New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology (Spring 2021) » April 6th: Capitalist Realism

April 6th: Capitalist Realism

Critical Analysis of Media Essay Due Next Week (4/13)

Plan for the Day

What’s a comma’s favorite type of music?
–Punc Rock

Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009)

Before we get too far ahead and wonder why there’s all these socialist authors we’re reading, remember, I first read this on the way home from Las Vegas–one of the most grandiose centers of American consumerism. There are tons of zombies there. These authors weren’t selected for us to start a global revolution; instead, we read them because they have quite insightful observations to make about a system that we assume to be a given, one that’s beyond critique.

Critical thinking is uncomfortable.

Below is a quotation that should always be on our minds when discussing Fisher’s book:

“Capialist realism: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher, 2009, p. 2).

Below are some definitions from or for the text:

  • neoliberalism: the idea of a total (or nearly total) market-driven economy with little or no government regulations.
    • In America, we often label people who promote this philosophy conservatives, neoconservatives, libertarians, or Republicans. In American popular media, the term “neoliberal” would be confusing because a “liberal” is considered (these are generalizations, of course) having the opposite view of the term “neoliberal.” This term is more a European one and rarely heard outside of academic discussions in America. As a fun side note, check out the history of the usage of liberalism.
  • socialist realism: an artistic style that glorifies the socialist cause, especially that of Joseph Stalin’s authoritarian regime (Scroll to “Cultural and Foreign Policy”).
  • confabulation: in psychology it means to replace fact with fantasy unconsciously in memory.
  • lacuna: empty space or missing part (often in the mind or memory).

Below are some notes from the text:

  • p. 22: “Control only works if you are complicit with it.”
    Consider Anthony Giddens theory of structuration: humans operate under a pre-existing social structure, which controls actions. Citizens abide by and reproduce the overall structure, but this means they consent to the agents of social control that govern them.
  • p. 24: Being bored means NOT being instantly, immediately gratified.
  • p. 25: Teenage slogan recognition. Think of the logos (not speaking Greek here…that’s logos) that kids these days recognize.
  • p. 26: “education…is the engine room of the reproduction of social reality.”
    • Explain…How does education reproduce social reality? Maybe we need to return to a previous discussion on Base + Superstructure.
  • p. 28: “neoliberal politics are not about the new, but a return of class power and privilege.”
  • p. 33: Families produce labor power.
    {Modern Family…same as it ever was: Disneyland, Javier’s Fiancée, and Phil’s backing out of getting snipped (skip to 16:20 then 21:45). All support the view that families should raise children, thus, reinforcing the idea that the family (superstructure) supports capitalism. MORE BELOW}
  • p. 36: “In the entrepreneurial fantasy society, the delusion is fostered that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates” (James, qtd. in Fisher, p.36).
  • p. 49: Bureaucrats don’t make decisions “they are permitted only to refer to decisions that have always-already been made.” {What does that tell us about a “democratic society”?}
  • p. 54: “The ‘reality’ here is akin to the multiplicity of options available on a digital document, where no decision is final, revisions are always possible, and any previous moment can be recalled at any time.”
  • pp. 55-56: consensual confabulations–“the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind…[, and] it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence.” {compare with narcissism}
  • p. 58: What can Jason Bourne tell us about culture?
    • ahistoricity
    • continuous present of film editing
    • p. 59: reflects “a culture that privileges only the present and the immediate.”
  • p. 60: Capitalist realism fills our minds (our dreams) by removing “the gaps and lacunae in our memories.”
    • Somewhere I have heard this before
      In a dream my memory has stored
      As defense I’m neutered and spayed
      What the hell am I trying to say?
      –Nirvana “On a Plain”
    • Have I ever told you about my first New Year’s Eve memories?
  • p. 61: “solutions in products, not political processes.” {Images of Consumption–what can a picture show…”}
  • p. 61: Mistaking choice and freedom.
  • p. 63: Media doesn’t look at the root, systemic causes.

