by
Mark Fisher
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
[Moralism] provides an emotional shoring up of the reactive stance of the weak, ‘who define themselves in opposition to the strong’. With the dissolution in recent times of positive projects of socialist construction, left moralism has been energized by increasing investments in injury, failure, and victimhood. When power is identified with what is ruthless and dominating, it becomes something the left must distance itself from, lest it be co-opted or compromised.
So, the idea there is, then: that power itself is pathological. To hold power is to inherently be oppressive, therefore it’s better to be wounded; it’s better to be the wounded, the abject, because you’re not actually holding power, which is oppressive. This becomes the name for a kind of impossible desire in lots of ways. Who are these appeals aimed at? What is a political project which doesn’t aim at capturing power or building power in some way? I think we can recognise the ways in which this form of desire has shaped a lot of left-wing politics recently. Brown’s essay is highly profound; both of those: “Wounded Attachments” and the one on left melancholia, which builds on [Walter] Benjamin’s discussion of left melancholia.19
i should read this essay
One of the themes you’ll have noticed running through this — through Lukács’ work and this text in particular — is a common philosophical theme of becoming versus being; the idea that ideology reifies. Ideology turns what is always a process of becoming — which is open-ended and therefore changeable — into something that is fixed and permanent. That’s what reification is. And, of course, that’s crucial. That’s the very purpose of ideology. The very purpose of ideology is to close off the possibility that anything could be different. That’s the A–Z of ideology, in fact. But, of course, the second step of ideology is to make itself disappear. Ideology doesn’t arrive and say, “I am ideology”. Ideology says: “I am nature, and this is how things are”. It probably doesn’t speak, but even in my metaphor it doesn’t really have to say anything. It’s we who must think in response to it. This is how things are. They can’t be any different.
Part of the problem of the old idea of objective truth, you could say, was its idea that consciousness has no effect on the truth. That might well be true of the state of a black hole or something like that, but it can’t possibly be true of social relations. I’m in those social relations! I’m already in those social relations. So, when I — and it can’t be me alone, ever, who does this — when group consciousness develops, when class consciousness develops, when any subordinated group [consciousness] develops, this immediately changes things — straight away. Because in being lifted out of experience, you’re broken out of ideology. You — and I’m using this as a second-person plural — you can then achieve agency! You can’t achieve it before.
Even before you do anything, something has happened, which is the production of this new consciousness. When we think about this set of social relations… Something has shifted in the set of social relations by the sheer fact that your consciousness has shifted anyway. That’s the first thing. It’s already changed things. Secondly, then, once a group recognises its common interests, then it can act together. Once workers realise the problem is capital, not them — once they stop competing against one another and realise they have a common enemy — capital — this is when they’re going to have agency. Similarly, when women realise the problem is patriarchy, not them as individuals, then their consciousness has immediately shifted. You feel better! That’s the first thing. You’ll feel relief from the guilt and misery of having to take responsibility for your own life, which you shouldn’t have to — despite everything neoliberal propaganda tells us. It is not you! It’s a direct inversion of Thatcher! “There’s no such thing as society. There are only individuals and their families”. It’s the other way round! There’s no such thing as the individual. But the individual is immediately given. And that’s part of the problem of immediacy.
If you’re in a subordinated group, you see the way things are talked about by the dominant group, and you see the reality of your life, and you see that they don’t match up. Ordinarily, before your consciousness has been raised, you will treat the mismatching of your experience from ideology as a failure in you. You must have thought of it wrong. You mustn’t be thinking about it in the right way. After consciousness raising, you can see: of course, it’s not going to match up. There are two fundamentally different ways of being in the world. There are the ways of the dominant group and the ways of the subordinate group. But precisely because the dominant group dominates, it can’t see that. Because it lives inside its own structure of dominance. Whereas, because the subordinated group is subordinated, it has the potential to see the schism.
Look at it this way: What does capital want to get out of it? What must capital always do? Capital must always — if you go back to Marcuse — must prevent that awareness amongst people that they could live differently and have more control over their own lives. It must prevent that. It has to do it, and it has to keep doing it. Capitalists moan about hard work — and it is hard work! It never stops. It always has to keep preventing that potential.
[...] Capital can know, right? Capital can know, because capital is like evolution: it selects for things. Capital has agency. Mark Zuckerberg has a kind of idiotic compulsion to like, errghh I wanna make loads of money and, like, impress some girls. (Laughter.) As we see in [David Fincher’s 2010 film] The Social Network, which is a brilliant film, I think. Really… It’s almost unprecedented, The Social Network, don’t you think? And also the meticulousness of the construction of its historical moment, in terms of the forms of technology it’s working with. We’ll come to that later. We’ll come to that later.
So, he has those motives but that doesn’t mean that capital doesn’t have its own ends and designs inside, without there being any conscious agent that’s sitting behind it all. Otherwise it’s just a conspiracy, isn’t it? The thing is, it’s a systemic tendency. It’s a systemic tendency. Now, of course, at a certain point, there are humans who make self-conscious decisions at crucial points, but there are also people like Zuckerberg who are puppets of capital without any kind of reflection.
