Mark Fisher The Political Aesthetics of Postcapitalism Methodologies of Valorization, 16 11 2011

I Thank you.

So, let's go. Good evening.

Today is with us Mark Fisher from London. He's probably the most known for his book also translated in Croatian capitalist realism and also for his famous blog Kate Punk. This is the second lecture this year in our series in the Center for Drama Art, Methodologies of Polarization. There will be two more lectures tomorrow like Oven Catterley and Douglas Murphy and also three more in December. Mark will talk about the political aesthetics of post-capitalism. We'll talk for, let's say, 40 minutes and then after his talk you can ask questions first. So Mark will please. Okay, thank you. Thanks for coming everybody.

Okay, I'm going to start with a clip from BBC television program, Have I Got News For You. It's a kind of slightly irritating satirical news program. But this was an exchange with the even more irritating, including an even more irritating chick-lit author turned Tory MP Louise Mensch. And it was an exchange about the Occupy London stock exchange. and I think it's kind of symptomatically interesting and we'll sort of lead into the kind of topic that I want to deal with today

okay so about four minutes maybe we won't watch it all but just to get the gist of it It's nice. You don't hear about that. It's another whole miserable aspect of Britain. Okay, now, sort of what interests me about that really is can we so easily dismiss

Louise Mench's point here? Why does it seem to make sense when Louise Mench says well anti-capitalists how can they have how can they be on Twitter how can they be having iPhones how can they be how can they be at Starbucks being at Starbucks seems to make more sense although at the end I want to move around and say even the design of Starbucks is nothing to do with the design for capitalism, actually. But why did it have an iPhone, as it were? Why does that seem to make sense? Why has anti-capitalism been associated with this kind of anarcho-primptivism, really? Now, of course, as we saw there, she was ridiculed.

But this kind of critique that she's making there, it just wouldn't have made much sense, I don't think, in the time of the Cold War, let's say. You know, this association of sort of anti-capitalism or opposition to capitalism with anti-technology. That's, you know, the time of the Cold War, the space race, etc. You know, that association wasn't made. So it's something to do with, at least on the implicit and perhaps disavowed level, of political aesthetics of anti-capitalism, which at least implies this opposition to technology and to modernity.

And I want to suggest that is really a serious problem, actually. and that what Mench is saying is maybe what a lot of other people think and maybe why a lot of other people and I think particularly working class people have problems with anti-capitalism so even if they may support a lot of the aims of anti-capitalism even though for instance that they share the anger against banks, nevertheless there's a certain reticence in being associated with anti-capitalism. And that's because of this idea,

it's partly because of this idea that being anti-capitalism means you have to revert to a barter system, be living in a tent, be reduced to face-to-face interaction, and grow rotting organic vegetables and all of that, and that's what life will be. In other words, you have to repudiate just to throw your mobile phones away at the door and abandon all hope of getting them back. I really think that it's really important that we articulate an opposition to this. And to start to really say, what does post-capitalism involve actually? and I think that might partly involve a shift away from anti-capitalism

and associations of anti-capitalism towards this concept of post-capitalism and I think it's partly about reasserting in lots of ways a kind of traditional Marxism in a way with its idea of technocracy of maximizing productive potential, of planning, of mass production, and certain notions of management, actually. Okay, let's take a step back then. Because I think once I say unequivocally support

things like the Occupy Media, I mean, it's unequivocally positive that it's happened. So what I'm saying is really, I think, about something supplementary rather than something that is necessarily critical of it. I mean, it's good that it's opened up a space for critique, which is in excess of marches or protests, which are time-limited. and sort of easily contained and treated as a kind of background noise, really. And life can easily return to normal. But the sheer persistence of occupations means that they can have a different role, I think, than that.

And as I think, you know, Owen Jones has sort of forcefully argued, one of the most powerful things about the Occupy Movement is it refocuses attention. that the ruling class has made desperate attempts to blame the crisis on public spending. Instead of what we all know to be the real cause, which was the financial system, as we all know. and Occupy as you know by publicly reiterating what we all know, that has a kind of ritualistic power in itself against the kind of

the fact that we're told things that we don't believe repeatedly told things that we don't believe, I mean that is what power can do, it can make something the official truth even though nobody actually believes it and you know it's the Occupy at the very least has cracked that ability to push that untruth as the official narrative. But I think that doesn't mean that there aren't problems with it or that there aren't problems with it if nothing else happens actually. and I think one of the problems with it is it doesn't really break from

what I've called capitalist realism capitalist realism well I've been interviewed many times about capitalist realism and I really know better at defining it than when I first started thinking about it really but the capitalist realism I think is something that is easy to identify but it's not so easy to define. Partly because of its cloud-like or sort of mist-like kind of amorphousness. And also the fact that we're still very much in the middle of it. I mean, one way of thinking about capitalist realism would be that it was a belief. The belief that capitalism is the only viable system,

that everything else, it might be nice, but it's unrealistic. It doesn't really work. etc. But another way of thinking about it is that it's an attitude an attitude of kind of resignation in response to the above. That we might like things to be different from what they are but we can't really change them. That isn't then so much a judgment about how good capitalism is a system and how effective it is. It's more a judgment about the balance of forces in the world today. That the forces are with capital and that really all we can do is adjust to that and sort of adapt to a world completely dominated by capital.

