Interview with Mark Fisher on Realismo capitalista. ¿No hay alternativa? (Caja Negra Editora, Buenos Aires, 2016).

For El Estado Mental, Madrid. Originally published in Spanish, August, 7th 2016.

Interview with Mark Fisher

‘The only real way to take back control consists, not in flaccid re-
heated nationalism, but in a democratisation of politics and work’.

Peio Aguirre

On the occasion of the Spanish publication of his first book Capitalist Realism. Is There No
Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) [Realismo capitalista. ¿No hay alternativa?, Caja Negra
Editora, Buenos Aires, 2016], I conducted this interview with cultural theorist and critic Mark
Fisher during the summer of 2016. At the time, the reception of Mark’s work by the
readership in Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic had only begun. This is, as far as I know,
Mark Fisher’s book first translation into a foreign language. It could not be otherwise, since
the echoes of Capitalist Realism are still loud and ever more present. This was the best start
to lay the foundations of his thinking for a broader audience across the world. Shortly after
the publication of Capitalist Realism I had read Mark’s writings regularly, and specially I was
delighted by the mixture of popular culture and fine theory found in his next book Ghosts of
My Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, as well as in various articles
and posts. At the same period I discovered him as K-punk, alongside the whole public sphere
around a series of blogs and authors, all now referable, and that became an extra motivation
for feeding of my own blog. So when I was asked by the people of Caja Negra Editora if I were
willing to write the prologue for the book, that was certainly one of the most exciting
commissions I had in the last few years. What struck me most in Mark Fisher was a quality
rarely seen in current cultural criticism, namely, the possibility of subjectivising cultural
production in such a way that the effects could had a truly systemic impact. Not only did Mark
Fisher write about culture and theory in a passionate and energising way, but he also helped
to transform the cultural field (think of his enormous influence in music and sound artists).
His writings had the fiber of the best. They demand to read over and over again.

This interview was published in Spanish on the website of the magazine El Estado Mental,
Madrid, August, 7th 2016. This is the original unpublished English version of that interview.

Peio Aguirre: This publication of Capitalist Realism in Spanish (published for the first time
in 2009) occurs in a global social and political climate of extreme confusion. How much the
world has changed in this period? Or better yet, how can the implications of ‘capitalist
realism’ be summarised for the Spanish readership?

Mark Fisher: I always say that capitalist realism is easier to identify than it is to define. The
quickest way to define it is as the belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. But the
problem with defining it that way is that it is not– at least in the main – a belief that
individuals consciously hold. It's more like a transpersonal ideological field, perhaps most
clearly manifested in the form of a kind of fatalistic acquiescence in capitalist dominance – an
acceptance that the demands of neoliberal capitalism are ‘realistic’, and conversely, an idea
that any alternative to this form of capitalism is unfeasible, unthinkable. Another way of
thinking about this is in terms of deflation of consciousness. Capitalist realism was only
possible once various forms of group consciousness (most notably class consciousness;
socialist-feminist consciousness, and also the psychedelic consciousness of the provisional
and plastic nature of anything experienced as ‘reality’) had been suppressed.

I wrote the book as one form of capitalist realism – the Clinton-Blair mode, established in the
1990s and consolidated in the 2000s – was entering a massive crisis. Since then, we have seen
a more aggressive phase of capitalist realism, manifested in the austerity programmes
imposed in the wake of the credit crunch. Now there are signs that this second phase of
capitalist realism is running into trouble. Capitalist realism in its first two phases depended
upon the positing of a ‘centre ground’, a common sense in tune with the instincts of the
corporate elite and financial ‘experts’. That former centre ground no longer holds - it is
cracking, under pressure from the left and the right. The left-wing experiments in Europe –
from Syriza to Podemos to Jeremy Corbyn in the UK – have faced massive pressure, which
has served to highlight the enormous institutional power that has supported capitalist
realism. The populist right, meanwhile, has shifted away from neoliberalism onto demagogic
nationalism.

Peio: In recent times there have been a number of attempts to name the current system, as if
the very category of postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism (as Fredric
Jameson defined) no longer serves or is obsolete. Is there an intention in your work for a
generic systemic definition or is a rather subjective and essayistic oeuvre?

Mark: Well, I see capitalist realism as the next phase of the postmodernism that Jameson
analysed so well. Capitalist realism is a kind of naturalised postmodernism. What was still
noteworthy when Jameson first advanced his theses on postmodernism – the ubiquity of
capitalist media, the domination of all areas of life and consciousness by marketing categories
– is now taken for granted.

Peio: Education and bureaucracy are two of the major issues that you address both using
your experience as a teacher. What transpires in the background is a complete conquest of
mental health by capital, of which anxiety and depression seem their most visible symptoms...
Is there an alternative to their immediate effects?

Mark: The first thing to note here is that anxiety and depression are not accidental side-
effects of the current system. A certain level of anxiety, a certain level of depression: these are
highly functional for the dominant form of capitalism. Anxiety is an inevitable response to
generalised precarity. It is both a weapon of capitalist realism, and an end in itself. Anxiety is
in itself disabling; it individualises and– just as neoliberalism in general does. In order to
envisage an alternative to this, I think we would require four fundamental transformations.
The first is a shift away from precarity towards security. Basic Income might play a role in
generating this new sense of security, but it will also require existential changes, a rejection of
the work ethic, a very different rhythm of life from that imposed by capitalist cyberspace.

