capture reality; that reality needs to be transformed such as to give it greater significance. Given the context, it is a balancing act for Rooney. First, she has to show us that our conversations aren’t as significant as we thought, but then that our lives are significant precisely where we don’t expect it. That’s how the material can become truly transformative.

The Plot of Conversations with Friends

Frances is a twenty-one-year-old student in Dublin who wants to write. She’s rather cold and doesn’t have a huge number of friends. Her best friend is Bobbi, who is cool. Bobbi and Frances together perform in poetry readings. At one of these poetry readings they meet Melissa, a well-known journalist, who decides to write about them. At this point the two young women are taken into Melissa’s world, one from a higher class than what Frances is used to. At a party Frances gets to know Nick, Melissa’s husband, and they start sleeping together. But sleeping with someone, especially someone who is married, isn’t always a painless operation. This new relationship ends up straining Frances’ relationship with those around her and revealing an awful lot about herself that she perhaps didn’t want to know.

Thematically, Conversations with Friends does a lot of things. One of the main conflicts is between youthful idealism and aged experience. Melissa and Nick are a lot older than Frances and Bobbi, and their views consequently differ a lot. It’s one thing to talk about destroying capitalism; quite another to, when faced with the richness of its blessings, reject it once again. In the same way, an adulterous relationship is hardly the ideal sort of relationship for plenty of reasons, and Frances needs to move away from an intellectual view of the world to have any chance of enjoying it. Purity localised within yourself might work, but demanding the world be equally perfect is a recipe for disaster.

Form and Structure

Conversations with Friends reminds me, to a large extent, of Brett Easton Ellis’s debut novel, Less than Zero. Both of them take a youthful cast of characters and reveal the fault lines within their world. Both of them also share a similar pared-down style that lacks direct relation of the characters’ emotions. Conversations with Friends uses first-person narration, but Frances hides her personal views from the reader just as much as she does from herself, so that the narration feels strangely empty. There is also no use of speech marks. It is easy enough to tell who is talking and when, but it gives the effect of isolating Frances. It feels like we are only inside her mind, and that connections with other people are fleeting. I like it; it suits the idea of the novel. We may talk and talk yet never reach each other’s hearts.

Culture and Politics

A bit like Less than Zero, Conversations with Friends is full of those little cultural markers which, like spices, give their representation of reality its relevance and accuracy. Films, books, television series, and even games are all named in logical places. Rooney wants to show the kind of shared cultural milieu that her characters inhabit, and she succeeds. But the naming doesn’t just extend to cultural artefacts – the politics of Conversations with Friends is also decidedly locked into its time. News of Syria, police brutality, and so on all tie the work into the late 2010s. The characters are all politically radical, as we humanities students often are. Communism, anarchism, Gilles Deleuze, modern feminism – a common frame of political reference is established early on.

Mark Fisher, whose work I’ve written on here, certainly seems relevant in the context of the characters’ depressions and despairs under late capitalism. While I read, I also thought a lot about David Foster Wallace’s essay on Dostoevsky, where he talks about the kind of literature we need to write to be able to move on from the pervasive ironic unseriousness of the present day. Rooney doesn’t really move beyond this irony, but instead of attacking the systematic problems and inequalities in the modern state her targets seem to be the very people who think they are most against the state. I mean, it’s in the title – conversations dominate. And conversations achieve very little in this book. The characters, concerned as they are with everything that is wrong with the world, don’t seem interested in doing anything about it.

What really matters

In the end Conversations with Friends is about conversations with friends, and the friends and time the characters spend with them become far more important than their political views. It is not that politics divides us – the characters in the book are all on the same page – but rather that politics doesn’t bring the characters together. But speaking, revealing the truth of one’s heart – this does have the capacity to create a lasting and valuable relationship between people. Ultimately, the contents of the relationships prove less important than the relationships themselves. Frances goes from a position of apparently great academic knowledge but limited self-knowledge to almost the exact opposite, and she’s all the happier for it.

What I liked about Conversations with Friends

I ended up liking quite a few things about Conversations with Friends. For one, the book not only accurately portrays its chosen milieu, it also successfully satirises it. The book is, I mean, quite funny. “I said hello, though what I meant was: I hope you haven’t found out about me sleeping with your husband”. Frances’s deadpan style makes humour easy. The humour is biting and modern, and indeed another thing I liked about the book was that it really felt it was written in this century. Rooney successfully incorporates instant messaging, emails, and games in a way that is natural, instead of pretending they don’t exist.

I also liked the way that the people were also modern. Their concerns were relevant, their attitudes – this kind of particular middle-class guilt – are attitudes that really haven’t existed for very long. Rooney gives voice not to a people who have been traditionally voiceless, but to part of a new generation that hasn’t yet been given voice. In this sense, the book is pretty unique for the moment. Even the older characters were well done. I felt Frances’s fear when she went home to her alcoholic father’s house, and recognised my own father in the language of Frances’s.