But part of the problem of thinking about capitalist realism in those terms is that they're kind of individual psychological categories. And really I think what we're talking about capitalist realism is more than that. It's something that can be extrapolated out of individual psychological dispositions. And what we're talking about is more diffuse, a kind of ideological atmosphere or psychic infrastructure, I think. And involved in that is a number of ideas, such as that the state is inefficient and oppressive. There's a kind of disdain for planning and top-down organization.

there's nothing worse than a top-down in this kind of thinking. And there's also a kind of negative identification or negative connotation of anything to do with the public. That the public is thought of as something fusty, archaic, and obsolete. And by comparison with anything to do with the state, with planning, or the public, the private sector clearly appears as something as dynamic, exciting, new. And what's involved in this is a temporality control of time where the concept of modernization becomes

equivalent to the concept of neoliberalization. They are practically used anonymously. To modernize means to, precisely to adapt to conditions of kind of dominion of capital. With the effect that it seems that no other modernity is possible. Which I think takes us back to this this definitive Louise Mensch kind of symptomatic attitude. That any kind of resistance to capital, any kind of alternative to capitalism would be one that would essentially be going backwards in time. And sometimes very far back in time. to primitive conditions almost. That's partly what I mean by the extent to which

at least at an implicit level, the level of political aesthetics and the occupying movement in danger of supporting this idea that there's nothing in the future for there's nothing in the future except capital. that really capital has the control of modernity and everything that will come after that, and all we can do is wind back in time. And, you know, I think it's very important that we have a counter-argument to that there. In addition to these kind of beliefs, attitudes, psychic infrastructure, I mean, what we're also talking about is design here, and, you know, questions of libido.

and it's very significant that she talks about the iPhone of course. People might remember the famous Apple advert from 1984 very much playing on the year in which it came out with Apple computers as associated with a breakthrough of individuality as opposed to the kind of totalitarian monoliths, a kind of totalitarian monolithic culture. And something like the iPhone, of course, now is very much an emblem of this idea of capital as the deliverer of modernity and also as

the liberator of desire. This is what is also behind Mench's claim, isn't it? That really capital has a monopoly on desire in lots of ways. That what is offered by anti-capitalism not only a kind of staunching of desire, a blocking of desire. And what she's also saying is that's why it's not realistic. That's not why it's realistic. Because even these people who claim they're opposed to capitalism, the desire for the... The desire... The desires which... Capital and only Capital can engage with are too strong for them. After a while, after a few hours or days of being in their tents,

they have to go to Starbucks to imbibe the wonders of Capital. And even when they're in their tents, they're on their iPhones, which shows that the power of these desires, which will erupt everywhere. so I think this question also about desire and post-capitalism is crucial the idea that we really have to break down this idea that there is this necessary equivalence of desire and capitalism that only capitalism can kind of be the being I think there's a little parable of all this

I don't know if you've seen Steven Spielberg's film The Terminal It's a film I have to think about because I spend quite a lot of time At airports now It's not a very good film But it's quite an interesting Symptomatic film In the film, if you've seen it you may know Tom Hanks Is playing someone from a Fictional East European country And while he's plane is flying over to New York. This country, that seems to happen really quickly. The country is engaged in some sort of civil war. It collapses. It loses his kind of citizenship. And so he has to stay in JFK airport

for the period. As an example of that capitalist realism on lots of levels, that you couldn't do better than the terminal. In a sense that what makes, what does signify the realism in the terminal? Signifiers of realism in the terminal are franchise chain stores. You know, the names of corporate logos, the sigils of corporate power. What's interesting about that is it's actually not realistic. If you've been to JFK, it looks like a kind of shoddy Soviet airport almost. There's hardly any kind of franchise stores there, actually.

But it's interesting that in order to make it seem like a realistic airport, they had to build another airport. They had to build an airport on a lot, full of corporate signs, etc. Of course, what is interesting about the film is the underlying fantasy. The fantasy is that if only Hanks could get out of the airport, that he could get to a place that was different from the airport. If only he could get to the real America. As if the real America was going to be anything different from this completely corporate-dominated environment. I mean as a word you know, Hank is already in the middle of the reality of capitalism and you know, he's right in the middle of it

because he's a kind of precarious worker he has to pick up bits and scraps of work around the airport on a very temporary and casual basis with no sense of security or permanence he's right, he's already being in the airport, he couldn't be more in the centre of kind of like capitalism there's no need to go anywhere else and actually there's nowhere else to go anyway. So I think part of the response to this kind of Louise Mensch type aggressive capitalist realism there's no alternative even they want it. Part of the response to that is to

dystopianize now actually to realize the extent to which we're already living in the middle of a kind of even before capitalism collapses even further than it is now it surely is going to collapse who knows where that will end up even before all that that we live in this kind of that we're already living in a kind of dystopia a dystopia in which far from as it were liberating desire things like iPhones play a major part in tethering us. That objects like iPhone, smartphones, BlackBerrys are not simply there

as consumer objects to be enjoyed. I guess what's interesting actually about iPhones is a similar kind of thing came up with the riots in the summer where reactionaries were arguing, these people can't be poor. The rioters can't be poor because they've got Blackberries. They've got Blackberries, that means they're not poor. Well, I mean, it's as if somehow that smartphones were luxury items. I mean, smartphones simply are not luxury items anymore. They are the means of connection to cumulative capitalism. They're the means of... They're no more a luxury item for us than lathes were

in the high day of industrial capitalism. They are the means by which capital can connect with us. That precarious work, etc., cannot be done unless we have things like mobile phones, where we're contactable at any moment. And the dystopian dimension of this, I think we need to just take a step back from where we are and maybe look at things just as a just as an instructive just for instructive purposes, not because we should be nostalgic but think about how different things were even ten years ago

if you go into the centre of London now it does look like you're in a fairly cheap B-movie science fiction film in which everyone's hypnotized by screens. You know, you could have there were sort of, you know, Doctor Who stories like this, you know, and they come, oh yeah, this kind of, it's not really plausible. But now we're in the middle of it. You know, you were looking at people who were, you know, entirely entranced by screens. And it's not like saying this like, I'm immune to this at all. Like, of course not. Like, you know, It's practically a requirement that we be plugged into this cyberspace architecture at all times. But this is not simply a matter of enjoyment desire.

