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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
funny
informative
fast-paced
It would be so messed up if capitalism was real
dark
informative
slow-paced
I really enjoyed the first 3,5 chapters. They brought interesting thoughts and I ended up marking down some of those sections. Sadly, the rest was just "meh" they were not really exciting, did not awaken any curiosity to make me want to read more and go back to reading when I had had to put it down. Also, reading about his opinions on students put a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. Not sure how I feel about that.
For every good take Fisher has here there is an equally bad take.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Me lo he leído en pdf para un trabajo de clase, lo he subrayado entero y cuando lo acabo todas las anotaciones se han borrado del pdf. Me voy a matar ya no puedo más uff
challenging
informative
tense
fast-paced
The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their Iifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work.
As Marx and Engels themselves observed in The Communist Manifesto,
[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
'We live in a contradiction,' Badiou has observed:
a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.
Zizek's counsel here remains invaluable. Ilf the concept of ideology is the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge', he argues,
then today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way ... to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.
According to Zizek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.
Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.
To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
Why wear the headphones without playing music or play music without wearing the headphones? Because the presence of the phones on the ears or the knowledge that the music is playing (even if he couldn't hear it) was a reassurance that the matrix was still there, within reach.
Specifically, [Oliver] James (The Selfish Capitalist) points to the way in which selfish capitalism stokes upboth aspirations and the expectations that they can be fulfilled....
In the entrepreneurial fantasy society, the delusion is fostered that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual likelihood of this occurring has dimin- ished since the 1970s - a person born in 1958 was more likely than one born in 1970 to achieve upward mobility through education, for example. The Selfish Capitalist toxins that are most poisonous to well-being are the systematic encour-agement of the ideas that material affluence is they key to fulfillment, that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background - if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame.
The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de- politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de- politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls).
The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company 'really does', and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.
We ourselves occupy the empty seat of power, phoning and clicking in our responses. TV's Big Brother had superseded Orwell's Big Brother. We the audience are not subjected to a power that comes from outside; rather, we are integrated into a control circuit that has our desires and prefer- ences as its only mandate - but those desires and preferences are returned to us, no longer as ours, but as the desires of the big Other. Clearly, these circuits are not confined to television: cyber- netic feedback systems (focus groups, demographic surveys) are now integral to the delivery of all 'services', including education and government.
The cynicism of the compliance is essential, of course; the preservation of his 60s liberal self-image depended upon his 'not really believing' in the auditing processes he so assiduously enforced. What this disavowal depends upon is the distinction between inner subjective attitude and outward behavior I discussed above: in terms of his inner subjective attitude, the manager is hostile, even contemptuous, towards, the bureaucratic procedures he supervises; but in terms of his outward behavior, he is perfectly compliant. Yet it is precisely workers' subjective disinvestment from auditing tasks which enables them to continue to perform labor that is pointless and demoralizing.
How could it ever be possible for us to believe successive or even co-extensive stories that so obviously contradict one another? Yet we know from Kant, Nietzsche and psychoanalysis that waking, as much as dreaming, experience, depends upon just such screening narra- tives. If the Real is unbearable, any reality we construct must be a tissue of inconsistencies. What differentiates Kant, Nietzsche and Freud from the tiresome cliche that 'life is but a dream' is the sense that the confabulations we live are consensual. The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.
How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals - but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/ expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-a- subject: Capital.
There's no doubt that late capitalism certainly articulates many of its injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. The banning of smoking in public places, the relentless monstering of working class diet on programs like You Are What You Eat, do appear to indicate that we are already in the presence of a paternalism without the Father. It is not that smoking is 'wrong', it is that it will lead to our failing to lead long and enjoyable lives. But there are limits to this emphasis on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely feature at all, for instance. What we see instead is a reductive, hedonic model of health which is all about I feeling and looking good'. To tell people how to lose weight, or how to decorate their house, is acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement is to be oppressive and elitist. The alleged elitism and oppression cannot consist in the notion that a third party might know someone's interest better than they know it themselves, since, presumably smokers are deemed either to be unaware of their interests or incapable of acting in accordance with them. No: the problem is that only certain types of interest are deemed relevant, since they reflect values that are held to be consensual. Losing weight, decorating your house and improving your appearance belong to the 'consentimental' regime.
It is another irony that capitalism's 'society of risk' is much less likely to take this kind of risk than was the supposedly stodgy, centralized culture of the postwar social consensus. It was the public service-oriented BBC and Channel 4 that perplexed and delighted me with the likes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Pinter plays and Tarkovsky seasons; it was this BBC that also funded the popular avant gardism of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which embedded sonic experimentalism into everyday life. Such innovations are unthinkable now that the public has been displaced by the consumer. The effect of permanent structural instability, the 'cancellation of the long term', is invariably stagnation and conservatism, not innovation.
