Tag: Mark Fisher

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!

Ambiguity, Class Conflict and Mental Health in Joker

I watched Todd Phillips’ Joker yesterday and it may well have been the best film I’ve ever seen – but then, I’m not exactly a film person. When I watch films, I generally balance out my serious reading by choosing light-hearted movies. Joker shows an alternative path forward for the ever-popular comic book movie genre – one that says that films about costumed heroes and villains can be every bit as introspective and challenging as other “serious” films. Indeed, given the violence, destruction, and brutal origins and lives of many comic book heroes and villains, perhaps the films should be.

 Joker is also a highly political film, as much of the more negative media coverage of it has indicated, but the suggestion that Joker supports the cause of “incels” is to my mind very much a misplaced one. Instead, using ambiguity as its guiding principle, Joker carefully explores the connections between class, violence, and mental illness. In this way, I’d like to use it as a companion piece to explore a few of the ideas I mentioned in connection with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, which I looked at here.

A film still showing Arthur putting his makeup on while crying
Joker asks us to consider how whether our own seemingly benign actions, whether at the ballot box or on the street, may have real and painful consequences for people like Arthur Fleck, the Joker.

Medication and Meetings – Austerity in Joker

At school I ended up doing some community service. I’m pretty sure it was there only because it’s one of the things private schools in the UK need to do retain charitable status. Either way, there were various activities on offer, ranging from picking up litter to looking after our (private!) library… I, however, somehow ended up doing one of the few serious activities – I chose to help a local theatre company teach people with Down’s and autism how to act. It lasted about half a year and was a life-changing experience. Never before had I spoken to anyone with Down’s. I remember the unease I felt on first entering the school buildings they used for the training. I’d thought these people were monsters. And when I first went to the bathroom and heard one of them noisily coming in a felt a real fear come over me.

Luckily, all that passed. With time I got to know each of the people there. Not well, but enough to realise that my preconceptions of them had been completely out of touch. They were, even though they often needed help, people like the rest of us, with their own passions, loves, and sadnesses. But I mention all this for another reason. One session one of our acting tasks was to pretend we were in a political rally. Obviously, the whole idea was strange for a bunch of boys who saw nothing amiss in the current system. But the others were excited. Each and every one of them chose the same topic for their protest – cuts to their benefits, challenges in getting medication and access to counselling when they needed it. It was a humbling moment to realise that these peoples’ entire lives were actually affected by our votes and politicians.

I couldn’t, after that, consider blindly the consequences of austerity and cuts the same way. Joker likewise features relatively prominently those political-economic decisions that can cause real consequences for our mental health. The first scene in the film features Arthur Fleck, the future Joker, having a meeting with a mental health worker. Although she doesn’t much care for him, she at least tries to help by encouraging him to open up and organising his medication. But when they meet again, later on in the film, she announces that her department’s budget has been cut. She can’t help him anymore, and he loses access to his medication. The film doesn’t suggest that she is doing a good job – in fact, Arthur gets angry at her for ignoring what he says and just repeating the same questions – but it’s undeniable that he suffers when her support is removed. Politics has human victims.

Violence in Joker – Purpose and Effect

The high point of the film’s early stages and the first decisive moment in Arthur’s transformation into Joker is his killing of three young men on the subway. They are well dressed but drunk, and turn out to be employees of Wayne Enterprises. After verbally abusing a young woman they turn on Arthur and begin – randomly – beating him. However, using a gun given to him for his protection, he shoots two of them and finishes the third off as he tries to escape. The murders – as determined by the media, and by Thomas Wayne himself – are politically motivated. Such “clowns” are simply envious of the rich for being more successful than they are. Wayne’s remarks lead to a general increase in civil unrest. What was not a murder to begin with – it was self-defence – is morphed into a symbol of class conflict by Wayne’s ignorance.

Violence as a Reflection of Moral Decay

Joker is a violent movie, but its violence is brutal and infrequent rather than sustained, as in a superhero movie. It’s important, considering the criticism of the film, to note that all of the violence serves a thematic purpose. There are a few scenes I’d like to mention and explain why the violence is, in its way, necessary. The first scene, which features in the trailers of Joker, involves the theft of Arthur’s sign by a few children. After chasing them through town they eventually hit him over the head with the sign and begin kicking him while he’s on the ground. The violence is unmotivated and pointless – its purpose in the film is to show the state of moral decay into which Gotham has fallen at the film’s beginning.