It's the fusion, really, of the demands of work with libido that makes this network so pernicious. that's why it's so difficult to unplug from the sorts of networks of communicative capitalism. Because the smart firm is both an object of enjoyment and the means by which demands are placed on us by work. That's part of the reason for its power over us, actually. Surely what would be involved then in thinking about what post-capitalism might be like,

it's not then the idea of, okay, let's throw smartphones away, let's go back to face-to-face interaction, let's go back to living in villages where we don't have the internet, etc. It's more about thinking, not about the technology per se, but the kind of the social relations, the different patterns of work, etc. that might surround these technologies. The ways in which these technologies could function differently in different kind of social political contexts. so I think we don't want, we really have to think very

clearly then about how we're going to articulate alternatives to capitalism that are not involving this any kind of model of retreat into a prelapsarian past a rejection of technology a rejection of the achievements of modernity and I think one way of tackling the sort of the kind of position presented by Lynch which I say it's not something she's cooked up or just a silly error of her part I think the critique is symptomatic

it. One way of doing that is really to, instead of thinking that capital is now satisfying the desires, which it gives rise to, is to say the opposite, actually. That capital everywhere thwarting desires, not meeting them. And that actually the post-capitalist world is the world where desires can actually be satisfied more radically. So let's take the bull by the horns

and take the actual Starbucks example here. Since, as it was, Starbucks seems to be the very sort of emblem of capitalist dominion. The fact that it replicates so successfully that as Louise Mensch says, even anti-capitalists go there. Well, isn't actually Starbuck's though a kind of classic case of dialectical ambivalence? Dialectical ambivalence, I think that we should have dialectical unbearable about Starbucks. And is it the case actually that the customers of Starbucks, which may include others sometimes, also share dialectical

unbearable about it? Like many of the most successful features of late capitalism, it's really often the people who most use these things are also most critical of them. So I think that's the other side of it actually. The fact that anti-capitalists go into Starbucks doesn't undermine their forms any more than the fact that people who go to Starbucks sort of hate Starbucks also. And, okay, so one of the things we can note about Starbucks, isn't it, is the way in which the criticisms of Starbucks, which, as I say, are often made by the people who use Starbucks as much as those who don't,

uncannily echo the kind of criticisms of state communism. So Starbucks is generic, it's homogenous, it's standardized, it crushes out individuality. You know, hold on. So how could it, isn't it strange that this emblem of capitalism and freedom certainly ends up sounding exactly like what people said about Stalinism? That's kind of peculiar. Well, I think we should be positive about this and say really then that this shows that the desire for Starbucks is the thwarted desire for communism. And I'm not just being facile about it, I mean it.

In the sense that, what do people want from Starbucks? Okay, what do people want from it? The desire involved when they're going to Starbucks has nothing to do with coffee, I hope. Jesus. The people don't want to like a coffee, right? It's nothing to do with Starbucks anymore. It's to do with admiration for capital, for the capitalist system, really. As people have said, the desire for Starbucks is fundamentally tied up with desire for what is called the third place, not work, not home. And what is this space, if not a public space, actually? And so what you get in Starbucks is a degraded form of public space. And, you know, if the success of Starbucks tells us anything then,

it's that the desire for public space has not withered away despite the intense kind of, intense program of kind of PRD-devenization aimed at the concept of the public under the period of kind of capitalist realist dominion, really. And so, the question is to really go with this. If people want the generic, the homogenous, and the standardized, can't we imagine much better versions of the generic, the homogenous, and the standardized than Starbucks provides, actually? And shouldn't part of what post-capitalism be about is delivering this? And you can say, look, we can get you a much better designed space than Starbucks.

you know just you pay a little bit more on your tax you don't even know you're going for free you don't even have to drink the rubbish coffee either as it were and I think really that what we can see in a lot of that kind of what we can see in a lot of capitalist infrastructure is this is this kind of thwarted desire for communism for collectivization I was in Westfield Shopping Centre the other day, which is the new shopping centre that's been built for the Olympics. We won't go to the Olympics either. Well, I will go to the Olympics at length if you want, but... Major causes of misery and rage in Britain at the moment.

But the Westfield Shopping, you just have to flash on Westfield Shopping Centre with your dystopian post-capitalist eye. It just looks like the most dismal form of bad collectivism. It looks like a really bad kibbutz. These kind of cavernous hangers where people are required to eat together. This is supposed to be a place of intense enjoyment and capitalist self-fulfillment. It just looks like some collective eating hall. and if people want that let's give them that bit of better form actually and what I think is crucial then in overcoming

elements of capitalist realism is really a return to certain concepts that were used disdainfully originally such as designer socialism designer socialism was a term that was used to you know, ridicule people, really. The idea that, again, I think it was the same kind of thinking as behind Mench's kind of dismissal, but are these socialists who are into kind of design, etc.? But why shouldn't socialists be into design? Actually, well, couldn't one say very clearly that at the time of defeat of the left is very much

tied up with that kind of disassociation of leftism from good design. The idea that again the word designer is synonymous with capitalism. A lot of the origins of the problems of the left lie in this kind of equivocation here. and another one, radical chic again a notion that was originally kind of satirical the association of the fashionable with the left etc

what is the problem here? I do think on the contrary of this being a problem this is something we need to cultivate that we need to compete on the sort of terrain of modernity. To compete, not adapt to it, but to change it. And offering people a choice between, if you're saying to them, well, you can either have your supermarkets and your iPhones, or you can come and tend with us. I think it's offering a sort of bad choice, really. And it's a choice that no one should be required to make, actually. But, I mean, I think what's crucial

here is that we need if we want if we want this kind of post-capitalist conception of the public, I think we then need a new concept of the public. where the public is not simply thought of as equivalent to the state. Now, I'm not there saying that the state should play no role in the public and the generation of the public. I think part of the problem with some of the neo-anarchist currents that are circulating around the Occupy movement is there is a slide from anti-statism

into anti-politics altogether where you know an opposition to the state becomes very quickly becomes a sort of recommendation to retreat from kind of any kind of model of systemic change and I think that itself is a symptom of capitalist realism as it were the idea that direct action I think doesn't come out of in most cases doesn't come out of a feeling of empowerment but a feeling of disempowerment actually. The sense that well we have to do something ourselves now immediately comes out of a feeling