The way that Rooney emphasises the importance of human connections and relationships is also something I liked. It’s not an original message, but it’s one we all need to hear. The incorporation of a little spiritual subplot wasn’t half-bad either, though Frances’ modern sensibility prevents this from going very far. As is, I suppose, reasonable enough. The book, for all its dryness – Conversations with Friends definitely came from under Raymond Carver’s Overcoat, so to speak – also has a few moments of surprising beauty, like this one: “Buses ran past like boxes of light, carrying faces in the windows”. It’s sometimes easy to forget that the world in front of us is capable of that.

What I didn’t like

“you have to do more than say you’re anti things” – Bobbi. Rooney is a self-professed Marxist, and Conversations with Friends does well in showing the complicated structures that reinforce unequal hierarchies, oppress certain groups, and all of that stuff. Frances claims she doesn’t want to work, but through connections ends up making quite a bit of money on a writing project. Everything works out in the end, but only because she is already, comparatively, well-placed within the late stage capital environment of modern Ireland as a middle-class white woman.

A photo of Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney was born in 1991, so unlike the people I’m usually reading she’s neither dead nor old. But she’s pretty cool! Photo by Alberto Cristofari—Contrasto/Redux via TIME

But though I appreciated the politics of Conversations with Friends, I felt the ultimate message was somewhat off. Rooney has written that she doesn’t know how to incorporate her politics into her work, and I completely understand the difficulty. But to reject politics in favour of the present moment and relationships (as the book’s conclusion seems to suggest) feels a lot like rejecting political action altogether. Talk accomplishes nothing, and since nobody seems serious about acting the overall feeling is that we may as well ignore the glaring problems we’re facing and hope they’ll just go away. I don’t really like the pessimism of this undertone; it sits uneasily with me.

Conclusion

I think I must have liked Conversations with Friends, though, in the end. After all, it’s a debut novel. It’s funny, at times even beautiful, and it hits close to home. The challenge of conveying radical politics within a novel while still making the novel compelling is a great one, and Rooney’s in no way to blame for not entirely succeeding. In fact, I’m glad that she at the very least reveals the degree of hypocrisy that underlines a lot of our virtue signalling these days. The value of our friendships and relationships transcends the political interests of the present moment, and hopefully always will. But we shouldn’t give up on change altogether. There is a compromise out there. The challenge of the great novels to come is finding it.

I’m looking forward to reading Normal People soon.

Update: I read it!

Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Mental Health in a Mental World

I recently read Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, a delightful book on the problems facing almost everybody alive in late capitalist society – which is to say, pretty much anyone reading this.

We have come a long way as a people. Free market capitalism has lifted great numbers out of poverty, given homes to them, placed food on their tables, and led to countless new inventions. It’s hard to argue with that. But something in the past fifty-or-so years has gone very wrong. Today, nations continue getting richer, our phones continue getting faster, our supermarkets continue getting even better stocked… and yet it appears that we have lost something of value that the data can’t or won’t acknowledge. People are getting unhappier – there is a worsening crisis in mental health, the planet’s ecosystems are collapsing before our eyes, innovation is slowing down, income inequality is getting worse, and extremism is on the rise in our politics. It’s hard to argue with that, too.

A photo of Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism
Mark Fisher (1968-2017) was a cultural theorist and a pretty cool guy. Capitalist Realism is probably his most famous work, but he is also important in modern British music criticism. Photo by MACBA and used under CC BY-SA 2.0

Capitalist Realism tries to explain what’s gone so wrong. It’s a compelling, frightening, and valuable book. Here I’d like to cover a few of its very many exciting ideas, and then discuss the value of Fisher’s critique for people who are not on the radical left like he was. For it turns out that the very power of this book lies in the way it answers questions faced by people all over the political spectrum.

What is Capitalist Realism?

As I study Russian, my first port of call is almost always going to be Dostoevsky. His books are full of passionate characters who are constantly espousing theories for new forms of governance, people filled with a great and infectious optimism for the future of the world. Dostoevsky himself was a dreadful reactionary, but his characters weren’t always. In the 1860s Russia was filled with hope – serfdom had been abolished, and the new Tsar seemed like a reformer. People debated the direction reforms should take, but nobody doubted that positive change was coming.

Things are different now. Early on in Capitalist Realism Fisher writes that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”, a quote that comes from either Slavoj Zizek or Fredric Jameson. That is the essence of the problem – we cannot imagine, or even hope to imagine, a way out. Fisher’s own definition for capitalist realism is this: “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”. Since the collapse of the USSR it has seemed that there’s no other system quite so resilient as capitalism. But accepting this doesn’t exactly bring us happiness.

