by
Mark Fisher
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
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 eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? These questions can be posed in a psychoanalytic register — if we are not who we think we are, what are we? — but they also apply to the forces governing capitalist society. Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.
What is the weird? When we say something is weird, what kind of feeling are we pointing to? I want to argue that the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.
The centrality of doors, thresholds and portals means that the notion of the between is crucial to the weird. It is clear that if Wells’ story had taken place only in the garden behind the wall, then no weird charge would have been produced. (This is why a feeling of the weird attaches to the lamppost at the edge of Narnia in C.S. Lewis’ stories, but not to Narnia proper.) If the story were set entirely beyond the door, we would be in the realm of the fantasy genre. This mode of fantasy naturalises other worlds. But the weird de-naturalises all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside.
precisely given what Jameson calls the “cabbage stink” of naturalism:
The misery of happiness, […] of Marcuse’s false happiness, the gratifications of the new car, the TV dinner and your favourite programme on the sofa — which are now themselves secretly a misery, an unhappiness that doesn’t know its name, that has no way of telling itself apart from genuine satisfaction and fulfilment since it has presumably never encountered this last.
In this lukewarm world, ambient discontent hides in plain view, a hazy malaise given off by the refrigerators, television sets and other consumer durables. The vividness and plausibility of this miserable world — with misery itself contributing to the world’s plausibility — somehow becomes all the more intense when its status is downgraded to that of a constructed simulation. The world is a simulation but it still feels real.
on philip k dick. quote relevant for mr & mrs smith? maybe i need to read marcuse first
With Inland Empire, world-haemorrhaging has become so acute that we can no longer talk about tangled hierarchies but a terrain subject to chronic ontological subsidence. [...]
wow
We are now in a position to answer the question of why it is important to think about the eerie. Since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the forces that govern our lives and the world. It should be especially clear to those of us in a globally tele-connected capitalist world that those forces are not fully available to our sensory apprehension. A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect. At another level, had not Freud long ago shown that the forces that govern our psyche can be conceived of as failures of presence — is not the unconscious itself not just such a failure of presence? — and failures of absence (the various drives or compulsions that intercede where our free will should be)?