Mark Fisher (talk)
- capitalism seen as the armchair at the end of history
- we interact with objects in a virtual way, reduce them to an ornamental status
- we are no longer subjects as spectators but part of a bigger spectacle
- reality t.v. needs a circuit to complete the reality becoming a participant in the reality by: phoning in, txting, tweets, emails
- capitalist realism means that we are all involved and integrated in the system
- critique rarification and subsumption of all life into the role of the aesthetic it becomes demythologised and has no function
- The role of culture is to produce new things and to create a reflection
- the end of history becomes more prone to pastiche, if nothing new happens then we are left with relics that can only be rearranged
- postmodernism has become so dominant that it can no longer be seen
- it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism
- failure of our imagination as we cannot imagine a world with no capitalism
- capitalism has its own subtle propaganda unlike socialism this is why capitalism is more effective
- capitalist realism claims to diminish illusions and myths that have dominated the past – this is part of the structure of capitalism: it de-functions artefacts
- capitalism destroys life worlds and reconstructs them as artefacts – we present life in the world as relics of times previous they are aesthetic and displaced – capitalism does this to itself and to us as subjects
- capitalism has no world of its own it reconstitutes itself in other life worlds
- history has a different reality but that is breaking down – captialism is not seen as underdeveloped
- subject reduced to a spectator with no belief: a cynical, disaffected and disconnected being who has superior awareness
- we live in a post-apocalyptic time therefore to create a new revelation we need an apocalypse
- excessive awareness creates hyper vigilance
- excessive unawareness is created by capitalism – this is why there is nothing new
- we are in nostalgia mode with our unwitting capitulation of forms of the past – the past conditions of the present means things can be repeated without being noticed
- alternative – reactivating lost futures we oppose capitalisms obsoleteness and reposition ourselves