Fisher charts this loss of imagination using examples from popular culture. He compares the utopian aspirations of rock with the grittiness and self-styled “realism” of modern hip-hop. He contrasts the movie Heat, where criminals don’t form attachments to anything because they are always on the move, with earlier gangster movies where there was an emphasis on loyalty and honour. And what he finds is that the closer we approach to the present day the less hope and non-monetary values there is to be found.

Values in a World of Capital

“Everything has a price”, and indeed it’s true for everything from harvested organs to works of art. But the problem is that’s not necessarily a good thing. To give something a price is to take away everything about it which is priceless. The mysterious quality of historical or artistic artefacts is lost, in what Fisher calls the “desacralization of culture”, the second you say how much it’s worth. It allows you to make comparisons between things that shouldn’t be compared – a work of art and a loaf of bread, for example. But the very moment something has a price that price then blocks out those other values which cannot be so easily named. And over time those values are lost.

If you think of art, or a watch, or a car, as an investment, then you’re already thinking about things in a way that’s conditioned by capitalism. In much the same way, if you think about Christmas as a time for getting cool presents, then the original message of that time has been lost or at the very least partially displaced too. I’m not saying that Christmas ought to be the Christian holiday it once was – rather, it’s a good example of how capitalism can destroy the traditional aspects of tradition and leave only a commercialised shell in its wake. In the UK we now “celebrate” Black Friday – a whole tradition was created for consumerism where there was just a calendar day before.

Fault Lines: Not So Real

Capitalism works so long as people buy into it, mentally and literally. Boom and bust cycles are all dependent on people investing themselves psychologically into speculation, and without these cycles, capitalism falls apart. Capitalism portrays itself – that is, businesses and politicians supportive of the status quo portray it – as hyperrational, hyper logical, the best option. Fisher writes that the only way to challenge capitalism is to reveal that this portrayal is a fabrication, and bear that knowledge in your own mind and spread it into the minds of others, too. Where are these fault lines in the system? Fisher singles out a few.

The first of these is the environment, and the effect on it of climate change. The fact that our ecosystems are collapsing because of capital’s pursuit of unlimited growth has already provided many people with an impetus to abandon faith in capitalism. Science, which is so valued in capitalism’s self-theorizing, is suddenly ignored and denied when it paints a terrifying view of the future. The consequences of climate change are not yet sufficiently visible, in the West at least, to cause mass clamour for alternatives to untrammelled free market growth, but they will be in due course. Millions of climate refugees, increased storms and extreme weather, and rising sea levels, will all be visible challenges faced by the West and capital in the coming decades.

Next, there is the matter of bureaucracy. Fisher points out that what we have seen, in spite of notions of “innovation” and “efficiency”, is that capitalism now demands reams of paperwork. Much of it, however, seems pointless. Endless targets, self-inspections, call centres – these aren’t efficient at all. Capitalism appears to be deteriorating from its initial agility. Fisher also talks about culture in connection with this. He approvingly refers to Jameson again, who thought that in the later stages of capitalism all culture will be pastiche or revivalism. That is, innovation will end. To me, at least, it does seem that culture is stagnant right now, with postmodernity being a dead-end but nothing else being created as an alternative. Fisher points out that by contrast, in the Soviet Union, cinematic innovation was far greater than it was elsewhere. Consider Tarkovsky and Vertov, among others. However, this is hard to quantify.

The third point is mental health. There are no two ways about it: people in the West are getting sadder and sadder. It’s all well and good to excuse this by saying that rising numbers of sufferers are due to changing methods of diagnosis or increased openness or by blaming social media. All of these things play a part. Fisher doesn’t deny that chemical imbalances can make us depressed. But he notes that capitalism encourages us to seek solutions and causes within ourselves – whether in the brain, or in our family, or in our upbringing – instead of in the system. “Unhealthy” mental health can be seen in the brain, but that doesn’t mean that its first cause was in the brain, or that the solution is necessarily in the brain. I know that when I’m depressed the best antidepressant is company – the complete opposite of capitalism’s relentless atomization of us.

A picture of the cover of Capitalist Realism, showing skyscrapers and a red background for text.
It’s red! There are skyscrapers! It’s enough to make any big-C conservative shudder… (fair use)

When you consider all the things that late-stage capitalism does to humanity, it’s hard not to see a lot of truth in Capitalist Realism’s suggestions. Nature is being destroyed, values that are not economic are devalued, family is broken up due to demands that both parents work to make ends meet, we lack the free time to make friends and spend time with them, and when we see people our views are distorted by increasingly unrealistic portrayals of life seen through social media, and politically we feel powerless too. And the worst thing is, we can’t imagine another system. We feel absolutely trapped and hopeless.

