Mark Fisher in postmodernity

Coming to Mark Fisher so late, three years after his death, hearing so much about his work, I was surprised that the stand-out moment for me in Capitalist Realism was the student wearing headphones in class. Born in the late ‘80s – when Jameson was writing on postmodernism, Fisher notes – that student would have been a little older than me; they would have been the 16-year-old students who looked impossibly mature to me as I entered secondary school, who went on to university as I entered Year 11 in 2008; who I’d, unknowingly, shared the same logic with as I sat in class with headphones hanging around my neck. But as someone born in this period, was my indifference to school an ‘incapacity to connect [my] current lack of focus with future failure, [an] inability to synthesize time into any coherent narrative, symptomatic of more than mere demotivation’? (Capitalist Realism, p. 24) The inability to imagine anything new, as part of ‘a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture – a generation … for whom time has already come ready-cut into digital micro-slices’? (Capitalist Realism, p. 25) I’d tentatively answer yes; as I’m writing I have a video of Macaulay Culkin talking about The Warriors (1979) on YouTube in the background.

Fisher recognises that capitalism has reached an ever greater height of interfering in our everyday lives, taking with it all possibilities of resistance, but when he refers to Bill Gates and George Soros as ‘liberal communists’, or when he writes, after detailing the inhumanity and facelessness of call centres, that ‘market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority’, (Capitalist Realism, p. 64) you almost wait for the penny to drop. As a writer critiquing the totality of capitalism and looking for viable alternatives, these conceptions of communism should concern us. After all, to quote Fisher himself, ‘postmodernism’s supposed gestures of demystification do not evince sophistication so much as a certain naivety.’ (Capitalist Realism, p. 47)

Capitalist realism falls ‘under the rubric of postmodernism’, as a more specific stage of capitalism that has intensified the reach of its totality to determine our interiority and consciousness – whether this is strict adherence to what is realistic or the inability to articulate the possibility of anything new itself. For Fisher, capitalist realism expresses the new global hegemony of capitalism after the dissolution of the USSR – after what he called ‘Really Existing Socialism’ ostensibly collapsed, and ‘a generation has passed since the collage of the Berlin Wall’. No alternatives to capitalism can be entertained anymore, and here Fisher quotes Alain Badiou: ‘to justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is awful.’ (Capitalist Realism, p. 5) But what separates postmodernity from capitalist realism, for Fisher, is that postmodernity must forever exorcise modernism; it must forever undo its crude dichotomies, presenting itself as a democratisation of culture as it leaves the categories of high and low behind. Capitalist realism, in contrast, for Fisher, has left the vestige of modernism and its antagonisms behind and, contrary to postmodernism, even ‘takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can practically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never an ideal for living.’ (Capitalist Realism, p. 8)

But, already, Fisher has internalised this logic of postmodernism. When was modernism last an ‘ideal for living’?  Long before the ‘post-Fordist’ stage of capitalism, modernism had recognised the ends of its ideals amid world history – amid total war and violence. And hasn’t postmodernity always shown itself as victorious over the defeat of modernism and its strict, formal categories? The division of high and low culture in modernism is dissolved as postmodernism makes a caricature of each of them, a caricature that supposes its victory is one of democratisation where high art consumed by the wealthy can now be broadened to welcome those who had been excluded from its loftiness. But this is a false democratisation; as a failed promise to resolve art’s contradictions in modernism, with the culture industry’s ‘purposeful integration of its consumers from above … [h]igh art is deprived of its seriousness because its effects are programmed; low art is put in chains and deprived of the unruly resistance inherent in it when social control was not yet total.’ (Theodor W. Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 20) J.M. Bernstein crucially recognises that ‘postmodernism is … a contingent procedure for continuing the project of modernism, the project of negation, by other means’; (J.M. Bernstein, introduction to Culture Industry, p. 26) postmodernism removes the content of this negativity that is so determinate in modernism, that negates what exists in an attempt to overcome it, and takes it for granted to such an extent that its presupposition of overcoming crude dichotomies and rendering them antiquated becomes the very content of postmodernism. And so it’s no surprise when we read David Harvey puzzling that postmodernism totally and uncritically accepts ‘ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic that formed the one-half of Baudelaire’s conception of modernity.’ (David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 44)

