Upstream - Capitalist Realism with Carlee Gomes

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

“It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Those words have been attributed to both the philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek decades ago, but they couldn���t feel more true today. As we continue to stare down the double barrels of climate change and COVID without any meaningful response from those who rule over us, without organized and collective action that has been able to make a transformative material impact, and for many out there without even really fully absorbing the reality staring us in the face…yeah. , it certainly seems like it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of this horrifying social order.  This phenomenon, which was so aptly distilled into a bite-sized quote by Jameson and Žižek, has come to be known as capitalist realism — a concept popularized by the late Mark Fisher in a book of the same name written in 2008. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher, an author and educator, explains in eighty pages, just how deeply capitalism has permeated our worlds, how totalizing its hegemony has become in the 21st century, how broadly it has flattened not just our institutions but our interactions, our experiences, our emotions, our traumas — how the commodification of everything has enveloped us all in this era we know as neoliberal capitalism. To discuss Capitalist Realism, the book and the concept, we’ve brought on Carlee Gomes, co-host of Hit Factory, a podcast about the films and politics of the 1990s. Carlee’s immersion in film and media, and her deep understanding of how capitalist realism exists in the realm of culture, gives this conversation a wide-ranging scope spanning from music to film to labor struggles to mental health — and much more. Carlee is also a friend of the show, both Robert and I have been guests on Hit Factory in the past, so we couldn’t be more excited to be continuing our collaboration with such a good comrade on such an exciting and rich topic.  Thank you to Carolyn Raider for this episode’s cover art and to Chain and The Gang for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond/Lanterns. Further Resources: Hit Factory on Patreon Hit Factory: The Matrix feat. Della Duncan Hit Factory: Slacker feat. Robert Raymond Hit Factory: The Matrix Resurrections feat. Aaron Thorpe What May Have Been, by Aaron Thorpe Revolutionary Left Radio: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

Hey, Robert here, just wanted to share a bit of news with you all before we get started on today's episode. A couple of weeks ago, we lost our second grant funder of the year. The majority of our funding came from two foundations and both of them, separately, discontinued our funding this year. So, we are officially down to zero dollars in grant funding. This means that we are now entirely listener funded. It also means that we may not be able to do our audio documentaries anymore since they are incredibly time and labor intensive. It is incredibly difficult to get grant funding for indie podcasts, especially political education podcasts, especially socialist political education podcasts.

The liberal philanthropic industrial complex is just not interested in that, it seems, which is horrifying because the right-wing in this country is more than happy to provide unlimited funding to right-wing political education podcasts, and we genuinely believe that this is one of the main reasons why right-wing politics have so much traction, despite most people being decent humans. Podcasts are incredibly popular and the industry continues to grow exponentially. It really is a shame that so many left-leaning funders don't understand how important this medium is and how important it is to fund left-wing voices in this time of severe reaction.

This is all to say, if you appreciate what we're doing with this podcast, there really couldn't be a better time to become a monthly donor. If even just 5% of our listeners donated $5 a month, less than the price of a coffee or a beer, we would be able to do so, so much while also keeping this work sustainable for me and Della. So if you're at a place where you can afford to do so, and if it's important for listening to this podcast. serves as an indispensable alternative to the mainstream capitalist propaganda that dominates the airwaves and RSS feeds. And thank you so, so much to everybody who supported us in the past or is a current recurring donor. It's not hyperbole to say that we literally could not do this podcast without you. And now, on with the show. capitalist realism is a sort of phenomenon tied to capitalism of course but the two things are

inextricably linked particularly in the late stages of capitalism i think at one point fisher describes it as like kind of an atmosphere but the way that I think about it is that it is this idea that we don't even know is an idea. And that idea is that capitalism is the only way of existing and that it is a natural order of some sort. That it is not man-made. There is no construction to it.