As Badiou has forcefully insisted, an effective anti- capitalism must be a rival to Capital, not a reaction to it; there can be no return to pre-capitalist territorialities. Anti-capitalism must oppose Capital's globalism with its own, authentic, univer- sality.
As Marx and Engels themselves observed in The Communist Manifesto,
[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
'We live in a contradiction,' Badiou has observed:
a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.
Zizek's counsel here remains invaluable. Ilf the concept of ideology is the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge', he argues,
then today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way ... to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.
According to Zizek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.
Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.
To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
Why wear the headphones without playing music or play music without wearing the headphones? Because the presence of the phones on the ears or the knowledge that the music is playing (even if he couldn't hear it) was a reassurance that the matrix was still there, within reach.
Specifically, [Oliver] James (The Selfish Capitalist) points to the way in which selfish capitalism stokes upboth aspirations and the expectations that they can be fulfilled....
In the entrepreneurial fantasy society, the delusion is fostered that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual likelihood of this occurring has dimin- ished since the 1970s - a person born in 1958 was more likely than one born in 1970 to achieve upward mobility through education, for example. The Selfish Capitalist toxins that are most poisonous to well-being are the systematic encour-agement of the ideas that material affluence is they key to fulfillment, that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background - if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame.
The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de- politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de- politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls).
The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company 'really does', and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.
We ourselves occupy the empty seat of power, phoning and clicking in our responses. TV's Big Brother had superseded Orwell's Big Brother. We the audience are not subjected to a power that comes from outside; rather, we are integrated into a control circuit that has our desires and prefer- ences as its only mandate - but those desires and preferences are returned to us, no longer as ours, but as the desires of the big Other. Clearly, these circuits are not confined to television: cyber- netic feedback systems (focus groups, demographic surveys) are now integral to the delivery of all 'services', including education and government.
The cynicism of the compliance is essential, of course; the preservation of his 60s liberal self-image depended upon his 'not really believing' in the auditing processes he so assiduously enforced. What this disavowal depends upon is the distinction between inner subjective attitude and outward behavior I discussed above: in terms of his inner subjective attitude, the manager is hostile, even contemptuous, towards, the bureaucratic procedures he supervises; but in terms of his outward behavior, he is perfectly compliant. Yet it is precisely workers' subjective disinvestment from auditing tasks which enables them to continue to perform labor that is pointless and demoralizing.
How could it ever be possible for us to believe successive or even co-extensive stories that so obviously contradict one another? Yet we know from Kant, Nietzsche and psychoanalysis that waking, as much as dreaming, experience, depends upon just such screening narra- tives. If the Real is unbearable, any reality we construct must be a tissue of inconsistencies. What differentiates Kant, Nietzsche and Freud from the tiresome cliche that 'life is but a dream' is the sense that the confabulations we live are consensual. The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.
How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals - but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/ expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-a- subject: Capital.
There's no doubt that late capitalism certainly articulates many of its injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. The banning of smoking in public places, the relentless monstering of working class diet on programs like You Are What You Eat, do appear to indicate that we are already in the presence of a paternalism without the Father. It is not that smoking is 'wrong', it is that it will lead to our failing to lead long and enjoyable lives. But there are limits to this emphasis on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely feature at all, for instance. What we see instead is a reductive, hedonic model of health which is all about I feeling and looking good'. To tell people how to lose weight, or how to decorate their house, is acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement is to be oppressive and elitist. The alleged elitism and oppression cannot consist in the notion that a third party might know someone's interest better than they know it themselves, since, presumably smokers are deemed either to be unaware of their interests or incapable of acting in accordance with them. No: the problem is that only certain types of interest are deemed relevant, since they reflect values that are held to be consensual. Losing weight, decorating your house and improving your appearance belong to the 'consentimental' regime.
It is another irony that capitalism's 'society of risk' is much less likely to take this kind of risk than was the supposedly stodgy, centralized culture of the postwar social consensus. It was the public service-oriented BBC and Channel 4 that perplexed and delighted me with the likes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Pinter plays and Tarkovsky seasons; it was this BBC that also funded the popular avant gardism of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which embedded sonic experimentalism into everyday life. Such innovations are unthinkable now that the public has been displaced by the consumer. The effect of permanent structural instability, the 'cancellation of the long term', is invariably stagnation and conservatism, not innovation.