The second shift is a rejection of neoliberal defaults. As I argue in the book, capitalist realism
imposed itself via languages and behaviours that became second nature – apparently empty
and platitudinous practices and discourses that served to normalise the values of capitalist
business, and to make any alternative to them – in for instance public service – seem quaint
and obsolete. Challenging and uprooting these defaults will be fundamental if we want to
break out of capitalist realism. The third thing is producing a new sense of belonging. The left
talks about solidarity, but the right has been better in producing a sense of belonging for its
followers - but it calls upon readymade forms of belonging (usually reactionary nationalisms),
which are held together by loathing for a racialised other. We need to articulate a different,
non-identitarian sense of belonging – a sense of belonging that has to do with being in a
movement. The fourth thing, and by no means the most insignificant, is a move towards
workplace democracy. One of the tropes that won the recent UK referendum on EU
membership UK for the Leave campaign was ‘Take Back Control’. Of course, this was
expressed in nationalist terms, but the slogan resonated because of the deep sense of
disenfranchisement and powerlessness that many people in neoliberal Britain feel. It’s crucial
that we keep pointing to the real sources of this impotence – not foreigners, but global capital.
It’s equally crucial that we articulate the way to put it right – via the development of group
consciousness, and of collective agency.

Peio: I saw your book in Spain placed in the section of ‘economy’ in ‘specialized’ bookstores
in critical thinking and culture. Your background is mainly cultural, you are a music critic and
writer. Do you think we envisage a moment of a ‘culturarisation’ of politics at expense of a
politicisation of culture?

Mark: I hope not. It should go without saying that culture is important. But much of the
organised left still overlooks the power of culture, the way that hegemonic struggles can not
only be fought in a narrow political arena, but in terms of what people consume, what they
listen to, the identifications that they form. But it should also go without saying that a struggle
that takes place only on the cultural arena won’t gain much traction. At the same time,
however, the very opposition between culture and politics isn’t especially helpful. It’s better to
say that culture saturates politics – what politics could be said to take place outside culture?

Peio: During the past decade, your blog K-punk was a site for a critical community arguing
about music, theory and politics. I recently heard someone saying that blogs have been a
failure as great as the Zeppelins. Which are now the places for dissent and criticism and what
are the possibilities of the so-called new media?

Mark: Have blogs been a failure as great as the Zeppelins? This seems a bit hyperbolic to me
– especially because, as you say, much of my influence and reputation was built on the
blogosphere. You could only say that blogs were as great as failure as the Zeppelins if you had
a fairly overblown view of blogs in the first place. But it needs to be recognised that many of
the most interesting new developments in theory and philosophy over the last decade – from
speculative realism to accelerationism – would not have happened without blogs. At a certain
point, blogs provided a speed of discourse that couldn’t be matched by any other discourse
network. At the same time, claims for new media have become very overblown. I often
compare the relationship between new media and old media to a baby clinging on to an
arthritic old man – neither can stand on their own two feet. For the most part, though, if ideas
are to gain much hegemonic traction, they must pass through ‘old’ media. It’s obvious surely
that hegemony now clearly entails a patchwork of print, broadcasting and online media, with
the different speeds and capacities that each operates with.

Peio: Your next book after Capitalist Realism, entitled Ghosts of My Life. Writings on
Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014) explores what you name,
following Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, the ‘slow cancellation of the future’, that is, the current
difficulty for invention and genuine creativity, the endless repetition of the past and so on.
What’s the difference with the eternal return and nostalgia already dissected by
postmodernism?

Mark: Nothing essentially. My argument is simply that features such as pastiche and
appropriation, which were noteworthy and remarkable in the flamboyant first phase of
postmodernism, are now taken for granted. When Jameson theorised postmodernism, it was
still possible to feel the comparison with modernism – perhaps especially with what I have
called popular modernism. But now the problem is that retro has become standardised –
there is practically nothing that isn’t retro. So the phenomenon has become invisible, in a way
that ‘classic’ postmodernism never was.

Peio: I would like to ask you about Zero Books, a publishing house for which you book has
been a kind of spearhead. Are we living a time for a revitalization of critical theory in the
fringes or interstices of the academy?

Mark: I think so. That has continued with Repeater Books, the publisher I work with now,
and which is run by most of the key people who set up Zero. No doubt the emergence of para-
spaces of thought outside the academy has a great deal to do with the asphyxiating and highly
bureaucratic conditions I described in education in Capitalist Realism. These para-spaces are
a product of the frustration with those conditions.

Peio: It is inevitable to ask about the current political situation in the UK and the immediate
effects of the Brexit. Another slogan by Margaret Thatcher from 1979 has been released: ‘I
want my money back!’ What future looks short term?

Mark: It’s very hard to say. The only thing that is clear a month after the vote is that those
who campaigned to leave had no plan whatsoever for what would happen if they won. It
seems that the vote was a kind of protest vote that went wrong. As I said above, the leave
campaign appealed to people’s sense of powerlessness – a sense of powerlessness that they
took with them into the polling booth, with the result that many leave voters were perplexed
when they actually won. In some ways, the Brexit vote was a vote against capitalist realism.
The views of the ‘experts’ and technocrats of the corporate capitalist elite, endlessly cited by
the remain campaign, were conspicuously rejected. But this was a lurch from capitalist
realism into fantasy politics – a fantasy steeped in what Paul Gilroy calls postcolonial
melancholia, a kind of melancholia that has never faced or accepted the end of empire. The
retreat from capitalist realism into regressive fantasy suggests a very miserable future. But if
the right is abandoning modernity in favour of this kind of political nostalgia, this clears a
space for the left to reclaim the modern. The modernity that the left must defend is
cosmopolitan, internationalist, technological and democratic. The left must say that it offers
the only real (as opposed to fantasmatic) solutions to the sense of disenfranchisement that the
Leave campaign tuned into so opportunistically. The only real way to ‘take back control’
consists, not in flaccid re-heated nationalism, but in a democratisation of politics and work.
We have to be seen to align ourselves with these aims, with this vision.