Capital Realism Flashcards
What is Capitalist Realism?
The idea that capitalism is the only viable political and economic system.
What Karl Marx phrase encompasses CR?
‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’
What is capital elitist approach to culture?
‘No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it’
What is an example of capitalism consuming history?
British Museum holds objects torn from lifeworlds and cultures - hegemonic devices of elites/states to mask oppression of cultures they supposedly represent.
How has our relationship to culture become structured?
We are spectators instead of engaging - delivered from fatal abstractions inspired by past ideologies, capital shielding us from belief and immunizing us against seductions of fanaticism.
What makes capitalism especially dangerous?
Defines its own rules improvisationally and pragmantically.
Francis Fukuyama inspiration for CR:
‘End of history’ with the fall of the berlin wall - history climaxing with liberal capitalism
What did Fukuyama sggest of the remenants of histories end?
Haunted in a Nietzschean way, not a Marxist one.
Frederic Jameson claim related to CR:
Postmodernism and consumer capitalism related.
Postmodernism
Break from modernist culture(subjectivism, abstract) - it is impossible now to rely on previous ways of depicting the world.
How does Mark Fisher distinguish CR from Frederic Jamesons view:
No political alternatives to capitalism now, modernism incorporated in postemodernist society but capitalised on,
Capitalism incorporation into cultural life:
Seeped into unconcious, colonizing dreaming life of populations
Example of Capitalism colonising culture:
All that is left is to imitate dead style - Kurt Cobain and Nirvana
What does it mean that to succeed is to fail?
To succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed.
How might anti-capitalism reinforce capitalist realism?
Subjugation turns to inreaction and participation opposed to subordination to some extrinsic spectacle.
Interpassivity
Art/technology acting on behalf of the audience/user.
How does capitalist ideology differ from others?
Does not make an explicit case for something - ideology isn’t an illusion masking reality, but an unconcious fantasy structuring our social reality.
How we regain political agency under capitalism?
Inserting ourselves into capital - Capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure, nothing without our co-operation - the elite are our servants.
Capitalism Realism Installing a Businness Ontology
The idea it is obvious that social services should be ran as a business.
What should Emancipatory politics do?
Destroy appearance of natural order - make previously seemingly impossible to be possible
Reality and the Real:
Reality a malleable concept, surpressing the real - environmental catastrophe from finite resource, but idea that Earth resource finitism is temporary, capital re-terraforming and re-colonzing planet.
Oliver James on mental health:
It has coinciding with rising neoloiberal ideology.