It simply exists. and then further down that rabbit hole that the sort of like realism part of capitalist realism is that we are confined to its existence insofar as we cannot imagine anything else outside of it. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Those words have been attributed to both the philosophers Frederick Jameson and Slavoj Žižek decades ago, but they couldn't feel more true today.

As we continue to stare down the double barrels of climate change and COVID without any meaningful response from those who rule over us, without organized and collective action that has been able to make a truly transformative material impact, and for many out there, without even really fully absorbing the reality staring us in the face. Yeah, it certainly seems like it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of this horrifying social order. This phenomenon, which was so aptly distilled into a bite-sized quote by Jameson and Zizek, has come to be known as capitalist realism, a concept popularized by the late Mark Fisher in a book of the same name written in 2008.

In Capitalist Realism, Fisher, an author and educator, explains in just 80 pages how deeply capitalism has permeated our worlds, how totalizing its hegemony has become in the 21st century, how broadly it has flattened not just our institutions but our interactions, our experiences, our emotions, our traumas, how the commodification of everything has enveloped us all in this era we know as neoliberal capitalism. To discuss capitalist realism, the book, and the concept, we've brought on Carly Gomes, co-host of Hit Factory, a podcast about the films and politics of the 1990s. Carly's immersion in film and media and her deep understanding of how capitalist realism exists in the realm of culture gives the conversation you're about to hear a wide-ranging scope, spanning from music to film to labor struggles, mental health, and so much more. Carly is also a friend of the show.

Both Robert and I have been guests on Hit Factory in the past, so we couldn't be more excited to be continuing our collaboration with such a good comrade on such a rich and exciting topic. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Carly Gomes. Hey, Carly. It's really a genuine pleasure to have you on Upstream. We have been talking about doing this for a long time. And so I know you had Della on your podcast, Hit Factory, awesome podcast that you do with, with your co producer, Aaron. And that's how we actually first met. And yeah, we've been talking about doing something on Upstream for a really long time. And so I'm really excited to be talking to you about a very specific topic that has a

million different threads that can be pulled on. So we're going to have a wide varying conversation about Mark Fisher's capitalist realism. And we've never actually done something like this where we have a conversation between two people who have not written the book. I've so not written this book. Like I'm the most I haven't written this book. So yeah, I'm wondering before we get into it, just to start, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself for our listeners. My name is Carly. I am a co-host of the Hit Factory podcast where we talk about films of the 90s and we are vehemently an anti-nostalgia podcast in the sense that we are often examining those films from a perspective that fully entrenches us in the politics and

sort of like material circumstances of the time and how that's related to the art being produced. Very germane to the book we're discussing today. And I should also note, like, it wasn't just Della that was on the show. you also came on and did a really fantastic episode on a movie I now adore because of you called Slacker and it was a really really great conversation but it was it was that is what I do

when I'm not working a nine to five or I guess like seven to eight is what it is most days and I'm happy to be here I I'm so excited. We're finally talking about this. Yeah, me too. I'm genuinely really, really excited to do this. And if you're not following Hit Factory, then you need to get on that immediately because it's such a great podcast. And I've learned so much about film and media and just hearing you and Aaron and your guests talk about movies is really fun and really informative.

And a lot of what we're going to be talking about today is like very related to a lot of the topics that you all talk about on the podcast. So, yeah, I'm really excited to get into it. Yeah, I'm really excited to get into it. And so, yeah, I guess the first maybe entry into this discussion might be to ask you where you first heard about Capitalist Realism, the book, and sort of, I guess, what impact it had on you when you first discovered it. This isn't a trick question, but it may sound like a trick answer. You are actually where I first heard about this book. I actually didn't realize that. Because you were reading it or you were going to read it and we were talking about it. And you had mentioned that you had listened to an episode of Rev Left Radio, which is another great podcast that I got into because of you and I love it. They had done a sort of read through of this book and it had spurred you to get it and you were going to start reading it. And I was like,

