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Introduction A Theory of Capitalist Realism a l i s o n s h o n k w i l e r & l e i g h c l a i r e l a b e r g e Capitalist realism is both an old and a new concept for literary studies . Realism, after all, has long been considered the aesthetic mode most intimate to capitalism. It is this intimacy that in the view of its admirers generates realism’s depth and incisiveness of critique. It is what in the equally compelling view of its detractors fatally compromises the realist project, producing the very subjects and objects that the mode claims to document. Where literary critics on both sides would most likely agree, however, is on the redundancy of the prefix “capitalist.” All realism is already capitalist. Meanwhile, in the political and economic realm the term “realism ” has had an altogether different career. The exhortation to “be realistic” is now part of the ideological enforcement process of neoliberalism . The appeal to the logic of fiscal “common sense,” has been amplified into the moral urgency of reducing spending and trimming deficits for entire economies. As politicians pursue austerity in the name of getting one’s household in order, “realism” becomes a onesided moral regime that focuses on reduction on the social side of the ledger while ignoring excesses of growth on the corporate and military side. Given that the realist imperative ignores precisely the debt expansion and financial machinations on which the past four decades of capitalist accumulation have depended, one could not be blamed for the suspicion that any political call to fiscal realism is an ideologically dubious one. Slavoj Žižek once quipped that the fantasy of every capitalist is to have capitalism without capitalism: For me, monopoly control of territory! For everyone else, free trade and open markets. For me, guaranteed profits! For everyone else, the assumption of risk.1 And yet the presence of a realistic common sense 2 a l i s o n s h o n k w i l e r & l e i g h c l a i r e l a b e r g e remains powerful and for many, including on the left, politically difficult to resist, even if the result were to be the veritable collapse of the social sphere. Whenever “realism” is defined as that which is measurable within a system of capitalist equivalence, then everything not measurable according to this standard becomes, by simple definition, unaffordable and unrealistic. The term “capitalist realism” has been used to describe the contemporary condition in which all social and political possibility is seemingly bound up in the economic status quo. Mark Fisher, in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, uses the term to characterize “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”2 Fisher’s claim that “capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself” (4), thus refers to the abovementioned expansion of realism beyond any particular ideological precinct to become, essentially , the sum of all ideology of the present. Realism, as described by Fisher, is not a representational mode or aesthetic. It is instead a general ideological formation in which capitalism is the most real of our horizons, the market-dominant present that forms the limits of our imaginaries. Thus Fisher argues, echoing similar statements from Fredric Jameson and Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Capitalist realism, in our view, is a theoretical concept that demands further elaboration. The concept’s potential lies in its ability both to address the limitations of postmodernism and to connect the postmodern (or post-postmodern, such as it may be) more powerfully to the features of our contemporary political economic moment. The aim of this volume is to open up the term in its political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions while accepting the larger intention of Fisher ’s project: to provide a language and terminology for what comes after a Jamesonian critique at its most totalizing, suffocating, and yet unassailably correct. One example suffices to remind us of the tone and sense of finality of Jameson’s 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”: “The new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapi- [3.144.113.30] Project...

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