that there's no possibility for us to change things in an indirect but sort of more long term and systemic way. and you know the question of the state won't go away it's not as if if we retreat from the state that the state then will sort of just wither away quite clearly neoliberalism requires the state in order to operate and you know it's quite happy with us to back away and say well you can have the state which isn't to say that those kind of old 20th century models of taking over the state

are quite adequate now but it's to say that the state continues to be a powerful actor and must be part of any kind of any political program that actually wants to change things in any sustainable and long term way must have some kind of relationship to the state. But equally, the public is not the same as the state. And we need to have a sort of modernized concept of the public. And indeed argue that the concept of the public is in a way synonymous with

modernity. That I think we need to battle over the question of temporality and defeat neoliberal temporality. As I was saying, neoliberal temporality, the argument is history goes in one direction, capitals, and that inevitably ends up in privatization, etc. at the end stage. I think we need a different model and that return to this concept of enlightenment and progress, actually. and the idea that really the achievement of a public sphere was a production of modernity which has been interrupted and kind of retarded

by this period of kind of neoliberal barbarism actually and Dan Hines' work actually Dan Hines' book, Return of the Public is very good on ways of refurbishing the concept of the public. Kind of wanting to move beyond kind of this idea of the state as this kind of, in this neoliberal caricature, really, as being this top-down centralizer. And has the idea of public commissioning. in terms of media and funding of science,

are two examples which he gives. He says that, in a way, there's a lot of rhetoric of, well, there's an enormous amount of rhetoric of participation and involvement in late capitalism. Corporations want us to join in, join the debate. I wouldn't join any corporations I'd ask you to join in personally but I think this in itself is another example of a kind of thwarted desires the desires that capitalism sort of needs but can't itself satisfy the desire for people to have more control over the

institutions that determine their lives But it simply obviously cannot be done at a level of consumer incapacivity. But what Dan Hines suggests is instead of this model of consumerism, we can have a model of the public becoming the commissioner of things. So that, for instance, with the media, which, to say the least, is in just a little bit of crisis at the moment in the UK in particular. But with the media, there could be a system where the public itself could be in control of commissioning investigative journalists.

and he sort of costed it out how much it would cost in order to have this system where you have 200 or so investigative journalists who had to sort of pitch their projects to a committee of the public and then the public would decide who to fund now I think one's immediate response to this or one of the responses one might have to this is wouldn't people just fund stories about celebrities and all of that well I think that itself is a symptom of capitalist realist defeatism actually when people are in a position of actively being responsible for commissioning something

and it's their project and they have a stake in a project it's different from when they are consumers, when they can as it were disavow the way in which the thing has been produced and I think Dan Hanley is right to bet on or sort of wager on the fact that in those conditions where the public could choose what kind of stories were being written that they would make good and informed choices as it were and he makes the same kind of argument for funding of science because of course at the moment what we see of both of these things is behind an ostensibly egalitarian rhetoric is the reality of the domination of the media

by the media and science research in universities, the domination of those things by corporate and military interests. And I do think that media is crucial, as it were. And I think this is one other dimension of this question of political aesthetics. One often hears in some of the neo-Americanist kind of discourse, a kind of disdain for mainstream media. But I think the whole lesson of cultural studies really is that there is no such thing as mainstream media, as a monolith.

that the mainstream media is really a terrain that can be fought over. And certainly in a sort of modern society like ours, that the idea of a kind of ordinary street life or whatever, that is beyond the media, is extremely naive. That the media saturates everything. And just as if we give up on the state, if we give up on the state, others will control it. And if we give up on mainstream media, then other forces will continue to control it at the moment. And

the last one looks at the history of the mainstream media is a story of terrain won and terrain lost. and you certainly won't win any terrain if you're not fighting for it and part of a kind of healthy public sphere must be a kind of a better media and I think Dan Hines' proposal is one way of achieving that but my broad point then is this question of re-livenizing the public re-livenizing

refurbishing the public all of the dark arts of capitalist PR have been used against the concept of the public and to disassociate the public, any notion of the public with notions of anything kind of desirable but I think the task now is to break out of this this bind and to imagine the two fused, imagine a kind of post-capitalist libido and a public world that was fused with desire and crucially then

this does involve this return to questions of the designer I think as I'm saying and so the task of reclaiming modernity I think then is a task that evolves taking on some of the things which are implicitly or explicitly disavowed I think by the sort of neonicist currents that surround the Occupy Movement. It does involve talking about management, planning, bureaucracy, and actually authority. As we've seen, as I talk about in my book, Capitalist Realism,

one of the myths of neoliberalism is that bureaucracy was a thing of the past. What we actually find is that bureaucracy has shifted form. Bureaucracy is, yes, no longer simply associated with a kind of centralized state authority, but bureaucracy has then instead proliferated into all areas of work and life. So that instead of our being subject to bureaucratic judgment from others, we ourselves become the auditors of our own life and work. and the question that isn't simply well can we imagine a world free of bureaucracy altogether but it's of what

kind of bureaucracy do we need what kind of bureaucracy you know would we want in a world where things worked better same with a question of management it's not a question of assuming that we can do without management in a kind of modern, complex, globalized world, but the issue is not all management has to be managerialism or neoliberalism, a kind of cancerous, kind of metastaticizing model of management, which is actually sort of Stinehold's initiative and becomes self-defeating. but also the question of authority

I think is a kind of crucial one I think one of the key questions really to and the key problems that emerged with since the 60s was the question of what anti-authoritarian left would look like and as the discontent with Stalinism being generalised. There's a search for an anti-authoritarian left. A popular story is then that this was, this failed actually. That what happened was as soon as you moved away from the authoritarian structures of the old

Stalinist left, as soon as the left pluralised into different struggles over sexuality and ethnicity, gender, etc., then it no longer had the kind of hegemonic force that it was able to command in its heyday. And therefore, in a certain way, in giving up authoritarianism, it sort of gave up any question of power. But I think that's a sort of pessimistic judgment. And really, partly how we deal with this is not to walk away from the question of authority,

but to precisely argue that proper authority is inherently anti-authoritarian. that the way in which we achieve a kind of anti-authoritarian politics is by constituting authority collectively, not by dispensing with the question of authority altogether and as we see with many of these movements which try to avoid the question of authority, it's not that they get rid of authority it's that it keeps coming back in different forms and so I think central to this central to

the next phase of the struggle really is to think about collective forms of authority and how they might be constituted okay I think I've said enough I don't know just take a few questions Thank you Mark. So please, questions, comments.