In the film, Thomas Wayne enters the mayoral race with the aim of bringing prosperity back to the city. He comes at it from a standard right-wing perspective, arguing that what will work for his business is bound to bring happiness and economic rejuvenation back to the people too. I’m not an economist by any stretch, but I’m willing to say that his view is dangerously simplistic – (just as opposing views from the left can be). Wayne himself is a big fellow, the very model of a serious capitalist. He encounters Arthur once in the film, in a bathroom at a theatre, where Arthur claims he is Wayne’s son and begs for kindness – more on that later. Wayne’s reaction, however, is to punch Arthur to the ground. As soon as he realises that Arthur won’t accept his answer, he resorts to violence. A simple solution, but not the moral one.

Does Violence Have to Beget Violence?

When violence is undertaken by the representative of the status quo in Joker instead of a search for a peaceful solution it becomes clear what kind of moral decline Arthur’s world is undergoing. One of the most poignant moments, if I’m remembering right, is when Arthur declares to the talk-show host Murray Franklin that if people only showed a little human decency then he himself wouldn’t have turned out the way he was. But instead, violence often begets violence, as Arthur discovers when he learns from a trip to Arkham Asylum that as a child he was physically abused. In fact, his recurrent uncontrollable laugh turns out to be due to head trauma undergone during that time.

A still showing Arthur laughing
Arthur’s uncontrollable laugh is the result of childhood trauma. But it is the cruelty of those around him who humiliate and denigrate him that leads to his own violence, and not the initial trauma at all.

But it’s interesting the way that the abusive childhood trope is used in Joker. Instead of simply becoming bad because of his brutal childhood, Arthur is left damaged – with his laugh – but able to live normally and kindly. It is only the endless mocking of his laughter by other people that leads him to violence, rather than the original abuse. The responsibility for his murderous madness becomes (partly) that of those who mocked him instead of showing warmth. He could easily have turned out differently if they had. When Arthur murders one of his old colleagues, Randall, but spares another – Gary – for treating him kindly, it isn’t madness on his part so much as the only possible action given a world in which violence becomes acceptable for solving problems. It’s difficult not to look at Joker’s violence and find that Arthur’s actions are the necessary results of his surrounding world.

Capitalist Realities – Who Decides What’s Real?

I found Joker at times difficult to watch, and not just for the violence. To me it ended up echoing a world that I was all too familiar with myself, growing up in highly privileged circumstances in the UK. The challenge of Joker is that it forces us to become aware of the multiple “realities” that exist in the highly unequal societies engendered by capitalism, and the way that they are easily manipulated. The manipulation of reality by the rich that is most interesting when comparing Joker with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. I’ve already mentioned how Thomas Wayne, using his influence and the media, creates a reality in which the deaths of the three businessmen is as a sign of class resentment instead of self-defence or simply a mystery. This idea of jealousy comes up again and again from his mouth and that of other wealthy characters like Murray Franklin.

But what the film is equally clear about is that this idea is a lie. There is resentment against the inequality, but it is in no way from jealousy. What the film instead shows is the way that, carelessly, the rich can hurt the poor without realising it. From cuts to mental health services to Murray’s television show, where he plays a clip of Arthur’s bad stand-up to laugh at him, there is a sense that the although the rich think they understand the poor, by their actions they repeatedly deprive them of their dignity. When Arthur tells Murray that his show humiliated him for entertainment Murray’s response is that “you don’t know me”. But the evidence of Joker is enough to condemn him, just as it condemns Wayne. It reveals a disjunct between their self-perceptions and their actions that they refuse to acknowledge.

A still showing Murray meeting Arthur
“You don’t know me” – Joker showcases the disjunction between Murray’s view of his actions and the real, harmful, results they have on people like Arthur.

Of course, this idea of the accidental cruelty of the wealthy towards the poor out of ignorance is a simplification made inevitable by the length of the film. In the real world we are a little more lucky with our rich people, if only a little. But the point remains a valid one. Without trying to understand people through talking with them – and in doing so, respecting their dignity as individuals – we can’t avoid ignorance of our actions’ consequences, however well-intentioned we are.

Parentage

Arthur lives with his mother, Penny Fleck. There’s no sign of a father, and for most of Joker the comedian, Murray, is his surrogate father figure. His true parentage is only revealed later on, probably. Arthur opens one of the many letters that his mother writes to Wayne – she had once been employed by him, and trusts to his goodness to help an old employee out – and learns that Wayne is in fact his father. Arthur then heads to Wayne Mansion, outside of the city, where he encounters the young Bruce and a his guardian in the grounds. The guardian has a loud and violent argument with Arthur, who says he wants to see Wayne because he knows the truth.

