Hello everyone, my name is Rhys Kuczynski. This is Simple Philosophy where we simplify philosophers to help you better understand life. In today's video we're going to be taking a look at the work of Mark Fisher. Now Mark Fisher was well known for his cultural commentaries under the K-Punk moniker. in particular used to deconstruct and analyse and review various aspects of contemporary culture including music, film, art and literature. He's also known to be quite a controversial figure but in this video what I really want to focus on are his philosophical concepts. So today we're going to be focusing on the concept of capitalist realism, his development of Derrida's concept of
hauntology and his latter-day concept of acid communism. If you enjoy the video please don't forget to like and subscribe. Also leave me a comment about with your thoughts in the comment box below. Timestamps are available in the description and without further ado let's get into it. I think before we get into the detail of Mark Fisher's philosophy it might be quite useful to start with who Mark Fisher is because I imagine a lot of people who are watching this may not have heard of Mark Fisher before. So I think what we'll do is we'll start by discussing who Mark Fisher is and then moving into his key ideas and his key works and philosophies. So Fisher completed his PhD at Warwick University and he was a member of the now heavily mythologised
and somewhat highly celebrated cybernetic culture research unit whilst he was at the university. Now Now, this is quite a unique group in a way, which is headed by two key thinkers, which was Sadie Platt and then eventually Nick Land, who took over afterwards. And what they would do is they would combine various disciplines such as science fiction, continental philosophy and various other literature studies in order to analyse the current situation and also to potentially provide new futures and new ideas for us going ahead. One of the ideas that it's heavily associated with is the idea of accelerationism. So instead of slowing down things in capitalism or reforming things in capitalism, they should be accelerated and intensified in order to create a new world or a new type of society at the end of it.
that's kind of one of the key ideas that comes out of this unit. Other ideas include one of my favourite of Nicklands which is the argument that capitalism is an AI sent from the future which operates itself and that merely what we should do is leave it alone and allow it to devour everything so that we can then create this new future which reminds me of Akira if you've ever seen Akira and there's this huge blob in the middle and that's essentially a representation of capitalism as it grows itself and develops itself and we just kind of have to do its thing and destroy itself so we can then create something new. Now the CCRU was eventually shut down allegedly due to Nickland having a bit of a breakdown alleged by the university and they all went their separate
ways but this idea of looking at the future or a new way of developing social reality or social relations is something that's going to dictate a lot of what we're going to look at in the rest of this video. So hugely influential on the work of Fisher as we go forward. After this, Fisher also became a FE philosophy lecturer. So he worked in a further education college, which in England is usually for students between the ages of 16 through to 18 before they go to university. Feel you there, Mark. And then he also, one of the things he's most influential for is the K-Punk Alter Ego blog, which he ran, which is basically a cultural criticism blog where he uses philosophy and different ideas in order to deconstruct various cultural phenomenons ranging from
music to film to literature to magazines to pulp fiction and various other things. So hugely influential and quite a lot of his work is located around the K-Punk alter ego and the cultural criticism blog. So it's a new way of doing philosophy compared to the other philosophers which we've been looking at in previous video. Now the first of Fisher's concepts is the idea of capitalist realism and capitalist realism is probably one of Fisher's more popular concepts which he uses throughout of his work when discussing contemporary culture and contemporary society. But in order to understand capitalist realism we need to understand the historical context in which Fisher is creating this concept out of. Now there's an idea in Britain definitely and
possibly in the US as well and in most of Western culture, that previous historical periods were better than the periods that we are currently living in now. In particular, in most of these societies, especially in Britain, there's an idea that from the 1950s right through to the 1970s, society was a lot better. There was more money about, there was a prominent and healthy culture, there were different ideas, there were different youth movements, there was constant cultural change which showed that things were developing progressively. You have groups like the Beatles for example, the development of rock and roll with Elvis Presley as well as punk rock and various other sub-genres that come around in that particular period. Now by the time we get to the end of the Cold War there is a popular idea which was brought about by a book published by Francis