Do you currently now, in this process of getting rid of capitalism and everything, do you see a society or a country state something in all worlds, not just in Europe, that's maybe most similar to post-capitalism? Do you see something which is more similar? No. No, but I don't think that means that things are hopeless.

I think I think in a way I think part of the point of what I'm saying is that things are in a way close to it but they're this dystopian version of so in a way the most capitalistic societies are in a way the dystopian model of what could be post-capitalism So, I don't know, but it's kind of difficult that one. Yeah, because I was wondering, because today I was reading an article and something about our neighbor state Slovenia. They have also elections in December.

And there is some weird stuff that we've done, which we don't actually know. Just in a month, in one month, there is formed a new party called the Party for Changes. and they are appealing that the capitalism system has to change. They are the second party already, just in a month. They are a new party and just in a month they get, according to the second party, which will enter the parliament. So that's a little bit interesting. They don't have a real agenda, it's just that they think that people should more enroll in that kind of stuff, more in economics, that they should, the whole nation, they should decide what should they

do, in which way, what's the best for them, that kind of stuff. So, maybe it's a block. What? Maybe it's a block. A block, man. I don't know. I mean, Slovenians have a weird capitalistic history, so maybe it's not. Well, my general sense is that kind of void in mainstream global mainstream politics, really. That, you know, there's a gap, really. So we've got people on the streets, but we've got complete paralysis at the level of mainstream politics. And, you know, there doesn't seem to be any way of connecting the two at the moment. But that seems to me the job as it were. that might involve

repopulating existing parties or creating new ones. I mean, I think we have to be we have to imagine to at this point because everything's up for grabs in a way, it just hasn't been certainly for the last 30 years. I mean, the point about, I guess, about capitalist realism is not, is that, in a way, it was true that there's no realistic resistance to capital possible over the last 30 years. I think it's a victory so over determined on so many fronts during that period. But now things are just radically over. We just don't know. We just don't know what's going to happen. And quite clearly politicians have lost a grip. Quite clearly the capitalists

have lost a grip. Nobody has a grip. You know, And mind that line from Nick Lander That if someone Can impersonate a pilot It will be a comfort to the other passengers That's the situation That we're in at the moment isn't it No one driving And all of the things that Were Made neoliberalism Powerful I.e. politicians who are kind of Inart Unthinking Kind of mechanisms just to ensure the flow of capital, now that's completely dysfunctional. Because you actually need politicians who could think and act decisively. And then they're simply

plainly not capable of that. Nor capable of actual imagination. And so we're in a state of total vacuum and desert. Neoliberalism is discredited. which doesn't mean that it's going to die that took 400 years for the Roman Empire to die just because it's discredited doesn't mean it'll fall away but it does mean that there is this ideological junkyard desert which can be repopulated so did you want to come in? I had just a few comments enjoyed your talk very much um okay one one thing i mean i i live between monday and zaga so i wasn't there for the most

recent of the time i just managed to visit them one one afternoon and i had the sense incredibly optimistic sense um that what seemed to be happening was a kind of push towards reformism rather than revolutionary. And I would just like to get your feeling about, because I do have a notion that there has been a paradigm shift in the public sphere. One that might not be the kind of radical politics that many would have hoped for, but one that has a very kind of potential for reform. I happened to be there when, I think it was George Irving was doing a lecture on Plan B for Britain, a different kind of economic package.

And the other thing that, I don't know whether it's connected or not, but it seems to me that if the mainstream media in the UK and all over Europe now has actually started using the word capitalism, it hadn't. It didn't use people. So it's become a marked noun rather than, in that sense, I think there is a crack in the idea of the real rights. No, I see you're right. I think that the coverage readers was most powerful when it's not seen at all. And in fact, as soon as it was named, the point which it could be named was the point at which it was already weakening. Because it ceased to be a natural field of assumptions or a quasi-natural field of assumptions and became a kind of, revealed to be a set of ideological impositions as it were. And you're right, that's filtering through.

That's what I mean about there is no such thing as mainstream media in the sense of something which is absolutely fixed and monolithic in what it's doing. It's really noticeable, actually, after the Occupy thing in the States, how different the coverage of the Occupy thing in the UK was. It was a residual hegemonic power of the US, really, where part of that, I think, what Americans are doing, it's okay. We did see, even on things like Murdoch and Sky News, surprisingly equivocal verging on positive coverage of the Occupy London movement. I think in the context of the US, if nothing else, it achieves this kind of hegemonic

rebalancing. The impression you've got with the Tea Party in the US was that all of the kind of extra, all of the political forces outside of the electoral system were right wing. And that obviously pulls them, that kind of stabilises a kind of so-called centre ground which is massively to the right anyway. Whereas I think that you know what we're seeing with Occupy is a kind of focus for a kind of focus for hegemonic shift. But I think you have to believe in things like hegemony, you have to believe in things like media in order for that to be important. And what I'm saying is some of the rhetoric around some of the neo-anarchist

rhetoric around Occupy would disdain both of those things, they don't think they're important what is important is some kind of face-to-face localism or whatever and for me, in spite of all that it actually is interventions in media terrain and the BBC economic status of Paul Mason has referred to Occupy as a brand You can imagine many people involved in bristling at that. I think that is a mark of its success. That it is a highly successful kind of meme that can spread even through the hostile terrain of capitalism. I just wanted to ask

in search of this post-capitalist paradigm. When somebody asks you if you know of any state that's similar to it, what do you compare it to? I mean, those candidate states. Is there anything you can... You know, some paradigm that basically gives you a madness against which you... Something like Iceland? No, no, I don't mean negative comparison, but actually positive comparison. When you were asked if there is some... What do you mean by positive comparison? Meaning that not a mismatch with capitalism, but an actually positive match with some criteria.

