Reading Capitalist Realism

Beyond Realism -

“Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.”1 Mark Fisher puts his finger on the basic problem for left politics: how is one to imagine an alternative to capitalism? Realism is our great enemy in this effort. “Realism” in this context refers both to an ­ attitude—­ a grim identification of the rule of markets with necessity, practicality, and hard-nosed common ­ sense—­ as well as a cultural ­ regime—­ art that reproduces and reinforces its context. It would thus seem that the anti-mimetic is our great ally. “Anti-mimetic” in this context refers both to an ­ attitude—­ a willingness to imagine alternatives to what ­ exists—­ as well as a cultural ­ practice—­ art that escapes from its context.2 In the following I will argue that, despite his acute registration of our urgent political dilemma, Fisher’s interpretive practice gives comfort to the enemy and deprives us of our ally. By reading the fictional as mimetic of the actual, by turning even science fiction into a species of realism, Fisher forecloses our capacity to see how art in fact challenges capitalist reality. This interpretive practice is by no means Fisher’s private fault. Rather, his approach is dictated by a venerable method of defending the humanities’ capacity to generate knowledge about society. Thus, to assess his claims we need to attend to criticism’s institutional position, and to the struggle to legitimate humanistic knowledge in the contemporary intellectual and institutional climate. Why should anti-capitalist activists turn to left literary or film criticism, instead of to left economics, history, or political science? The traditional answer has been that cultural works provide a special kind of evidence about economic, political, and social conditions, evidence that other disciplines cannot access. A novel or a film, in this account, functions m i c h a e l w. c l u n e Beyond Realism 1 9 6 m i c h a e l w . c l u n e as evidence about a given social ­ condition—­ in this case, contemporary capitalism. By reading novels and poems, or watching films and television shows, we can grasp the contours, the strategies and weaknesses , of the socio-economic logic we wish to contest. But, as I will show, in practice the extraction of this evidence often depends on theories that are not derived from the works. These social, psychological, and economic theories are, however, “literary” in the sense that they are largely absent from the social and natural sciences. This constitutes their great appeal for critics, who are thus provided with social knowledges autonomous with respect to economics , political science, biology, sociology, or history. And yet this autonomous position is a double-edged sword. It shelters our theories from the kind of debate now necessary, in the aftermath of the Sokal hoax, to legitimate the extra-disciplinary claims of literary thinkers.3 Without the possibility of meaningful interdisciplinary testing, these theories take on the quasi-fictional status of “literary economics,” “literary psychology,” or “literary critical sociology .” These theories are literary not in the sense that they are derived from works of literature, but in the sense that literary critics tend to be the only people who work with them. Cultural scholarship ’s claim to autonomous knowledge thus rests on a displacement of the fictional or virtual from the object of study to the critic’s theory. This traditional understanding of literature as evidence used to illustrate social or psychological or economic theories whose primary institutional home is the English department is not tenable. It has proved unsuccessful both at demonstrating the value of the humanities and at contributing to the anti-capitalist struggle. Both criticism and the social and economic theories which critics espouse have had little or no impact on the recent vigorous left attack on failed free market economics, for example, or on the development of new political processes in the Occupy movements, to take a different example.4 Autonomy becomes isolation. This is not criticism’s necessary fate. Once we see literary works not as evidence of actually existing capitalism , but as intellectual and material examples of escape from capitalist reality, a meaningful relation both to other disciplines and to urgent political questions becomes possible. b e y o n d r e a l i s m 1 9 7 * * * “Cyberspatial capital works by addicting its users; William Gibson recognized that in Neuromancer” (Fisher, 25). Here Fisher reads...