"For most people under twenty in
Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer
even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.
Jameson used to report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into
the very unconscious; now, the fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming
life of the population is so taken for granted that it is It would be
dangerous and misleading to imagine that the near past was some prelapsarian
state rife with political potentials, so it's as well to remember the role that
commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth
century. Yet the old struggle between detournement and
recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played
out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that
previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the
pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist
culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or
'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of
rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and
'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather,
they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within
the mainstream." -- Mark Fisher, Capitalism Realism
I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries— the realists of a larger reality . Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is ...
Comments