Are there any criteria that actually give you some guidelines towards what a post-capitalist system or a reformed capitalist system should be? besides just the things that, you know, the obvious effects of capital history lately? Okay. But it would be one in which, you know, a simple level of capital was subdued and capital wasn't dominating the country. You know, where there was... where capitalism wasn't dominating the country, but there were all the achievements of technological modernity.

Where there was a sort of strong public sphere, where people's lives weren't dominated by work they didn't want to do, where there was some kind of security. people are not in conditions of constant precariousness where for instance cultural work could be rewarded in an adequate way these are some of the features of a post-capitalist society capitalist dystopia sounds like capitalist dystopia

why is it capitalist though? Well, because it, you know, okay, maybe that's a good response. No, no, no, what are you saying is what makes capitalism capitalism? But you still retain, you know, like most of those, most of those, how do I say, fruits of capitalism, you tend to go after them, to still retain them, just flush to capitalism. Well, I don't know what's capitalistic. That's what I'm trying to say about the whole thing. What is capitalistic about them? I mean, okay, that's... I mean, what... A simple level of capitalism means the domination of capital over workers.

So what about what I just said involves is capitalistic in that sense? You forget to mention the social ownership of the needs of production. Well, okay. That's a kind of given like that, I suppose. In the sense that it's, you know, how do we stop capital donating? It's the preconditions of all of those things, isn't it? How do we stop capital dominating all that there is a lot. How do we achieve any of those things without some model of public ownership? There is public ownership

I think rather than this old one of the state running everything. Like I said, the state would have to play some role in it. social ownership then I prefer that term to you know nothing to say I don't think it's possible I mean, I will refer back to Slovenia I know you hate it but when they started to sell their companies beginning of the 90s from the fall of Yugoslavia, everything was state owned and everything they had a really excellent system every company and everything was actually given to the citizens and then they were the owners and they were selling among themselves shares and actually

public ownership and then we have shares to workers which is yeah but that's why we sell to the tycoons Slovenians didn't sell to tycoons you have still companies who are actually citizen or state-owned they're like health insurance is owned by the citizens if you have health insurance then you're also an owner. So you will pay money for your shares and you will get ... How is that not privatization? I don't know. It's a privatization, but it's a firm that is a individual. Share-off. Yeah, yeah. I think that it's kind of an ironic twist that petty consumerism should become the test

of failed anti-capitalist attitudes when it's actually the grand consumerism of capitalism that has triggered, or the failure of the grand consumerism of capitalism that has triggered the current crisis that is the housing bubble. So maybe instead of just like thinking in terms of lividable attachments to mobile phones and coffees, we should start advocating liberal attachments to housing and work, which is a definite limit to the capacity, the current capacity of capitalism. And that immediately

leads us to the question of how do we provision those kinds of goods to the collective desire for that. If we want to twist around things or if we want to play with the notion of consumerism, we should advocate that. Just think big. The biggest thing. Everybody should have a bill up. Please try to provide that. That's the public system that we need. No, I agree. But I think the point is about that. The point about Starbucks is not about consumerism, though. That it only seems to be about that. It's actually about desire for a certain kind of space, etc. So I don't think it is about petty consumerism at all, but

I agree with you. I agree with you that obviously that is part of the question of libidinizing the public would be countering the massive de-libidinization of social housing, etc. Even though there's a massive de-libidinization the penalisation programme against social housing but now as we were discussing earlier it costs a quarter of a million pounds to get a flat in a former council house block in London. So you get the worst of all worlds actually in some ways. But yeah I mean the easiest part of the project I think would be exactly that that making social housing desirable

I do agree about work as well. A lot of the focus in late capitalist societies is on the consolations that one gets outside work, given that work itself is accepted as being miserable. That's part of the privatization of everyday life. that since where we're spending most of our life, albeit in some debased public form, work is always to some extent public, and that is where we are most miserable, and the consolations for that are to be found in a private space.

But instead, refocusing on the work, kind of thing. And which would then refocus people's demands in respect of work. The reason people, probably the reason people accept poor conditions of work is that that isn't where the focus of their lives is. They don't expect it to be there. So, I agree on both points. I think that maybe the point would be, like a more serious point would be, how do you create public imaginary and public desire for transitions that, for instance,

David Harvey desires for capitalism? Like give people a chance for normal living and take care of the environmental impact. And then you are basically moving toward a transition of capitalism. You need to kind of start from the systematic makeup of capitalism and try to think how do you break up that. but rather how do you create pressure on the system to start transforming in that direction and then lead it into, well, maybe an impasse where it has to change or rather where it transforms successfully or I don't know. No, I agree it's about creating a public imaginary,

but that involves competing on this terrain of the big engineering, I think. You know, it involves making things desirable. involves making people think that a public sphere is desirable not in an accepting as binary where we're on the side of dreary ethical worthiness versus exciting glossy glossy capitalism we have to both say that this new kind of publicly owned culture would be more exciting and desirable and that the ostensible gloss and, you know, this enough of essence of capitalism is actually miserable.