As Badiou has forcefully insisted, an effective anti- capitalism must be a rival to Capital, not a reaction to it; there can be no return to pre-capitalist territorialities. Anti-capitalism must oppose Capital's globalism with its own, authentic, univer- sality.
Zizek Quote
Jameson Quote
Kafka reference
New Labour
Spinoza
Left wing melancholia and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race.
Jameson Quote
Kafka reference
New Labour
Spinoza
Left wing melancholia and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race.
informative
reflective
fast-paced
Este libro me gusto bastante estaba bien escrito y me hizo pensar mas de los problemas que se individualizan para quitarle la culpa a los sitemas mas grandiosos. Creo que su mayor mensaje es llamar la atencikn al cambio del publico en el aue el capitalismo se luzca como el unico sistema viable, cuaneo todos sus problemas estan bastante reconozidos pero presdntados como lo mejorde muchos peores.
Trambsien trae al frente epecialmente en burocracy en el management de todas las compañies y la gente trabajando en posiciones q no son necesarias, o el su0ersaturation de corruption en el thatcher reagan era o en españa qie se toma como parte del sistema en lugar de tener solucion. Y habla delburocracy dandole goals superficiales a los colegios y hospitales que auiere decir hacen peor trabajo de lo que podrian intentando mejorar sus estadisticas sin crear cambio en el servicio para los alumnos en su calidad de educacion.
Capital has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless, indefeasible chartered freedoms , has set up that single, unconscionable freedom, free trade.
Western consumerism, far from being intrisically implicated in systemic global inequalities, cpuld instead solve them. All we have to do is buy the right product.
The realkty principle itself is ideologically mediated, one couod even claimthat it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact
Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact like weather... the accepting the vast privatizatikn of stress that has taken place... how has it become acceptable that so may people especially young people are ill
Cone sto cita los rising rates of depression y dislexia y ke pregunto cuanto de ello es porrising diagnosis y cuanto de ñello es por el changing societal norms y systems.
By provitazing these problems any question of social systemic causation is rules out
La diferencia entre los protesting french students y los accpeting british students que aceptan los costen y mal servicio de las unis.
Tambien adresse el rise the inequality con los rich hoarding mas wealth under neoliberal policies desde los 7os mientras que la media apenas sube comparado. En esta etapa rates of distress tambien doubled.
What late capialism repeats from stalinism is just the valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement
The extirpation of the long term extends backwards aswell as forwards in time
Tambien address el irrationality entre neoliberalism y neoconservative con una siendo todo sobre control y el otro siendo todo sobre supuesta kibertad
Lo mismo pasa con climate change q con mental health
Y finalmente cubre la eliminacion de la figura del intelectual q se plaga por el advertisicng y social media que te quiere quitar la atencion de tu vida
Trambsien trae al frente epecialmente en burocracy en el management de todas las compañies y la gente trabajando en posiciones q no son necesarias, o el su0ersaturation de corruption en el thatcher reagan era o en españa qie se toma como parte del sistema en lugar de tener solucion. Y habla delburocracy dandole goals superficiales a los colegios y hospitales que auiere decir hacen peor trabajo de lo que podrian intentando mejorar sus estadisticas sin crear cambio en el servicio para los alumnos en su calidad de educacion.
Capital has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless, indefeasible chartered freedoms , has set up that single, unconscionable freedom, free trade.
Western consumerism, far from being intrisically implicated in systemic global inequalities, cpuld instead solve them. All we have to do is buy the right product.
The realkty principle itself is ideologically mediated, one couod even claimthat it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact
Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact like weather... the accepting the vast privatizatikn of stress that has taken place... how has it become acceptable that so may people especially young people are ill
Cone sto cita los rising rates of depression y dislexia y ke pregunto cuanto de ello es porrising diagnosis y cuanto de ñello es por el changing societal norms y systems.
By provitazing these problems any question of social systemic causation is rules out
La diferencia entre los protesting french students y los accpeting british students que aceptan los costen y mal servicio de las unis.
Tambien adresse el rise the inequality con los rich hoarding mas wealth under neoliberal policies desde los 7os mientras que la media apenas sube comparado. En esta etapa rates of distress tambien doubled.
What late capialism repeats from stalinism is just the valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement
The extirpation of the long term extends backwards aswell as forwards in time
Tambien address el irrationality entre neoliberalism y neoconservative con una siendo todo sobre control y el otro siendo todo sobre supuesta kibertad
Lo mismo pasa con climate change q con mental health
Y finalmente cubre la eliminacion de la figura del intelectual q se plaga por el advertisicng y social media que te quiere quitar la atencion de tu vida