Fukuyama called The End of History and The Last Man and what this book argued which certainly was prominent in the public psyche at the time, whether people realised it or not, was that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the end of history, that there would be no more huge debates about what society would look like, about how the world would look, because as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism and liberal capitalism at that had won the day. Liberal capitalism was the only game in town. It had destroyed all of the discussions, all of their ideologies, and it had won. Therefore, there was no need to take up any new big ideas, and Fukuyama predicts that there would be no other big ideas as a result of the
failure of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Fukuyama now, liberal democracy is the only game in town, and we see this reflected in a lot of 1990s politics, particularly in the Democratic Party in the US and the Labour Party in Britain, where they were no longer interested in the abstract ideas of socialism or communism anymore, or even some of the key ideas of social democracy for the Democratic Party in America. They were more interested in realism, what works, and converting everyone to this kind of liberal capitalist democracy. So Fukuyama's ideas were very much influential whether people realised it or not at the time. But another aspect of Fukuyama's book is the idea that as a result of us living in the end of history, as a result of us living in
the end times, people are no longer actors of their own destiny. They have lost the ability to create new types of societies and actually take hold in forming new institutions and developing new ideas. We have now become political spectators. There is no point taking action because there is nothing new to create. As I said, liberal capitalism is the only game in town. So we are just spectators to events as they happen. We just merely watch them happen. And we're very passive about their happening because we know that fundamentally it's not going to change anything. that how things currently are is the way they will always be as a result and that this can lead to a bit of an issue which Fish is going to pick up in his later writings. Associated with this idea
during the period that Fukuyama publishes his book is the idea of postmodern culture. Now postmodern culture is different from postmodern philosophy. Postmodern culture is generally defined by Jameson's book Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism which is that our culture is very much dominated by the ideas of pastiche which is the combination of different periods of history intermingling with our present. To put it in a cultural sense if we use the example of dance music for example which was popular in the illegal raves at the time it is taking music from other periods using it as samples and manipulating it to create something new. So an aspect of post-modern culture is taking elements of the past and remixing them or remodifying them in order to create
something new. Hip-hop and gangster rap will be another example of genres that were doing this at the time that were particularly popular too. So this idea of post-modern pastiche is very prominent in our culture along with the idea of relativism which is the indifference that there could be any idea of a universal truth that things are basically subjective and so therefore we are indifferent to or at least critical of anyone who is suggesting any ideas of broad change or any ideas of change in general because everything is fundamentally subjective right so there's an intermingling of these two things you've got the end of history complemented by post-modern culture the final element which comes to define the 1990s but is emerging in the 1980s is neoliberalism
And neoliberalism is best personified in Thatcher's quote, which is the idea that there is no alternative or Tina, as it was sometimes referred to. Now, there is no alternative referred to the idea, the economic arguments of Thatcherism or Reaganomics. That there is no alternative to the neoliberal economic model that is being proposed because the socialism of the 1970s had not worked and it had failed. This is the only way forward. This is the only game in town. And neoliberalism in this context is generally defined by the withering away of public welfare services, such as public health insurance or public health care, out of work benefits, social housing, things like that, in favour of finance capital.
Now, for a more detailed discussion of neoliberalism, please see my video on neoliberalism. But for the context of what we're talking about here, that's as much as we need in this context. So we've got three things intermingling which come to define the culture of the 1990s. We've got the idea of the end of history. We've got the development of postmodern culture and irony. And we've got neoliberalism as the only economic model and the only economic game in town. Now, these cultural changes or these cultural differences in the 1990s that have emerged have allowed Fisher to come up with the hypothesis that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism. And this is a quote which is attributed to both Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.