You know, surely both at the same time. So maybe I just wanted also to come up to David Harvey. It's always been, struck me, you see, Harvey is a, so you have a geographer who is always so attentive about, also about the spatial emergence of neoliberalism. which always for him in plural. But then when he comes to talk about the libido, which has been captured by neoliberals, and he always takes it as a kind of uniform. So it's interesting, so there is no geography of libido in Harvard, so now come to my point. But now, also to your comment, as a kind of comment of provocation for your lecture. So if you look up into the history of social struggle

from the 60s in Europe up until now, I could say, okay, you have a kind of story which is kind of anglophone, which is UK based. But then everything you have told me reminded me everything about like the German or the French way of the long march through the institution after 68. And then of course you have the geography of the socialist states like Central European or Eastern European. So my question now would be, now everything you have told me or you have told us, how does it differ from the program of the long march through the institution like has been at least imperative for the French or the German or for the Benelopes or for the Scandinavians intellectuals from the 60s on.

So does it differ or is it just you now coming to terms with it? I don't know. I might if it might not. But I think that... Okay, from... I'll take from the Anglophone perspective, I think. So the Anglophone story will be... Okay, so we had the 60s. That went wrong. That went wrong and notably led to rise of neoliberalism. and the break up of the old left gave the left

no traction whatsoever anymore and the only way that was going to end up is something like something like new labour so you're left with an impasse of either you know what is I mean capitalist realism is really about new labour you could say in a way the foundations of something like new labour because capitalist realism is meaningless as a concept for neoliberals. Obviously neoliberals are capitalist realists. You know, that's what they do. And it's really, the interesting thing is about the left succumbing to capitalist realism as it were. But then I think the issue is the challenge of post-borderism

and as part of this question of the anti-authoritarianism. And that's, you know, not seeing post-forism A, as just something negative. On nostalgia for forist conditions which allowed, you know, social democracy, etc. And, you know, B, accepting that because it was driven by desires, post-forism was partly driven by the desires of workers. So that, you know, it's workers themselves who didn't want to be trapped into the kind of compacted post-for-dism, which was, you know, order in exchange for security, you could say.

And then, it seems to me that then the problem is, well, once you've got that, once you've got those, once you've got post-for-dism, once you've got the desires of workers for post-for-dism, does that automatically mean that things have to end up with capitalist realism. So I think then, I think the answer to that is no, but that does involve, I think, returning to these questions of perhaps long marcher institutions on one level, returning to some of the debates, issues raised in Italy with autonomous in the 17s. also returning to

a lot of the issues raised by in the UK by Marxism today, the New Times project the New Times project which is historically very interesting in the UK because a lot of the people some of the people involved in that went on to become the key architects of new labour but then there's something else involved there I think, which was this idea of a post-forwardist leftism I think the answer is sort of yes and no to your question in some sense. It partly is a case of accepting those things that other parts of the world have accepted before.

But it's not just a case of return. Since the level of intense... The intensity of late capitalism in the UK, I think, just does make that difference. And also the decomposition. You're starting from this position of massive decomposition now. You're not starting from a position of where there's an existing workers movement which could take a step back. You're starting from a massively decomposed position where there is hardly any kind of effective working movement at all. So even if one is to learn that lesson, it's not the same kind of position that one is learning it from.

that's the that's the one important difference. Just I enjoyed very much your comments on temporality and modernity and maybe to connect a little bit to Peter's question or the kind of location of the question I guess in how geography so here in a country that is in a so-called transition, whatever we're transiting towards. I think there's probably quite a few people in this room who remember communism as it was in Yugoslavia. And I think the official rhetoric at the time of communism was that this was modern.

and it was in advance of the West. But communist realism also produced an official truth and unofficial truth. So what people knew was that we were actually that good. Or what I think the common belief would have been. So just as a kind of addition to this kind of time-traveling games, if Croatia and most of these countries are now in this kind of void of a transition towards something that's falling apart, this in a way might have been articulated in the past as a lack of being, of relatedness of some kind of stuff. But in a way this offers an opportunity

to kind of hopscotch beyond the kind of the appropriation of modernity by neoliberalism I think can be completely possibly circumvented circumvented I'm sorry, what do you mean by saying that the official metric of communism was the ideology that was more advanced? Official record. Because technologically, of course, it wasn't. Yeah, well, I was saying there was a distinction between the official record. Yeah, but it seems to me all the talks.

But we have people who are waiting to suggest questions. Oh, yeah. I'll give you a chance to everyone. Well, yeah, to come back to this question of what cultural production in Yugoslavia because I think we have to think of historical terms of different times of industrial and cultural progress in Yugoslavia and probably at some point things were more advanced than in some parts of the West and at some point they were a bit less advanced but we have to think of this in terms of specific economic relations between Yugoslavia and the rest of the world at a certain stage of its development or its dissolution. But

what I wanted to ask you is what is specifically important for me in your speeches. How, well, how do we, how do we grasp this as something as well un-egalitarian as desire in a collectively egalitarian and universalizing way. But why is desire un-egalitarian? Well, it is. I mean, in some specific psychoanalytical tradition, desire is something that is inherently egalitarian. It's not egalitarian in itself. There is nothing egalitarian in desire. It's always

something that produces a sort of antagonism towards, I mean, it's something that is, it's never, it's direct product is never something that equalizes things, right? It produces some sort of difference and some sort of antagonism. Well, I mean, but I think that if you take that line, it's really dangerous, I think. I mean, in a sense, you're back to Freud's comments on communism in civilization and discontent, when he says this kind of, that's his argument against it, actually, isn't it?

