In the 1960s and 1970s, capitalism had to face the problem of how to contain and absorb energies from the outside. It now, in fact, has the opposite problem; having all-too successfully incorporated externally, how can it function without an outside it can colonize and appropriate? For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable. Jameson used to report in horror about the way that capitalism had seeped into the very unconscious; now, the fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment. It would be dangerous and misleading to imagine that the near past was some prelapsarian state rife with political potentials, so it’s as well to remember the role that commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth century. Yet the old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations, and hopes by capitalist culture.
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. 2008.
(via theorynotebook)
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. 2008.
(via theorynotebook)