And essentially what it's arguing is that we have now lost our ability to dream. We have lost our ability to dream of any other alternative apart from the world that we are living in now. And this comes at a huge political, economic and psychological cost to us as a human species, which allows Fisher to develop that concept of capitalist realism. Capitalist realism is a concept which Fisher argues dominates the psyche of every individual, whether they are liberal, conservative, communist, socialist, whatever, which completely dictates our way of thinking and our mode of understanding in the 21st century. and he defines it as the belief that first of all capitalism is the only viable economic and
political system that can exist it is the only one that makes sense and that's why if you talk to people on the street say for example you talk about a one nation conservative nation or if you talk about a communist nation people will say well that's all very well and good and it sounds good in theory but it's just not going to happen in reality is it because the argument has been put forward, that the only viable political system there can be is what we already have now. There is no alternative to you voting every couple of years for your officials and finance capital running as it does. So that's the first element of capitalist realism. The second belief which links to it is the idea that it is impossible to imagine any coherent alternative to it. And
that links back to what I was just saying, that if you try to propose an alternative economic system or an alternative model or maybe going back into guilds, for example, people will say, oh, well, that's very nice and that's all well and good. I agree with you in principle, but the reality is it's just not going to happen. Things are always going to be as they are. There is no alternative to what we already have. And for Fisher, he argues that both of these things have created a psyche, which he refers to as capitalist realism, that again, we have lost the ability to dream as a result. Now capitalist realism he argues is reflected in various aspects of our culture whether that be in film, whether that be in books, whether that be in our day-to-day lives. But I just want to talk about a couple which he picks up on in the book. The first
idea which Fisher picks up on is capitalist realism's reflection in culture. There's been a lot of post-apocalyptic or futuristic films that have emerged since 9-11 and also since the 2008 financial crisis. We have films such as Children of Men, for example, or more recently Blade Runner 2049. And he argues what's interesting about these films is that even though they are trying to depict a future, there tends to be no image beyond capitalism, or there tends to be no ideas or no our understandings beyond the capitalist system which they inhibit. So therefore, are they really futuristic? They don't show us an alternative vision apart from what we are already experiencing,
like some kind of dystopian fantasy, which is a reflection of our reality, as opposed to an optimistic image of the 1950s. And that's a good kind of example to go off. If you think about the 1950s, for example, people will be talking about colonies on the moon, they'll be talking about eating moon pie, maybe eating pills instead of actually eating food, maybe working less hours, having robots in our house, robots as domestic servants, whereas nowadays most people don't have that vision anymore and that's also reflected in a lot of films. There seems to be no futuristic image represented in culture beyond that which we already have. Another aspect of capitalist realism's reflection in culture is in popular gangster films. So whether it's Scarface, Good Face or Netflix's
The Irishman, what we tend to see in these films is that the characters see capitalism for what it really is. They keep it real. They see society for how it really is, minus the pleasantries, regardless of the abstractions, the idea that underneath we are basically just carnal, animalistic, Hobbesian subjects where we are in a survival of the fittest situation. The best quote that I can give would be Tony Montana from Capitalism when he goes, what is capitalism? Fuck you. Which would be a really good example of capitalist realism in action. They understand exactly what the system is, exactly how the system plays. And that is how it has to be. That is how you get ahead. You have to be this reality gangster figure, which is then reflected back into you guys. I suppose Peaky Blinders would be another example to that as well.
Fisher also identifies gangster rap and hip hop and its eclipsing of rock and metal music in the mainstream charts as another example of capitalist realism. Because one of the things Fisher highlights is that in gangster rap, there is an obsession with keeping it real, with making money when you can't get any job, how you get by day to day. You only have to listen to early Jay-Z or Kanye West music to kind of get these vibes and these understandings. All of this reflect the idea that capitalism is the only economic system and there is no coherent alternative to it. So therefore, you have to play it in a dog eat dog manner, which again, for Fisher, reflects the idea and hegemony of capitalist realism. Fisher also argues that the impact of capitalist realism has had a detrimental effect on the mental health of the population,
in particular, the mental health of young people in our population. And he argues that many young people tend to be resigned to their fate of capitalist realism, that they realise there is no alternative future that they could have. Unlike the children of the 1960s who were potentially hippies or there were mods, rockers earlier than that, or even the punk rockers who kind of had more of an alternative future that they wanted, particularly if you listen to the early clash. Young people today, he argues, don't really have this vision anymore. That capitalist realism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is nothing else that I can expect in my future. There is no hope. There is no opportunity. There is just what I am experiencing now. And as a result of this, Fisher argues that many young people are aware that things are bad. They're aware of things like climate change.