hearing you talk about it. And I was like, this sounds like my shit. I need to purchase this book. And then the other place that I had heard of it sort of like, tangentially was through a mutual comrade, Aaron Thorpe, who's on the Trillbillies podcast and a couple of other projects. And he has a substat called Space and Light. And he wrote a really incredible piece called What May Have Been. And he talks a lot about Fisher and Derrida and a lot of other people that Fisher mentions in Capitalist Realism in this piece that he wrote. And so those two things sort of spurred me into getting into the book. And I think in terms of its impact, I don't even know where to begin. This is one of those books, so I've read it three times,

and I still feel like I don't have a handle on it, which is wild because it's a very short book and it's very easily digestible, but it's incredibly rich. And every time I read a passage that I may have read like four or five times, I feel like I come to a new understanding with it. But what I will say is that it's really kind of stunning how pointedly and thoroughly Fisher is able to articulate something that feels and is often by design so inarticulable. He's talking about something that is a feeling, it's a material reality, a perspective that informs individual mindsets, while also being a collective experience, that being capitalist realism. And it seems like a completely impossible task to unpack that and to talk about something that seems so nebulous and

just like existing a priori. There's that metaphor of the bird in the cage who can't see his bars which is what i think of often when i'm thinking about capitalist realism and just like capitalism in general but fisher does it he talks about it and he talks about it with alacrity and clarity and like a very exacting perspective and he's so unafraid and it's really really compelling and I think like so much of what we could say is like capital T theory is intimidating for people and if people read like nothing else related to like anti-capitalist thought, I would recommend this book because of how accessible it is and just how directly he speaks to something so complex. Yeah, absolutely. And I really, really love that metaphor of the bird not being able to see the

bars. And especially like even just digging into it a little bit like it makes so much sense in so many different ways like the bars might be so close right that like it's seeing through them a little bit but they're they're right there right and yes I like to use the metaphor of the fish swimming in in water and how the fish doesn't know that it's in water right and someone asks the fish how's the water and the fish is like what and it's in water, right? And someone asks the fish, how's the water? And the fish is like, what? And so that's kind of a related metaphor, I think that we might get into a little bit more in the conversation. But yeah, thank you for sort of outlining a little bit about how capitalist realism has impacted you and touching a little bit while you were describing that what it is and what capitalist realism means.

But I'm wondering maybe just more explicitly if you want to talk about in your own words what capitalist realism is and what you think that Mark Fisher was hoping to do with this text. I really want to do this man and his work justice. And I think it's important to understand that capitalist realism is a sort of phenomenon tied to capitalism, of course, but the two things are inextricably linked, particularly in the late stages of capitalism. I think at one point, Fisher describes it as like kind of an atmosphere. But the way that I think about it is that it is this idea that we don't even know is an idea. And that idea is that capitalism is the only way of existing and that it is a natural order of some sort that it is not man-made there is no

construction to it it simply exists and then further down that rabbit hole that the sort of like realism part of capitalist realism is that we are confined to its existence insofar as we cannot imagine anything else outside of it. So like your metaphor about the water is completely applicable here. A fish in water doesn't know about the water and also like can't imagine anything that exists outside of water. All it knows is water. It doesn't know there's land somewhere like, you know, a sky or, or even is that fish able to conceive of those things potentially. And so that's what capitalist realism is trying to do with this text is name and give shape to that which is seemingly shapeless and unnameable. Name and give shape to that which doesn't seem to exist and in doing so really give us and our comrades critical and crucial space like

actual psychic distance required to recognize capitalism's hold on us and eventually think beyond it so in actually naming capitalist realism and describing it he's allowing us a bit of breathing room. And it's in that breathing room that we can actually start to conceive of revolutionary alternatives, or at least just alternatives, period. And this critical distance that he's giving us in describing capitalist realism and naming it and articulating it so beautifully. That is where like all of the generative impulses that are required to imagine alternatives and the ways to get there happen. That's where revolution happens. So I think that he is in writing this, I think he's actually like doing a generative revolutionary act, which maybe sounds