“Capialist realism…entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment” (Fisher, 2009, p. 54).
{Your Weekly Discussion Post is to think about the ideal worker and the attributes they have in the service economy vs. the manufacturing (industrial) economy? Of course, just reflecting on work, workplaces, or work-life-balance is fine to reflect upon.}

Modern Family:  that can have multiple readings (interpretations). On the surface, ABC’s Modern Family is a funny story and a leading character triumphs. Below the surface, it’s a trite display of gender roles and gendered value in patriarchal culture. Check out Gloria meeting Javier’s fiancée. (Here’s a short article about the first part of the episode–Season 4, ep. 20). Here’s the link to Jay getting Gloria new shoes. Phil worried about his manhood when discussing his potential vasectomy with Jay. Here’s an article/review on the entire episode–Modern Family: “Schooled”/”Snip.”

What Is Hauntology?

I’m interested in your impressions of this article. It’s different from most of the reading this semester.

  • p. 16: “What defined this “hauntological” confluence more than anything else was its confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future.”
  • “…the futuristic now connoted a settled set of concepts, affects, and associations.”
    • What do we associate with the future?
  • “What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.”
  • “the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.”
    • This is the big takeaway from this article. If I were more up on electronica, I might suggest another take, but I’ll settle for this one…in this time.
    • And what is the “world” we can’t envision, or what can we not envision in this world and, therefore, the future?
    • There’s also a critique of socialism/Marxism/communism we could make. Do those systems ever have to defend themselves?
  • “The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production.”
  • p. 17: “Everything in [Body Heat]…conspires to blur its official contemporaneity and make it possible for the viewer to receive the narrative as though it were set in some eternal thirties, beyond real historical time.” (quoting Jamison)
  • p. 18: “Relentless technological upgrades—the same thing, seen and/or heard on a new platform—disguise the disappearance of formal innovation and new kind of sensory experience.”
  • “…series of sweet traces that are veiled by one of sonic hauntology’s signature traits, the conspicuous use of crackle, which renders time as an audible materiality.”
    • As for pastiche, one would add “snap” and “pop” to the above.
  • “…a public service broadcasting system and a popular culture that could be challenging and experimental.”
  • “The radical dimension of social democratic culture, in fact, consisted in the way it produced a longing for its (self-)overcoming, that it was premised on the movement toward a scarcely imaginable future.”
  • “One of the futures that haunts those who count themselves as progressive, then, is the possibility of a culture that could continue what had begun in postwar social democracy, but that could leave behind the sexism, racism, and homophobia which were so much a feature of the actual postwar period.”
    • Of course, all those are behind us now…
  • p. 19: “The disappearance of space goes alongside the disappearance of time: there are non-times as well as non-places. Haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time.”
  • The Shining…”of the preoccupations that have reemerged in the twenty-first-century take on hauntology. The film refers to hauntology in the most general sense—the quality of (dis)possession that is proper to human existence as such, the way in which the past has a way of using us to repeat itself.”
    • Take fashion, a very zombie behavior, there’s not too much difference between “bell bottoms” and “flared” jeans…hippies are so commercial.
  • p. 20: “to the non-places of coming corporate hyperdomination…”

“All the Lost Futures…” (p. 16)

Oh, the lost futures where you’ll (not) go! It takes a certain amount of pessimism to embrace this topic, so I forewarn you that your (constructed) reality may not remain intact. Both of Fisher’s texts point to our reproductions in this capitalist wasteland. You video game fans will recognize the Fallout series as a narrative on the “failure of the future,” but you should also realize that it references contemporary American culture using improved yet the same technologies that moved from tactical purposes (WW2) to practical ones (post-war consumerism): interstates, space technologies, the (early) internet, Las Vegas, Disneyland, shopping malls, etc.