But the guardian says that Arthur’s wrong, that there was no relationship, and that his mother was instead crazy. This is the officially accepted story, and, seeking the truth, Arthur goes to Arkham Asylum, where he steals his mother’s medical records. He learns that he was adopted and that his mother has Narcissism and various other disorders. Now there are two conflicting truths – the one that his mother possesses, and the one that the rich have determined. At this point it’s impossible to know who is right. But later on, we find a photo of Penny as a younger girl and see that it’s signed by Wayne. To my mind, this is proof that her story is the right one. Wayne used his power to have Arthur made an adopted foundling and have his mother discredited, all to protect himself. Through connections and power, Wayne’s reality comes to dominate.

Arthur’s hallucinations

An interesting point of comparison is between Arthur’s own hallucinations and the reality-shifting antics of the rich. For much of the film Arthur believes that he is dating a single mother who lives down the hallway, but as the film reaches its conclusion, we learn that he had hallucinated the whole thing. The moment of realisation is terrible. He enters her flat in complete despair and hoping for support but instead she asks the stranger to leave her house. All of this points to a sad truth – all of us are capable of creating our own realities, but only those who are given power are able to expand their realities beyond themselves. Wayne can erase his illegitimate son’s existence and make it something everyone accepts, but Arthur cannot count on even one other human heart to accept his need for comfort.

A still from Joker showing Arthur's imagined girlfriend.
Arthur’s imagined girlfriend in Joker. Our minds can sometimes offer comfort, but when we need a real hug and a pat on our back the illusions we create prove inadequate – unless we have the power to make them be considered reality.

Overall, what all of this serves to do is make us ask questions about what we believe, and how far we can trust the reality of things as it’s shown to us. It’s easy to believe that the political actions of the privileged rarely have consequences, but Joker shows that for people living in a different, harsher reality, the consequences are real. But without any listening – whether it’s Arthur’s psychiatrist or Wayne himself, this gap of experience and privilege cannot be bridged, and we talk and act past each other. And so, the film ends in a violent cacophony. It may inspire some youthful would-be revolutionaries, but the final scenes really shouldn’t. The pointless violence may be a release of pent-up energies, but rioting achieves nothing and shows as little respect for the rich as the rich of Joker show to the poor.

Joker is clever enough to raise its questions while discrediting the easy answers it puts forward. It doesn’t advocate violence, but it forces us to ask whether or not we ourselves have a hand in creating a world in which violence is inevitable.

Conclusion

Joker is simply a fantastic film. Joaquin Phoenix and Robert De Niro give excellent performances, the music is perfect throughout – the score by Hildur Guðnadóttir takes us right into the mind of Arthur, whether we want to be there or not. It raises the questions of social inequality’s connection to mental health and violence and in doing so gets us talking about topics both taboo and rarely raised in polite discourse.

It is true that the film’s politics can, as happened with Fight Club, create its own clown-sympathisers and imitators. But I’m not sure how far we should let that turn us off the film. It’s far better to have the courage to raise the questions, even if we don’t know the answers to them, than to pretend that the problems Joker depicts – the effects of cuts to social welfare on the people who need it most, and the dreadful consequences of inequality and class conflict – don’t exist.

To devalue Joker for its politics is to do exactly the thing that Arthur warns us about in his rant to Murray when he compares killing the young businessmen to being killed himself. If Joker had only been about how being “crazy” leads you to murder then we wouldn’t be talking about it. Like a beaten madman on the street it’s easy to nod and accept such a moral and move on. But when, without excusing Arthur’s actions or suggesting that they are caused by capitalism alone, Joker shows us that our own system and its politics can exacerbate our mental illnesses and bring a man to violence – this provides a challenge to our mental status quo that we can’t just ignore in the same way.

The answer is not class violence, but – perhaps – rather a newfound sense of responsibility. We have to do our best to listen to those we’d otherwise pass over without a second glance. Otherwise, we ourselves become to blame for when they can take our neglect no longer. Ultimately that is the central message of the film – to listen and care – much more than any anti-capitalist note. And luckily, it’s a message that’s easy to accept and worth every effort to act on.

For my piece on Capitalist Realism, click here. If you’ve seen Joker and have your own view whynot leave a comment of what you thought of it and my own ideas on the film?

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.