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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Everything was going fine, then something unexpected happened, everyone failed to consider who Joe was. This book put some of the thoughts I’ve had into words before I even had them. A truest depressing look at the current state of politics and culture in the western world and how our imagination for change has completely died. I see Fishers observations being more true by the day now.
I have so many questions and Mark Fisher is no longer alive
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I think this book should be held as a kind of 21st century communist manifesto. A framing of what the 21st century left needs to strive for and take into account, but by no means a thorough guide to analyzing and defeating late capitalism.
I thought Fisher did a tremendous job presenting his arguments and overall his work is of very high quality. My one grievance, however, is in the content of this work. I don't feel Fisher adequately addresses the possible alternatives to Capitalism, why there is no alternative, and why he thinks Capitalism is so bad in the first place.
Lastly, a lot of the evidence he used felt incredibly speculative. In Zizek's works he will often use themes in films to describe aspects of the human condition or psychoanalytic principles. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher tries to use fictitious films to draw conclusions about the real-world impacts of Capitalism. This method of using film as evidence works when one is writing about a pseudoscience, something subjective and metaphysical. This method does not work when applied to the very concrete nuances of real-world economic systems and their consequences, it just feels speculative.
Lastly, a lot of the evidence he used felt incredibly speculative. In Zizek's works he will often use themes in films to describe aspects of the human condition or psychoanalytic principles. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher tries to use fictitious films to draw conclusions about the real-world impacts of Capitalism. This method of using film as evidence works when one is writing about a pseudoscience, something subjective and metaphysical. This method does not work when applied to the very concrete nuances of real-world economic systems and their consequences, it just feels speculative.
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
It is hardly a contribution to the public discourse to note that Fisher's *Capitalist Realism* is a deserving classic, but would any review be complete if it did not make note of such a fact?
Weaving together robust theoretical analysis with much-needed praxial interventions through refreshingly clear (if occasionally dated) cultural critique, Fisher leads a masterclass in contemporary pursuit of Foucault's double-project of de-naturalization: simultaneously drawing the reader's attention to the self-obscuring background that is capitalist realism (and its business ontology more specifically) *and* highlighting the failures, false assumptions, and unworkable futures which are not only inherent to its nature, but which necessitate its very obfuscation to begin with.
Though general in its outlook, Fisher's project takes as its primary case studies the issues of education, mental health, and bureaucracy, the later two of which being particularly apt lenses through which to study the phenomenological dimensions and internal logics of capitalist realism, respectively.
Of course, the text does present certain internal limitations, most of which Fisher is upfront about. Unfortunately, several of these have only grown in significance in the years since *Realism*'s publication and Fisher's own untimely death. His final chapter's preliminary sketches of new leftist programs and tactics in particular--already self-confessing of its own limitations--would probably become both clearer and more robust were it to engage with the struggles lately underway in the America and Western Europe.
In particular, I would be curious whether Fisher would rethink his abnegation of strikes in favor of direct resistance to managerial practices on the part of educators in light of the recent teacher strikes in America, as well as his admission of the necessity of a new austerity in light of the efforts around the passage of an explicitly anti-austerity New Green Deal, an international project which takes to heart the long-held capitalist principle of never letting a good crisis go to waste.
Even nearer to my own interests is the question of Fisher's presentation of the mental illness epidemics as being symptomatic of late capitalism itself, his point of analysis which I think most suffers from his insistence on the reducibility of all social problems to the evils of Capital. Though I do appreciate his anti-post-modernist stance to an extent, I cannot help but find his insistence on the use of a Marxist lens alone to be unhelpfully flattening and unnecessarily uniocular.
After all, if we are to take a socialist approach to the problems of mental illness (i.e., one grounded in an understanding of social structures and their materialist roots and instantiations), how can we afford to exclude, as Fisher does, the critical social analysis and interventions made by feminist, Queer, and critical race theorists? After all, while imperialism and hetero-patriarchy are certainly intertwined and co-dependent with capital, it seems unnecessarily simplistic at best to try to reduce the former to the later. Likewise, one cannot help but cringe at Fisher's failure to note at all that many instantiations of mental illness might find their roots in the traumas of racism and/or sexism.
Thus, I cannot help but concur with the general (if at times overly dismissive) critique of *Capitalist Realism,* that it traffics in class reductionist analysis to the point that, by means of academic language and thoroughly necessary political interventions, it launders such reductionist accounts for the very sort of Marxist-exclusive readers and thinkers who most need to be reminded of the limitations of the Marxist lens.
Though general in its outlook, Fisher's project takes as its primary case studies the issues of education, mental health, and bureaucracy, the later two of which being particularly apt lenses through which to study the phenomenological dimensions and internal logics of capitalist realism, respectively.
Of course, the text does present certain internal limitations, most of which Fisher is upfront about. Unfortunately, several of these have only grown in significance in the years since *Realism*'s publication and Fisher's own untimely death. His final chapter's preliminary sketches of new leftist programs and tactics in particular--already self-confessing of its own limitations--would probably become both clearer and more robust were it to engage with the struggles lately underway in the America and Western Europe.
In particular, I would be curious whether Fisher would rethink his abnegation of strikes in favor of direct resistance to managerial practices on the part of educators in light of the recent teacher strikes in America, as well as his admission of the necessity of a new austerity in light of the efforts around the passage of an explicitly anti-austerity New Green Deal, an international project which takes to heart the long-held capitalist principle of never letting a good crisis go to waste.
Even nearer to my own interests is the question of Fisher's presentation of the mental illness epidemics as being symptomatic of late capitalism itself, his point of analysis which I think most suffers from his insistence on the reducibility of all social problems to the evils of Capital. Though I do appreciate his anti-post-modernist stance to an extent, I cannot help but find his insistence on the use of a Marxist lens alone to be unhelpfully flattening and unnecessarily uniocular.
After all, if we are to take a socialist approach to the problems of mental illness (i.e., one grounded in an understanding of social structures and their materialist roots and instantiations), how can we afford to exclude, as Fisher does, the critical social analysis and interventions made by feminist, Queer, and critical race theorists? After all, while imperialism and hetero-patriarchy are certainly intertwined and co-dependent with capital, it seems unnecessarily simplistic at best to try to reduce the former to the later. Likewise, one cannot help but cringe at Fisher's failure to note at all that many instantiations of mental illness might find their roots in the traumas of racism and/or sexism.
Thus, I cannot help but concur with the general (if at times overly dismissive) critique of *Capitalist Realism,* that it traffics in class reductionist analysis to the point that, by means of academic language and thoroughly necessary political interventions, it launders such reductionist accounts for the very sort of Marxist-exclusive readers and thinkers who most need to be reminded of the limitations of the Marxist lens.
did not expect to enjoy this so much, but i really did. accessible without collapsing complex context. particularly intrigued by the arguments regarding mental health and affective disorders under late capitalism, as well as the focus on media analysis