That in a way, well, you know, questions of libido and et cetera will never be resolved in this level of, but always disrupt any possibility of achieving this kind of politically egalitarian goals. I just think that is conservative. I just think it is a conservative model of desire. I think that the significance of the importance now of looking at things like Deleuze and Guattari for instance, is that they pose this question

the question of the relationship between the two I think that if we I think the tendency has been to think of them as post-Marxist or post-communist or whatever and so that leads to the idea that the ideologist of capitalism etc etc but I think that's only because of his underlying kind of comedy Stalinism actually it would be good if the 60s hadn't happened at all it would be good if you could get rid of all these questions about desire and you know but you can't

I don't think I think it has to be seriously confronted, otherwise I think we are just feeding into capitalist realism because what are you saying, you're going to extinguish desire, and that your political project would involve extinguishing desire, that is what people like that's what Louise Mensch thinks, isn't it? that only capitalism can liberate desire then I think we have to think about ways in which actually desire us is always in some sense collectively constituted. Isn't it true that Frederick Jameson says we've never been in a world

that's more collective than this one. Everything that we have is the product of so many hands etc. yet, you know, the desire and the collectivity are not necessarily opposed to one. I think there's another question which is about I think the deeper question which is, not necessarily deeper than yours but alongside it, which is about the relation of death right, the relation of as it was, desire for security with the question of the death drive as it were. Because I think that, again, I think that part of the problem of

this simplistic aesthetics around agrarianism, organism, anarcho-aprimatism, etc. An underlying fantasy of that is a world without death drive. A world of equilibrium, kind of stasis, etc. a world at an effect where desire had been extinguished but I think that is it's both impossible and it's defeatist in a way to want to aim for that and so for me the question is how do we reconcile the dynamism of the death drive

actually with questions about security and justice but I think to think that they are inherently antithetical I think will only feed the idea that capitalism is the only possible way because capitalism is then based on precisely that idea that well you can't get rid of desire but desire is inegalitarian and this is the best system for managing that inegalitarianism as it were My question, maybe I didn't formulate my question very well. Okay. But what I was trying to really say, I think your tackling of the question of desire is very productive because it takes a very strong opposition towards, on the one side, maybe

a very conservative Freudian and Lacanian theory of desire, where desire is something that really is an egalitarian. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And on the other side of some sort of an obscurantist Reichen theory of freeing our libidinal energy, freeing our desire, which always inevitably fails because desire is inagilitarian in a way. I mean because it shows that desire is inagilitarian. But I think what is interesting to me in your project is really this, if I understand it correctly, this point where you try to to think of collectively controlling desire in an egalitarian and a very

universalizing or universalist way of trying to develop a universalizing egalitarian project that also has its own Another example then I think is like Disneyland. This is a classic one. Why would you go to Disneyland? Disneyland is a totally managed environment. It's a weird phenomenon. You pay to go to something which is, all of the features of which are utterly disdained by the capitalist ideology around it. Do you know what I mean? Why is it really desirable for children? because it has only, it is a totally managed and sort of planned place.

You know what I mean? It's an example of, again, a degraded example perhaps. But it's also a place of discovery, sort of. It is planned, but it's also a place of discovery. I mean, if you don't want to plan. Yeah. Like in nature, you don't want to plan. But it's just an example, albeit a degraded one, the way in which design and planning management etc are. On the darker side of capitalism it's been manipulated to keep certain people at the place of power and control but I think the thing is that that kind of control has to be dropped in order to produce this kind of system that you're buying. and also this wasteland. Everything is perhaps sort of a primordial soup of combining all of humans on earth consciousness

through internet and communication into something that's... Just a second, I sort of lost my way of thought. But just we have to perhaps, it's something we have to discover and see in the process what will happen and leave certain things structured but also certain things free for interactive evolution. In society? Yeah. No, no, no, it's a question. It's a question of, you know, since nobody now wants to go back to fantasy and totally

planned society. I think Jameson's really good on this the dialectical inversions the way in which we've got a society where diversity choice etc are massively emphasized yet culture has never been more homogenous in the US and UK and so to flip that around so what are the kind of standard, what sort of levels of standardization, security, et cetera, what we need in actually in order to produce diversity and novelty. I mean, because we have the rhetoric of diversity and novelty in late capitalism, but the reality

of a massively stalled and national repetitious and retrospective culture actually. And I think that's, there's no accident that that is related to, you know, the removal of social democratic security, I think. So there's no inherent opposition between, I hate the word creativity, because of the creative industries in the UK. But there's no inherent opposition between creativity and standardization. That standardization, certain kinds of bureaucracy, etc., can be precisely preconditions for creativity.

We've definitely seen the opposite. We've definitely seen the opposite in the UK, which is kind of lab. Neoniberal experimental lab, I think, for how far things can go. in terms of really removing kind of, removing almost any space that, outside work and convalescence. That really is what, that is what the UK is reduced to now. That, you know, part of the reason why the UK culture is so, so moribund, so moribund, is a simple thing. and this question of housing that Tom raised is really, in a way, the overriding factor.

If you want to look at one reason why UK culture has become progressively more conservative, retrospective, you could simply look at the rise of property in a cultural hub like London. So if you live in London, you have to spend so much time working that you just don't have any energy or time for reflection or to kind of absorb yourself in projects. This is the key feature, I think, of kind of cyberspatial communicative capitalism. As Franco Barati puts it, what you have is, from the point of view of capital,

it's kind of, as it were, smooth flows. But from the point of view of workers, time is cut up time is cut up into these microphones and you have this kind of attentional dispersal at all times that you can't get absorbed in anything because you have to be checking what messages have come in one hand is always on your smartphone, whatever you're trying to concentrate on. In terms of conditions of production of art or whatever, the broader sense of art or art or culture, this is very bad, isn't it? The arts requires absorption. And these conditions massively military against any kind of

talk, actually. And it's a systemic attack on this space outside business and work. And that's the real significance of the attack on funding for higher education, etc. That, you know, all of the spaces where counterculture could be built in the UK have been, you know, have been systematically attacked. So, you know, the spaces for, spaces outside work, where you could drift and become absorbed, no one has any time for that anymore. And, you know, that's because

that those conditions of standardization and security are removed. You don't have three years at university where you can be out of this time of fake urgencies. Capitalism, late capitalism is always imposing these fake urgencies. The significance of which is just to enslave you into this constant short-term temporality, which disables capacity for agency and critical thought. Sorry, it's a long one. We can end here. It's very interesting. It's two hours here, so I think it's...

Thank you.