Capitalist realism then is not a concept distinct from postmodernism and postmodernity, or even one that succeeds it, but one that succumbs to it; Fisher rightly derides Francis Fukuyama for his thesis that world history culminated in the capitalism of the ‘90s, and though Fisher points out that this is now accepted and assumed in our cultural consciousness, his own thinking is unable to overcome this new stage in the totality of capitalism. Modernism becomes monolithic, without the contradictions and antagonisms that developed it and moved it forward, and entirely without content – content that is far more self-aware than its postmodern critics grant it, whether it’s the brazen negativity of Dadaism or the democratisation that was at the heart of Bauhaus. Fisher praises Foucault and his attempts ‘not to recover our “lost” identity, to free our imprisoned nature, our deepest truth; but instead, [to recognise] the problem is to move towards something radically Other.’ (Acid Communism) But this succumbs to the critical logic outlined by Fisher in Capitalist Realism when he writes that ‘capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its “system of equivalence” which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value.’ (Capitalist Realism, p. 4) In postmodernity, the thinking subject takes the role of the entrepreneur; looking to fill a gap in the market, the subject turns to what has been overlooked and refused – whether this is an unknown work of a famous author, an entire culture that has been decimated and lost, or the everyday itself, as this ‘Other’ holds the key to our predetermined totality.

Taking Lyotard’s thesis that postmodernism has a suspicion of grand narratives and their overbearing totality – and that, within this suspicion, the ‘Other’ is necessary to overcome this – there is almost a moment in which Fisher recognises this misrepresentation when he questioned whether, in the past, people really believed this. But he soon takes them up again. ‘We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against … Capital.’ (Capitalist Realism, p. 77) All previous critiques of capitalism developed over the past century are dismissed as developing from ‘a harsh Leninist superego.’ This misrepresentation is a conceptual indeterminacy that extends to Fisher’s critique of bureaucracy in capitalism, which he unironically dubs ‘market Stalinism’, a phrase entirely ‘without hyperbole’, he notes. More severely, however, is that the USSR – in this indeterminacy – becomes identical to the imperialism of the US and European powers; Marx, Lenin, and Stalin become dead white men who may as well be T.E. Lawrence – in spite of the contradictions of the concept of whiteness that very much excluded each of them during their lives; Marx as a Jewish man whose paternal and maternal grandfathers were rabbis (Marx’s paternal grandfather had the surname Marx Levi), who was exiled from his home country and lived in poverty; Lenin as a Russian with an often caricatured ‘swarthy face with a touch of the Asiatic to it’; and Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili – Stalin – as a Georgian born to a peasant family and the only child of four to survive past infancy.

In establishing this false genealogy of homogeneous and Other, the content of those genealogies themselves are made indeterminate. Without recognising the objectivity of concepts themselves, they are each made into their own caricatures as history and its antagonisms become an indeterminate vacuum while what is new becomes a categorical imperative. And what is this obsession for the new except an inability to come out the other side of postmodernism? To take postmodernity’s obfuscation of history at its word, and to lean into it? Achieving communism, Fisher supposed, ‘will require a range of strategies, and new kinds of intervention are being improvised all the time’; ‘thinking and discussing new strategies, continuing to build a “new politics” that has nothing to do with the dead neoliberal consensus that the coaliton [sic] is seeking to resuscitate.’ He laments ‘the “establishment” no longer commanded automatic deference; instead, it came to seem exhausted, out of touch, obsolete, limply awaiting to be washed away by any or all of the new cultural and political waves which were eroding all the old certainties.’ (Acid Communism)