But I wonder if identity logic — taking identity as the model rather than class — is the issue here, for understanding those other forms of struggle. And this was the way in which the Right could capture these struggles. Because you could say it’s not the positive features of actually existing women that define women as a revolutionary class. It’s not the positive features of actually existing minority race groups that define them as a revolutionary class. It’s their structural and antagonistic position and the potential for transformation that occurs once consciousness develops that makes them potentially revolutionary agents.
It was precisely because they were so potentially transformative that they could be so retrospectively commodified. Because the energy of transformation then becomes a kind of residual libido. When the conditions for the struggle are no longer there you can still appeal to that libido, the transformational libido. Which it still endlessly has to. Capital is always going on about the “revolutionary”. The word “revolution” is a key commodity identifier now… You’re sort of looking at me blankly… Don’t you see this quite a lot? The word “revolution” used as a commodity? Names of restaurants, that kind of thing?12 This appeal to dynamic flux, shift, creativity, all of that, is a key feature of advertising. This is kind of the argument of Boltanski and Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. I say that — you may not have read it. It was an important text for a lot of these discussions. It was very big — way too big for what was necessary — but a lot of their argument is really about how the counterculture became subdued, transformed, turned into… It wasn’t simply defeated, it was incorporated into the core structure of capitalism now, which then has to be about creativity, self-reinvention, etc. etc. So the counterculture becomes mirrored in the current form of capitalism. So it doesn’t simply defeat this stuff, it metabolises it, it absorbs it, it transforms it for its own ends. And that’s what we can start to look at next week with Lyotard.
[...] The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in Utopian or essential fashion. Postmodernism is more formal in that sense, and more "distracted," as Benjamin might put it; it only clocks the variations themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images. In modernism, as I will try to show later on, some residual zones of "nature" or "being" of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that "referent." Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature." Indeed, what happened to culture may well be one of the more important clues for tracking the postmodern: an immense dilation of its sphere (the sphere of commodities), an immense and historically original acculturation of the Real, a quantum leap in what Benjamin still called the "aestheticization" of reality (he thought it meant fascism, but we know it's only fun: a prodigious exhilaration with the new order of things, a commodity rush, our "representations" of things tending to arouse an enthusiasm and a mood swing not necessarily inspired by the things themselves). So, in postmodern culture, "culture" has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself: modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself. Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process. The "life-style" of the superstate therefore stands in relationship to Marx's "fetishism" of commodities as the most advanced monotheisms to primitive animisms or the most rudimentary idol worship; indeed, any sophisticated theory of the postmodern ought to bear something of the same relationship to Horkheimer and Adorno old "Culture Industry" concept as MTV or fractal ads bear to fifties television series.
cool
Agency, however, raises the issue of the other unit of my title, "late capitalism," about which something further needs to be said. In particular, people have begun to notice that it functions as a sign of some kind and seems to carry a burden of intent and consequences not clear to the noninitiate. It is not my favorite slogan, and I try to vary it with the appropriate synonyms ("multinational capitalism," "spectacle or image society," "media capitalism," "the world system," even"Postmodernism" itself); but as the Right has also spotted what evidently seems to them a dangerous new concept and way of speaking (even though some of the economic diagnoses overlap their own, and a term like postindustrial society certainly has a family likeness), this particular terrain of ideological struggle, which unfortunately one rarely chooses oneself, seems a solid one and worth defending.
As far as I can see, the general use of the term late capitalism originated with the Frankfurt School; 7 it is everywhere in Adorno and Horkheimer, sometimes varied with their own synonyms (for example, "administered society"), which make it clear that a very different conception was involved, of a more Weberian type, which, derived essentially from Grossman and Pollock, stressed two essential features: (1) a tendential web of bureaucratic control (in its more nightmarish forms, a Foucault-like grid avant la lettre), and (2) the interpenetration of government and big business ("state capitalism") such that Nazism and the New Deal are related systems (and some form of socialism, benign or Stalinist, also seems on the agenda).
As widely used today, the term late capitalism has very different overtones from these. No one particularly notices the expansion of the state sector and bureaucratization any longer: it seems a simple, "natural" fact of life. What marks the development of the new concept over the older one (which was still roughly consistent with Lenin's notion of a "monopoly stage" of capitalism) is not merely an emphasis on the emergence of new forms of business organization (multinationals, transnationals) beyond the monopoly stage but, above all, the vision of a world capitalist system fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism, which was little more than a rivalry between the various colonial powers. The scholastic, I am tempted to say theological, debates on whether the various notions of "late capitalism" are really consistent with Marx ism itself (despite Marx's own repeated evocation, in the Grundrisse, of the "world market" as the ultimate horizon of capitalism) turn on this matter of internationalization and how it is to be described (and in particular whether the component of "dependency theory" or of Wallerstein's "world system" theory is a production model, based on social classes). In spite of these theoretical uncertainties, it seems fair to say that today we have some rough idea of this new system (called "late capitalism" in order to mark its continuity with what preceded it rather than the break, rupture, and mutation that concepts like "postindustrial society" wished to underscore). Besides the forms of transnational business mentioned above, its features include the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation systems such as containerization), computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now-global scale.