Pop cultural references (from England, which I largely don’t understand…) are the meat of this book, used in order to explain a postmodern condition that Fisher calls “Capitalist Realism.” The phenomenon he describes is not a global one, since there are countries all around the world in different stages of their economic development or with different systems, but I can understand why the book was well regarded since it vindicates youthful disaffection (while castigating the young working class as mindless idiots at the same time, thereby vindicating the middle-aged as well).
Because Fisher spends a great deal of time discussing culture and entertainment, I think he is best here, especially at explaining why online content is so dull and repetitive and has no surprises. Combine his insights with global city’s policies to rev the growth engine of the “culture industry,” and we have an explanatory framework for the lack of spontaneity in the field of the arts, our outsourced conscience. We work so that others can generate high culture on our behalf, as part of a vast machine or singular organism. But what if these “cultural products” suck? I don’t like culture as a set of alienable products, a specific domain of experts, as a way to prime post-industrial areas for real estate development. How many art galleries and craft markets have I visited in neighborhoods that suddenly sprout sugar-cube luxury apartment blocks? And the inane content of those arts. In the Comaroff’s work Ethnicity, Inc., we see entire societies come to create their ethnicities as a set of commodities. This is the exact same survival strategy as the creative cultural city policies enacted in the wealthy world.
Better a diffuse activity spread across society, cultural creation participated in by all and not segregated into the highbrow and lowbrow. Sahlins’ in his The Original Affluent Society claims that much of a hunter-gatherer’s daily activity was consumed in craft-making for trade, but the trade was network-forming – it wasn’t the terminal exchange of cash changing hands. It implied a responsibility toward each other, a friendship. I’m not positing this as necessarily ideal. Production itself is already an exchange, it is an exchange with the earth..
Fisher is stuck in the world of airy cultural products, still elite produced but mass marketed. But the main importance and the take-away from his book is to show how almost every sphere of life has been colonized by market considerations. It is not a relationship with other people, but relationships with a system that are being built and time is being devoted to. I’m guilty of it as well.
“Cultural products” are not created as a gift or as a bearer of the self, but as a tribute to the market. The pricing is strange, and everywhere we hear people saying “it’s unfair the way that artists are not compensated for their work.” In fact, the promise of the early internet was to eliminate the connection between items and value, so that a living could be derived from another place. To create a class of elite culture and creative industry workers is dishonest. It is like a class of elite athletes. These are both the play things of a capital which circulates only in the upper reaches of the inverted gyre.
“Nevertheless, the interpassive simulation of participation in postmodern media, the network narcissism of MySpace and Facebook, has, in the main, generated content that is repetitive, parasitic and conformist. In a seeming irony, the media class's refusal to be paternalistic has not produced a bottom-up culture of breathtaking diversity, but one that is increasingly infantilized. By contrast, it is paternalistic cultures that treat audiences as adults, assuming that they can cope with cultural products that are complex and intellectually demanding. The reason that focus groups and capitalist feedback systems fail, even when they generate commodities that are immensely popular, is that people do not know what they want. This is not only because people's desire is already present but concealed from them (although this is often the case). Rather, the most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird. These can only be supplied by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk. The Marxist Supernanny would not only be the one who laid down limitations, who acted in our own interests when we are incapable of recognizing them ourselves, but also the one prepared to take this kind of risk, to wager on the strange and our appetite for it. It is another irony that capitalism’s ‘society of risk’ is much less likely to take this kind of risk than was the supposedly stodgy, centralized culture of the postwar social consensus. It was the public service-oriented BBC and Channel 4 that perplexed and delighted me with the likes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Pinter plays and Tarkovsky seasons; it was this BBC that also funded the popular avant gardism of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which embedded sonic experimentalism into everyday life. Such innovations are unthinkable now that the public has been displaced by the consumer. The effect of permanent structural instability, the ‘cancellation of the long term’, is invariably stagnation and conservatism, not innovation. This is not a paradox. As Adam Curtis’s remarks above make clear, the affects that predominate in late capitalism are fear and cynicism. These emotions do not inspire bold thinking or entrepreneurial leaps, they breed conformity and the cult of the minimal variation, the turning out of products which very closely resemble those that are already successful. Meanwhile, films such as the aforementioned Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker - plundered by Hollywood since as far back as Alien and Blade Runner - were produced in the ostensibly moribund conditions of the Brezhnevite Soviet state, meaning that the USSR acted as a cultural entrepreneur for Hollywood. Since it is now clear that a certain amount of stability is necessary for cultural vibrancy, the question to be asked is: how can this stability be provided, and by what agencies?”
Mark Fisher,
Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative? Pgs 75 - 77
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