Fisher relies heavily on the countercultural elements of the 1960s that were appropriated to form a new spirit of ‘post-Fordist’ capitalism, but at the same time the stakes and history of those struggles are given up by him freely and willingly. He takes issue with Margaret Atwood’s observation that ‘The past is so much safer … because whatever’s in it has already happened. It can’t be changed: so, in a way there’s nothing to dread,’ (Acid Communism) and rightly contends that ‘the past has to be continually re-narrated’, and in that retelling the past that holds its own potential that is ‘ready to be reawakened,’ but still the old struggles are dismissed as old – not as essential lessons or even gains. In postmodernity, a ‘new breed of worker’ exists, one that is part of a generation separated from ‘the old tradition of the labour parties’, writes Franco Berardi of the situation in Turin in 1973 that attempted to carry the same youthful energy of the 1968 protests across Europe and the US – one with nothing ‘to do with the socialist ideology of a state-owned system. A massive refusal of the sadness of work was the leading element behind their protest. Those young workers had much more to do with the hippy movement; much more to do with the history of the avant-garde.’

And so, Fisher writes, ‘the failure of the left after the Sixties had much to do with its repudiation of, or refusal to engage with, the dreamings that the counterculture unleashed.’ What was the goal of acid communism, of a ‘convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project’? A world ‘unimaginably stranger’ than anything Marxism-Leninism had worked towards. But if ‘the counterculture thought it was already producing spaces where this revolution could already be experienced’, who is this revolution for? Fisher offers us a glimpse:

To get some sense of what those spaces were like, we can do no better than listen to the Temptations’ ‘Psychedelic Shack’, released in December 1969. The group play the role of breathless ingénues who have just returned from some kind of Wonderland: “Strobe lights flashin’ way till after sundown… There ain’t no such thing as time… Incense in the air…”’ It is in these spaces that you are ‘as likely to come upon a crank or a huckster as a poet or musician here, and who knows if today’s crank might turn out to be tomorrow’s genius?

In desiring an adjective communism, in which the necessary content of communism is diluted to appear more palatable to its critics who won’t even entertain concessions to basic social reforms, Fisher calls for a libertarian communism, or an acid communism – where the gains of international communism are reduced to a part of that monolithic history that must be overcome, and the image of Soviet communism never develops beyond the oppressive and authoritarian caricature granted to it by its most fierce opponents. This is the precise moment that Fisher’s attempt to outline an alternative to capitalism, to declare the poverty of imagination under capitalism, succumbs to a postmodernity that he supposes he has already overcome. Though he recognises the degradation of a ‘weak messianic hope’ into a ‘morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen’, this hope is only restored insofar as it is a return to the messianism of the new.

As someone born in this generation, born after the dissolution of the USSR, it is beyond frustrating to have to reiterate the necessity of simply reading Lenin. Online, it’s practically a trope but it remains a necessity that absolutely cannot be substituted. Stalin himself was able to foresee the dangers of the international abandonment of the Soviet Union when he asked, ‘What would happen if the proletarians of all countries did not sympathise with and support the Republic of Soviets?’ After decades of propaganda sublimated into philosophy, such that critics of imperialism and capitalism would still sooner take concepts at face value rather than looking at their history and development, we no longer need to propose this as a hypothetical question. Stalin correctly saw that, without the support of the international working class, ‘there would be intervention and the Republic of Soviets would be smashed.’ And, further, to the detriment of that international working class:

What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost. (J.V. Stalin, ‘The disagreements in the CPSU’, Pravda, 1926)

What would have come of Mark Fisher’s work had he engaged with Lenin instead of discussing the organisation of popular movements in abstract terms like horizontal or vertical, open and closed, adding appendages and adjectives to communism to make it more palatable, or instead of creating his own caricature of ‘the harsh Leninist superego’ that dictates communists must not like music, that they must step over homeless people, only to be absolved by a post-revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat? Would he have looked away from figures like Russell Brand, who he admired when Brand ‘so consummately destroy[ed] a class “superior” using intelligence and reason’? It’s difficult to venture to say that his own political project was always doomed, but capitalist realism was borne out of the failure of the left to engage with actually existing communism. Working towards communism is already a herculean task, but to start with what is new, from scratch – to have the same arguments again and again, arguments that have torn apart parties, internationals, revolutions and countries – is to condemn any political project, whether it’s communist or not, whether it's acid or not.