They're aware of political corruption. They're aware of poor economic planning. They're aware of the lack of housing, lack of jobs, jobs being supplanted for AI and all of these various different things. But they also know that there is nothing that they can do about it. They've become completely impotent as a result. There's just a complete sense of hopelessness. And there's also a contradiction in their day to day lives, too. So Fisher uses the example of the education system and how this can perpetuate mental health issues in a capitalist realist context. Now, there is an issue, he argues, between the disciplinary apparatuses of the school where you are expected to come in at nine o'clock, read at a certain time, eat at a certain time, act at a different time, read for certain periods, do maths for certain periods.
And then their consumer status, where they are encouraged to create data, to be on their phones all the time, to constantly be engaged, constantly keep up to date with their contacts, constantly update people with what they are doing and develop their own cultural capital and their own relations and identity on the Internet. And for Fisher, he argues this accelerates the mental health conditions as a result. There is a young people find themselves crushed between these two systems that has a detrimental effect on their education and their general well-being and their ideas of the future, too. So, for example, he argues that many students that he worked with when he was an F.E. philosophy professor struggle with things like anxiety, depression and in particular dyslexia, and that they struggle to focus on anything for extended periods of time as a result of this.
As a result of that, they just don't develop the skills that they need. Compare this or contrast this with how the education system runs in capitalist realism, where funding is allocated relating to the numbers of people they have in the classroom or the amount of money that they get based on results. What he refers to as market Stalinism, where there is an increased pressure on the teachers, which then increases pressure on the students, while students are in this cultural bind in a system that refuses to move. There's also an issue relating to education and young people, which he argues has left them with no final destination. There is no clear job process for them to go into. In fact, education has become a lifelong process, which they constantly have to engage with. So they end up thinking, well, what's the point in doing this anyway if I'm going to be here indefinitely and forever?
It also leads Fisher to a kind of political point relating to this, which is whilst he accepts that many mental health issues are related to chemical imbalances within the brain. There is also a social element which can accelerate mental health, too, that he argues within the book. And things like the education system and things like getting a job, the lack of opportunities, lack of future. And this bind also contributes to mental health. And when people go to discuss their mental health with doctors or in the NHS, it's that capitalist realism idea. Again, it's seen as a private issue. It's your personal issue and it's nothing to do with the system. And Fisher argues that we should actually start to question the relationship with the wider system and its creation of mental health.
So it's a mix of both private issues and collective communal issues, which are creating these anxieties, too, which he argues that we should probably politicise and start to look at more in-depthly as a result. The final impact of capitalist realism is on politics in general. And Fisher argues that as a result of capitalist realism, politics has become stagnant, or we're currently in a period of political stagnation, regardless of the election or previous election of Trump or Boris Johnson or any of these other radicals that have been elected in recent years. Now, he argues that both liberalism and conservatism in mainstream politics have been resigned to capitalist realism, whether it was the new Labour government, whether it's Boris Johnson. Now, there's the idea that capitalism is the only game in town and that things can only run in a neoliberal way.
So that includes austerity, so cutting back public services in order to pay the debt and fix the economy. He also argues that both of these ideas, both the Labour Party and Conservative Party, Democrats, Republicans, they are essentially backwards looking. So for the Conservatives in Britain, their ideal vision would be 1950s Britain. In terms of the left, there's something that I like to refer to as left wing conservatism, where they're constantly looking back to the heydays of the welfare state between 1945 right through to the early 1970s. And they're constantly wanting to get back to that stage, regardless of whether they are conservative or whether they are liberal. They want to go back to a past that no longer exists instead of looking to the future and looking forward. Fisher also argues that both of these groups tend to be overly bureaucratic in terms of creating more red tape,
whether that be through the market or whether that be through increased public services, increased regulation, which creates further problems for creating a future or looking at new ways of doing things. because the bureaucracy stops you from thinking of new ideas or potentially acting in new ways, whether you're running your business, whether you're a creative person or whatever. The key example that he uses to highlight this are the responses to the 2008 banking crisis, where governments, regardless of whether they were liberal or conservative, were more likely to bail out the banks or give the bankers a bailout than they would ever conceive of allowing them to collapse and allow a new society to form out of the ashes. So therefore, they have vested interest in making sure that capitalist realism and the system that we the present that we currently have continues and maintains and constantly restores itself.