Let’s consider a British writer to go along with Fisher. D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) is hardly the romance the title suggests (his Lady Chatterley’s Lover is more “romantic”) and offers a scathing rebuke of letting technology take over. Consider the character Gerald Crich:

  • Gerald runs the company ‘‘on the most accurate and delicate scientific method’’; thus, ‘‘the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments’’ (Lawrence 1920/1995, p. 230). Of course, this Taylorist/Fordist impulse for ultra-efficiency was part of the rise of the industrial West. Lawrence appeared to be aware of America’s dominance (or coming dominance in industrialization) because he wrote that the ‘‘[n]ew machinery was brought from America, such as the miners had never seen before, great iron men, as the cutting machines were called, and unusual appliances’’ (1920/1995, p. 230, emphasis added). Even the machines had nicknames to reinforce their ‘‘human’’ qualities. (Toscano, p. 127)
  • Gerald is the god in his own mind because he adheres so vehemently to the cult of efficiency that permeates industrialization. By putting humans into this framework, their worth directly relates to the work they produce: ‘‘The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least….What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual’’ (Lawrence 1920/1995, p. 223). (Toscano, p. 128)
  • Unfortunately, this system sets humans up for failure because the loop continually pushes them to work faster and faster, which is ‘‘terrible and heartbreaking in its mechanicalness’’ (Lawrence 1920/1995, p. 230). Therefore, Gerald is not inherently corrupt and destined to breakdown as a machine would, but he is a victim of his own dogma, an ideology the industrialized world embraces along with the cult of efficiency. (Toscano, p. 128)

Spoiler alert! Gerald finds himself at a cul-de-sac of sorts–a valley with impenetrable mountains–where its nature that consumes him (well, that’s an interpretation). Symbolically, he’s leaving humanity and love behind because…you’ll have to read to find out. We’ve previously discussed the meaning of cul-de-sacs, so what do you think. Consider the cultural analysis (suburbia?) and critical analysis (dead end or repetition?).

On a lighter note, perhaps, this Archie Comic from 1997 has made the rounds on social media.

Time Permitting–Zombies

This a tradition in this class–talk about zombies!

More on Structuration Theory

Consider this a theory about power and control. What are the things that control us? We aren’t just controlled be force–police, parents, politicians, etc.–we’re also controlled by ideology, but it’s often invisible, and we don’t reflect upon it. Mark Fisher claims that “Control only works if you are complicit with it” (22). I like to consider Anthony Giddens theory of structuration when I think of Fisher’s argument. Structuration theory proposes that humans operate under a pre-existing social structure, which controls actions. Citizens abide by and reproduce the overall structure, but this means they consent to the agents of social control that govern them. Consider the following quotations from Giddens:

  • “social structures are both constituted by human agency, and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution” (New Rules for Sociological Method 121).
  • “To examine the structuration of a social system is to examine the modes whereby that system, through the application of generative rules and resources is produced and reproduced in social interaction. Social systems, which are systems of social interaction, are not structures, although they necessarily have structures. There is no structure, in human social life, apart from the continuity of processes of structuration.” (Studies in Social and Political Theory 118)

Reflecting and advocating Giddens’s theory, James W. Messerschmidt summarizes that “structure both constrains and enables social action” (p. 77). I’ve mentioned that media reproduce ideology, normalizing it. Well, it was already normalized, but it’s impossible to determine whether or not the media (broadly) developed the ideology first or reflected the ideology (or could it be dialectic). We don’t need to worry about a starting point, however, because we can identify instances where culture mediates rules, norms, repetitive behaviors, etc. We can claim that our actions are not solely individually motivated. We reproduce and justify the social system by operating within it.

Giddens’s theory hasn’t been debunked and, although there are criticisms of his initial theory, there are many expansions of his theory. Structuration theory is a useful interpretive lens for cultural studies because it allows us to focus on agents and rules. Simply put, our actions create our world; our interactions maintain or recreate the world. Why do we agents follow rules? Why are there rules? In view of our texts, do humans have any agency, or do they just respond to rules (their code—coding, program language)?

Next Week

We return to Barker & Jane for some light reading–Chapters 11 & 12. You’re Critical Analysis of Media Essay is due also via Canvas (of course).

Works Cited

Archie Publications. Betty #46 (Feb. 1997).

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.

Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Polity Press, 1984.

Giddens, Anthony. New Rules for Sociological Method. Basic Books, 1976.

Giddens, Anthony. Studies in Social and Political Theory. Routledge, 2015.

Lawrence, D.H. Women in Love. London: Penguin, 1995. (Original work published in 1920)

Messerschmidt, James W. Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory. Rowman & Littlefield P, 1993.

Toscano, Aaron. Marconi’s Wireless and the Rhetoric of a New Technology. Springer, 2011.