too saccharine, but I do believe that the more I read the book, that there is something inherently productive, generative in the act of delving into what capitalist realism is, because in describing it, you are inherently antagonistic toward its hold on you, which is that there is no way to describe it, right? I don't know if that makes sense. No, yeah, no, that's really, I think, just a really great encapsulation of what is a really tricky, really tricky topic and a really tricky book. And there's a lot in there. In fact, I think maybe just to complement your description, I might read a few quotes that describe a little bit also what Fisher was trying to articulate with the idea of capitalist realism. One of them is, quote, the widespread sense that

not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it. And then another quote is, capitalist realism is more like a pervasive atmosphere, like you mentioned, conditioning not only the production of culture, but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier, constraining thought and action. And then so in my words, you know, it's sort of like capitalism. It's not a field on which we exist as actors, but it's like more of a mood, a subjective reality, and a lens through which we see the world. And so those are all a few different ways that you can start thinking about capitalism and start thinking about capitalist

realism as we begin to move through this text and really dissect it in like granular detail. And I promise I'm not going to read too many quotes. Although I know we have this shared Google Doc that we're looking at where I just threw in a ton of quotes. And I'm going to be more disciplined about trying not to read all of them because there's just so much rich text that we could read from. And maybe I'll do something at some point where I just read the book and analyze it so I can just share all the quotes at some point. But I mean, his words are so good. Like, I think you can read as many quotes as you want, but this is your show. Like, you decide. But like, there are so many. I mean, you've I've sent you like, pictures of my book where I have like, one color highlighter, I have something

underlined, then I have like a red pen and like a black pen. Like there are just so many quotes that like lend themselves to so many offshoots of ideas and conversations. So I think mentioning his words as often as possible is not not a bad thing. Okay. It's good to know that I have the green light to to get into a few more of the quotes as we go through. You totally do. Sweet. Okay. that I have the green light to get into a few more of the quotes as we go through. You totally do. Sweet. Okay, so because the book opens with this, and also just because of your vast knowledge of film and analyzing media, I thought it would be a good place to start is looking at the 2006 film

Children of Men, which I just recently rewatched. And it was just as good as I remembered it the first time I watched it. So yeah, I'm wondering if, as someone who spent so much time studying film and media more broadly, if you could maybe talk a little bit about how this film is emblematic of capitalist realism. Yeah, gosh, this film is incredible. And for anyone who hasn't seen it, please rectify that immediately. Outside of it being like, I think sort of like fundamental to an understanding of like, any sort of like revolutionary text or anti capitalist thinking, it's also just like a thrilling and very emotional film a great cinematic experience I can't underscore that enough I think giving credit where credit is due children of men maybe is like what

brought me to capitalist realism because you were initially talking about it in relation to the book and that was like a green light like a I don't know that just like lit a fire under my ass because the idea that like someone talking about anti-capitalism through the lens of this movie that I love is really exciting to me and man he just does not disappoint so I think it's really important that Fisher starts off talking about sort of like the artifacts within the film and that the artifacts of history of culture that are present in the film, like Guernica and all of these other sort of like works of art that have held historical, political, material importance, that in the film, they are more or less detritus. And this one thing visually represented in the film is fundamental to understanding the broader sort of like posture of society in the world presented in the film, which Fisher argues is basically our world, just like pulled to a little bit of an extreme. And what's crucial about that is that these

artifacts of culture are stripped of their political, material, and ideological importance in this world where there is no future, which is the world that Children of Men takes place in. And it's called Children of Men because everyone has become sterile in this society. And this idea of sterilization is kind of a very literal evocation of the futurelessness that we all feel presently in our society. And I think is something that the movie taps into beautifully, even though it came out in 2006. I think so much of what's contained in its text is still incredibly salient