On the other hand, he also critiques anti-capitalist movements of the left and the right. But in particular, he angles his shotgun towards the anti-capitalist left. He argues it's composed of two elements. First of all, there is the Leninist superego, which I think we can probably relate to the Socialist Workers Party, where they stand outside on street corners trying to sell you Trotskyist papers, for example. But it's this idea that we need to ignore suffering. We need to address them, but we need to ignore the suffering of people that is really happening now because the faith in the eventual revolution will resolve these issues. Things are going to get bad. Recessions are going to get bad. But don't worry. whilst you're suffering in the meantime eventually there will be a revolution and we will overcome it so this is what Fish is critiquing and he argues that this is the Leninist superego that it's just
this faith in revolution that will eventually come that keeps them going the other element of the anti-capitalist left is the corporate anti-capitalism or he refers to as corporate anti-capitalism and this essentially can take place in various forms one of the main forms that Fisher identifies is Hollywood films. So films such as Wall-E and the Muppets allow us to live out our anti-capitalist fantasies whilst actually continuing to engage and perpetuate the system. So for example by watching Wall-E and understanding that potentially capitalism is destroying the planet and understanding that capitalism has led us to be alienated and all these various different things, by seeing that and accepting that we know that in our hearts it's bad so therefore when we
go out tomorrow and we buy our new cars or our new TVs or whatever, we can feel a kind of disassociation with it or that we've done our bit. It's kind of like when Zizek talks about environmental activism, where people put their Coke cans on the side and they do their recycling and they feel they have done enough without recognising the impact that oil companies have on the environment, as well as the production of meat in agriculture and various things like that. So Hollywood films or this corporate anti-capitalism doesn't actually solve anything. It merely tries to address the issues in order to distract us from doing something more concrete. Another example of this relates to a friend of mine who works for the LGBT movements and noted that in the 1980s, when he first started going, they were quite radical.
And they would talk about philosophy and different ideas and different ways to conduct relationships and identities. Whereas nowadays LGBT movements and pride parades are sponsored by companies such as Nando's, Sainsbury's and all these various other things where you can get a discount off if you go to the parade. And so it's been completely brought back into the system. What Deleuze would refer to as a re-territorializing, something that might have initially threatened social relations, has been remolded and turned into profits for the elite. both of those ideas link to Fisher's criticism that these fail to actually offer any coherent alternative beyond what there already is and it also reflects Zizek's argument that the left today and the anti-capitalist left in particular even though certain people are worried about them
they probably are the more Fuki-armorists than the current right who are in governments around the world which might be potentially one of the reasons why they've been quite successful in elections in recent years, that many of the liberal and left movements are resigned to this idea that capitalism maybe is the only game in town and they have been as susceptible to capitalist realism as the liberals and the conservatives. Coming on this point of capitalist realism and politics a little bit further, Mark Fisher also wrote a rather controversial essay called Exiting The Vampire's Castle, where he critiques liberal academia's identity politics, which has certainly accelerated or at least has become more prominent in public consciousness in recent years. Now,
he argues that in universities, the main ideas is to place people into identity camps, that you define yourself by your identity, your race, your gender, your whatever, your sexuality is more important than other aspects of your identity. So you prioritise those marginalised issues over more collective or wider aspects of your identity as a result. So it's like someone identifying as a vegan and that veganism becomes their main identity, even though they are probably part of more complex networks and complex groups to their identity, they are corralled into these identity camps and that's what comes to label them. Now, as a result of this, he argues that we cannot understand each other according to the universities and academia unless we are from the same identity
group. So if I was a vegan for example the only other person that had the right to understand me and critique me would be another vegan as opposed to someone who was a meat eater they wouldn't be able to engage with me and if they did that would be considered oppressive. So he's fully critiquing these kind of identity politics or call out culture in a general way in this essay. He also argues that research that tends to be conducted at universities now, even though it claims to be structural, realistically, it tends to only be delivered at an individual level. What's a kind of more interactionist theory? What do key individualist concepts mean to individual people, as opposed to looking at how they fit into a wider structure and a wider culture that they might be part of?