A Conservative View on Capitalist Realism

I have a habit of arranging all of the books that I’m taking with me on holiday in various shapes and piles, and rather unfortunately Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was lying in pride of place just as my mother entered to see how my packing was going for my latest trip to Russia. She took one uncomfortably long look at the book, said nothing, and promptly left. Unfortunately, it seems like I’ll have to be defending myself against accusations of being a socialist anti-monarchist traitor for the next few months again, just when I thought I’d managed to escape the worst of it…

All this is frustrating, because Capitalist Realism, for all its radicalism and its angry red cover, is not a book that “conservatives” should reject out of hand. Capitalism ought to be seen as a monster by those on the right just as much as it is for those on the left. I’d like to explain why that is the case, and in doing so hopefully redeem myself partially from the disappointment of my family. Though truth be told, the views that follow are not entirely my own.

First, I should just qualify what I mean by “conservative”. It does not mean the Republican Party in the US and nor does it mean The Conservative and Unionist Party in the UK, at least as these parties currently are. Rather, to my mind, it means a set of values and attitudes. It means a preference for slow change over rapid change, for local communities over global connections, for modesty in matters of sex and relationships when in the public view, for tradition and (sometimes) religion in public affairs and in culture, for a sense of honour and duty, for conservation of history and nature and the good aspects of the past, for the tight-knit family, and for respect. Conservatism in this sense is an intellectual tradition with such notable supporters as Edmund Burke.

A Painting of Edmund Burke,
Edmund Burke, a founding figure of modern British Conservatism and a believer in those old-fashioned things we call values. It is only recently that conservatism seems to have lost its way and become more about attacking its opposition than promoting its own values and positive vision of the world.

Many of these values are easy to get behind, and some are easy to disagree with. But I think that all of these values when present in another human being are deserving of respect, in the same way that many “liberal” values are also worthy of admiration. The problem is that these values are strangely absent from modern conservative parties. Yes, they pay lip service to them at election time, but “conservatism” for them seems much more an economic policy of low taxation and regulation, rather than a social one. And the problem with all this is that, for the reasons Fisher describes in Capitalist Realism, the values imposed by economic conservatism are incompatible with the values of social conservatism as I’ve defined it.

Capitalism doesn’t encourage loyalty because it demands businesses and individuals make money over cultivating dedication and honour and duty. It doesn’t encourage respect for nature or history or art or tradition because all that gets in the way of making profits. It doesn’t encourage our participation in local communities because it is focused on our atomization and individual consumption. It doesn’t even, really, encourage conservative politics, because the capitalist system demands anything be blamed instead of the system itself, and so parties on the right end up adopting elements closer to fascism in order to remain electable, such as demonizing unproductive groups as the source of people’s discontent.

Taken this way, people throughout the political spectrum ought to find good reasons to be disappointed with the state of the world right now, and both would benefit from reading Capitalist Realism. People all over the political spectrum have a lot of positive values to offer the world, but the problem is that capitalism, instead of encouraging those values so that together left and right can build a brighter future, instead turns left and right against each other, forcing them into increasingly unsavoury political positions with little chance of compromise or peaceful resolution. “The system works, don’t change it”, is a traditional conservative rallying cry. But Capitalist Realism provides us with enough evidence to show that’s not the case. And though they would not approve of rapid change, I’d hope conservatives wouldn’t be against slow, steady, and sensible change towards a world that actually values their values.

Conclusion

I really can’t recommend this book enough. It’s only eighty pages, and it’s pretty cheap too. Fisher is an excellent diagnostician of our present woes, and he even puts forward some decent suggestions as to how to move forward going into the future. Capitalist Realism isn’t perfect – it has a few problems typical of this kind of book. For example, his suggestions about how to fight back against capitalism were a little undeveloped, and his comments on the 1985 miners’ strike in the UK are somewhat contradictory in light of what he writes about climate change. But that’s doesn’t matter too much. The book gets the job done. To understand the nature of our predicament is already the first step out of it. And whether you’re on the left or on the right, you should have reason to be disappointed with the current state of our overcapitalised world.

Mark Fisher died in 2017, a victim of the system he had spent his life analysing. I may not have agreed with everything he wrote in Capitalist Realism, but it’s hard not to think of him as, in his own way, a heroic figure…

So go off and try imagining something other than capitalism for yourself! If you do manage to think up a solution to our problems, why not leave a comment with your answer?

For a recent film that showcases a few ideas featured in Capitalist Realism, have a look at my analysis of Joker. For more theory complaining about the state of the world, check out my piece on Adorno and our relationship with the past.