'Capitalist Realism' & The Limits of Materialism
The alternative is Piercing the Veil
I recently made the claim that Nick Land's understanding of Capital, and Mark Fisher's agreement with it in broad strokes, pushed Fisher1 to realize the limits of Marxist materialism and to suggest a means to overcoming that limitation by transcending the material realm in the closing pages of Capitalist Realism. Why did I say this?
In these final pages of CR, Fisher gives two recommendations for those seeking an alternative to the dismal workings of Capital and its ongoing march over the human and nonhuman spheres. His first exhortation is to have people take their mental-psychic responses to the deteriorating situation seriously, short-circuiting the impulse to individualize systemic issues and to respond with a stuporous hedonism.2 The second exhortation is to adopt a voluntary ascesis in the material realm, partly to deprive Capital a beachhead in their psyche, but primarily to refine the appetite for transformative change and cultivate an inner discipline, for both the individual and aggregate.3
Fisher ends the book with the following paragraph, communicating his hope something pierces the veil of ignorance that he understands Capital as imposing upon humanity:4
The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.5
Influenced by my religious bent and my familiarity with the religious orientation generally, I read this coda and the two exhortations mentioned above as clearly pointing to a hope that an element of the Transcendent will reveal itself and Set Things Right. Following the traditional forms (perhaps inadvertently), for Fisher this possibility of Transcendent Intervention is introduced by the subordination of the material, continued reflection of one's place in the world, and committed submission to norms (known and yet-to-be-revealed) whose concerns are not bound by reference to physical objects and strictly sublunar reasoning. To be a mere materialist is to deny this avenue of redress.
Land and Fisher were members of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or 'the CCRU', while at the University of Warwick. Fisher and Land eventually grew apart over the latter's right-wing turn. Fisher describes the Landian idea of capital, as expressed in the essay Meltdown, as "capitalism as a shattering Real" in chapter 6 of Capitalist Realism.
This is described at length in earlier chapters of Capitalist Realism. Fisher uses the term, 'hedonic depression', which buttresses a 'selfish capitalism' (pp. 36-7) that simultaneously supports the "chemico-biologization of mental illness" (and thus distracting from the roots of mental instability in capitalism), ongoing consumption within Capital as 'self-care', individualizing the causes of systemic failures, and fostering reflexive impotence relative to the world and all within it.
This inner policing force is called 'Marxist Supernanny ', after the television show Supernanny, and described in chapter 9 of CR. It's notable that there is little that is 'Marxist' about 'Marxist Supernanny' as described by Fisher-- that it is liberatory is enough for Fisher to deem it 'Marxist'. I take this as Fisher's way to somehow associate his Alternative with Marxism, even as he seems to supercede or deprecate it qua liberatory ideology.
In Ghosts of My Life, Fisher makes a passing reference to maya, the veil of illusion in Vedic cosmology. Meditative and ascetic practice in many Vedic traditions are oriented to helping individuals and humanity transcend or pierce this veil, and thus breaking the wheel of suffering, samsara.
Capitalist Realism, pp. 80-1