So, where Fisher argues that when he worked at universities, were any discussions of class or the idea that not only might you be a white vegan, you might also be part of the working class, which is wider, bigger and a more structural analysis, which tends to be scoffed at by the academic elite as a result. And then you tend to be condescended to as a result that you are prioritising class interests or collective identities over individual identities people claim is oppressive. And Fisher wants to call that out and critique it. He also argues that this understanding that has come from universities or this way of researching or analysing identities and culture has led to call out culture, particularly on Twitter and online, which essentially makes solidarity
impossible, where instead of checking someone's privilege potentially or just saying, oh, I think you've got that wrong. Can you think of things from my point of view? The person ends up being condemned and then labelled as this negative person until they are eventually crushed into the around and ostracized from all things as a result. So he argues that current academia and the current education system is like a vampire's castle and that we need to escape it. And it links to this idea of capitalist realism because we can't build new futures. We can't speak to each other and talk about regardless of where you stand. We can't talk about a new world that we might want to create. We can't talk of getting out of this situation because we're too concerned with our own identity and our own individuality. And that links as much to the political right as much as it does to
the political left nowadays too. So another critique that has come from Fisher that was kind of ahead of its time in many ways. The final philosophical concept which Fisher comes up with is a development of Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology. Now Jacques Derrida wrote a book called Spectres of Marx. You can check it out in my video on Jacques Derrida. But Derrida essentially argues that time is out of joint, that there are certain figures in history which re-emerge and haunt us. So there was an idea linking back to Fukuyama and the end of history that Marxism would be irrelevant for the rest of the 20th and 21st century because communism is essentially lost. But what Derrida argued was that these figures are not stagnant, they are a figure of deconstruction
and that Marx will reappear in other areas which is what we've seen. Marx has not only appeared in a resurgence of certain elements of communism or leftist thought but he's also re-emerged in certain elements of conservative thought in relation to economic crisis and austerity and things like that. So Fisher takes that idea but he applies it to our current culture. He uses this phrase which Derrida uses in Hauntology which is from Hamlet which is the type that time is out of joint. Things are not in order, things are not in their current present. In fact we're living in a period where time is disorientated. And as a result of that, Fisher argues that our current present, the way we currently live, our current societies have an inability to conceive of a world
that is radically different from the one that we already live in. It links back to that idea when we were talking about Blade Runner in capitalist realism and this idea of hauntology and capitalist realism linked together for Fisher. Essentially in Blade Runner, it's a future, but it's still based on capitalist forms of consumption, capitalist accumulation and capitalist forms of production. So therefore, it's not really a broad or alternative version of the future. It's merely just an accelerated version of the present that we have now. Now, as a result of that, Fisher argues we are now haunted by 1950s and 1970s visions and ideas of the future. So again, it kind of links with the ideas of capitalist realism. In the 1950s when people are encouraged to think about the
future they talk about flying cars, they talk about pill food, living on the moon and all these various different things whereas nowadays we don't really have those visions anymore. Those visions tend to be focused on our present or don't tend to be that much different from the present that we are living in. So this has led to a situation which refers to as nostalgia for the future that we rely on our old visions of futures in order to shape our own. So let's think about this in a kind of modern context. If we're trying to think of the future today, chances are we're copying something that has already been used by our grandparents. So we can see the image here of colonies on the moon is merely a copy or a reimagining of what our grandparents imagined in the 1950s. And that this
results in what he refers to as a hauntological melancholia, that we refuse to accept that we have lost our ideas or our understandings or conceptions of the future and so what we do is we just keep recreating f*** up from the past. We can see this a little bit in our nostalgia culture. Many of the popular music tends to sample or at least re-simulate culture from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s Now, even if we look at the way people are dressing at the moment, tends to be feeler, chunky trainers, 501s are back in baggy clothes. This is a hauntology, a past future from the 1990s. So therefore, again, we have lost our vision to think of the future, that any kind of thought of the future, any way of moving forward is always borrowed from the past.
And we are borrowing past visions of the futures to try and look into our future. So therefore, as a result of this, Fisher argues that 21st century culture is merely 20th century culture in high definition. There is no grand vision of technology, that technology could make our lives easier, that we could use technology a different way, that we could organise ourselves differently as a result of technology. Instead, technology has become a whip to beat us with in which it essentially operates within the economic system. The reason why we're always on our phone all the time is to create data for other companies and keep the system running. It doesn't allow us to potentially use that data or that information or that technology to create new ways of working, to create an easier way of life for ourselves. Instead, it's all based on making yourself more productive and contributing more to the current system than it is to anything else.
