Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
tial rate – schizophrenia at society’s margins, bi-polar
disorder at is core.
Capital is an eternally shape-shifting “un-nameable
thing”, tainting everything with the logic of its own
transactions. The brutal logic of the market creates its
own kind of cultural ‘realism’, which Fisher shows
as expressing itself in the fetishisation of the rugged
individual in the vogue for gangsta rap and gangster
films, reaching their asocial apotheosis in the Hobbesian
fictional worlds of James Ellroy and Frank Miller,
where no-one and nothing is to be trusted. Fisher uses
gangster films to show the direction of travel capitalist
organisation has taken. In The Godfather era of the 40s-
60s, the Corleones were bound together with a ruthless
and absolute loyalty, mirroring the big, hierarchical,
often family-based corporations of old (where you may
be exploited but you still have a job for life, ‘at least
they looked after their own.’).
By the time of Heat, De Niro’s character Neil McAuley
shows himself a very modern gangster by his lack
of any ties or loyalties whatsoever: “Don’t let yourself
get too attached to anything that you are not willing
to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat
around the corner.” This in turn mirrors the atomisation
of the brave new world of “de-centred” capitalism,
whose lack of straightforward hierarchy only makes its
exploitation more nebulous, casual labour in all areas
of the economy shed in an instant as billionaires lightly
BUY Mark Fisher books online from and
toss their casual carefree faces to the world, “shirtsleeves
informality and quiet authoritarianism”.
In a system where everyone is co-opted, no-one can
be to blame. Witness, as Fisher notes, that “no-one was
to blame” at Hillsborough and the Menezes shooting
(you could add the Union Carbide explosion in India
and BP oil spill in the US to that) – and literally speaking
this is quite true. Capitalism claims its legitimacy
in the name of the free, autonomous individual, yet this
individual has long been lost in a Kafka-esque maze,
his face used as a totem as his autonomy is secreted
away, forgotten.
Socialist Realism was the official name for the ersatz
art churned out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hackneyed,
servile and trite, the art of ‘actually existing socialism’
had as much in common with the liberationist project
of Marxism as the plastic Mary’s flogged near Lourdes
have to do with the Sermon on the Mount. The reality
of ‘actually existing capitalism’ is similarly dislocated
from its projected self-image as that of the heroic, ruggedly
free isolated individual.
Using his own background in the education system
as just one of many examples, Fisher shows that
while modern capitalism presents itself as the enemy
of bureaucracy, in fact it has proliferated meaningless
layers of white collar wastage more than any system in
history. As the system only functions in so far as how
it’s appearance can keep its hold over the populace, “all
219
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z