To further develop Fisher's point of hauntology or his conception of hauntology or the idea we are living in a present with no future that relies on the past visions of the future. I've included here the top grossing movies of 2019 and we can see that nearly all of them are essentially what he's saying. They are 20th century cultural creations but presented in 21st century high definition. We've got Avengers Endgame, which is an adaptation of comic books from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s. So in the 20th century, got The Lion King from the 1990s. Frozen 2, which is probably one of the only modern films that are on there. We've got Toy Story 4, which is a development from the 1990s again.
Captain Marvel, Star Wars, Spider-Man, Aladdin, Joker and it. These are all nostalgic comfort ideas which are there to represent the idea we currently have no new ideas because we have no vision of the future. We're living in this current period of nostalgia. Similarly, another example of Mark Fisher's concept of hauntology would be none other than one of the best albums of 2020, according to various pundits, which would be Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia. even the name we can deconstruct quite well in relation to what Mark Fish is saying in relation to hauntology that the album's called future nostalgia in the sense that it's trying to angle itself towards the future to present a sound that is futuristic that looks at a more
optimistic future that we may have but in reality what it's doing is it's sampling futures from the past and future sounds from the past in order to create its sonic reception so future nostalgia is interesting in terms of how it sounds as well because whilst it's in high definition electronics which were found in the 21st century the production of many of the songs are based on 1980s 1990s 1970s particularly if you look at don't start now which could very easily be a reinterpretation of 1970s earth wind and fire but presented with modern vocals modern techniques and modern creation. It is a fundamental example of hauntology that when we try to think of the future, when we try to think of an alternative system, an alternative way of doing
things, we again return back to these old vision, these old ideas in order to try and create something new. This isn't calling out Dua Leap, by the way, I quite liked this album, but it's kind of personified what Mark Fisher was talking about in this concept of hauntology. Fisher's called everything out. He said that we're living in a world with no future, that capitalist realism is the only game in town, that all of this has such a negative effect. Well, what's his solution? Well, unfortunately, sadly, Mark Fisher passed away before he could finish his book, which was going to address that issue. But in the collected works of K-Punk, we have an extract from his unfortunately unfinished manuscript on acid communism, which was going to be his potential solution to the issues which we face as a society and in the face of all of these philosophical issues.
Now, acid communism isn't any kind of nostalgia or contradictory nostalgia to return back to the Soviet Union, to reinvigorate the ideas of communism and just to move back to an old circle. In fact, acid communism is probably slightly unfortunate name, but he's picked it for good reason. But you could see how it could easily be misinterpreted as a result. Now, the best way to understand this concept is by breaking down the two terms. Now, the acid refers to recapturing the avant-garde and psychedelic in order to conceive of new futures. That currently in capitalist realism, we just see everything for the reality that it allegedly is, such as gangster movies, keeping it real and all of that kind of thing. By reinvigorating the avant-garde, by looking at abstract art or creating new ideas or generally trying to create new sounds, we could potentially come up with new futures and new ways of doing things.
So we don't have to be stuck with this rigid way of thinking in a capitalist realist sense. Final element of this is the communism element. Now, as I said, the communism is probably the most misleading part because he's not calling for a return to currently existing communist ideas or systems. For example, he's not calling for a return to the USSR and he's not really one to agree with the Occupy movements and the kind of modern left movements and the way that they organise. Instead, he wanted to use the concept of communism as a hopeful idea for the future. Communism as a term represents an alternative beyond capitalism, regardless of its historical connotations or theories that relate to it. the term itself represents something radically different to capitalism. So he wanted to call it
communism because it would maintain our hopes for the future. But unfortunately, beyond that, he doesn't really expand on how this is done or how we can develop these ideas as it is an unfinished piece of work. So what do you think about Mark Fisher? Do you think he's got some reasonable points? Do you think that he's right with his analysis of capitalist realism? Do you think capitalist realism is really a bad thing? I don't know. Let me know down below in the comments Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe and I will see you next time.