and anticipates so much of what we're experiencing its text is still incredibly salient and anticipates so much of what we're experiencing now and will continue to experience in our future. And this sterilization is what leads to this sort of nihilism that pervades the film. And Fisher notes that unlike sort of other dystopian nightmares in cinema that actually used to be kind of generative acts of imagining an alternative, even if it was a terrifying one, an alternative to capitalism. Children of Men actually depicts a world that is just sort of like an exacerbation of capitalism. It is not fundamentally at odds with anything that is in the pursuit of capital or of our society. The world of Children of Men is kind of an expression of capitalist realism

in and of itself. The film kind of is, perhaps unknowingly, but it still is because it is depicting for us a future that is going to take place under capitalism in some form or another. The details might change a little bit, but it's happening. We're in the middle of it. And I think this is important to not only understanding capitalist realism, but also just sort of like children of men and the way that it's different from other films that imagine the end of our society. Children of men is not imagining the end of our society per se. It is actually showing us the middle stuff, the like decline, the slow necrosis of our society versus something that

you and i have discussed previously a film like don't look up which kind of imagines the end of our society in a you know a sort of ecstatic explosion that removes us from the pain of having to experience the monotony of decline. CB Right. Yeah, yeah. It's this idea that there's not going to be some kind of apocalyptic rupture necessarily, that the apocalypse is sort of what we're experiencing, right? And there's this trope that we're going to be working throughout the apocalypse. And that sort of, you know, what we're experiencing, right? And like, there's this trope that, you know, we're going to be working throughout the apocalypse. And that sort of comes through in Children of Men. There's, you know, coffee shops, like Starbucks-esque coffee shops existing right alongside like, immigration detention camps and stuff. So it feels very real, and yet,

not so much at the same time just because it's so dramatized, I guess. But just to read another quote that's related to this from the book, the catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road nor has it already happened. Rather, it's being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster. The world doesn't end with a bang. It winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. And that sounds fucking relatable to me. Doesn't it? It does. It definitely does. And okay, let's see here. So another quote, which might lead to another thread to pull on this is, okay, so quote,

the power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all previous history. One effect of its system of equivalence, which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. So does that spark anything for you? Did you have anything that you wanted to add to that or reflect on? Oh my gosh. It sparks so much for me, Robbie. I think about this all the time. I tweet about this all the time. I think about it in the shower. This is a concept that it's a sort of like perfect expression of what the promise of neoliberalism is, right? The real promise of neoliberalism, which is that everything is a market. Literally fucking everything is a market or marketable in some way

and can be commodified. And Fisher sums it up beautifully in that quote that you just read. And children of men is a perfect corollary here because children of men illuminates this dynamic explicitly with this idea of recursion and sort of the only thing left for us in a futureless world is what's already happened, right? Like, it's the way that we sort of take on a reflective, and by reflective, I don't mean in the sort of like productive generative healing sense. I mean, looking backward, we take on a reflective posture in order to sort of ameliorate these feelings of confronting that there is no future. And fundamental to that is this commodification of all aspects of existence. I think that another quote that illuminates this well in relation to Children of Men is the following. Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come and thought that it could

well be the case that harbors only reiteration and repermutation. The focus shifts from the next big thing to the last big thing. How long ago did it happen? How big was it? And here we get into Derrida's idea of hauntology, which we can discuss at a later point if we want to. It's something that Fisher draws on a lot. And it's also really important to understanding our current media landscape. Yeah.

Yeah. We'll get into it for sure. But the last thing I'll say about this is that what Children of Men is showing us in this landscape of sort of like cultural artifacts as detritus and all aspects of our life sort of becoming transactional, which is incredibly prevalent in the film, this urgency of the transaction is something that propels the film forward throughout its entirety is that these sort of like market imperatives of selling us something familiar are in existence because the markets are too confined for us to take risk. The stakes are too high. And this is certainly the case in

Children of Men. And so this kind of like, everything must be a transaction, everything must be exploitable to produce capital to a certain extent, necessarily comes with the tacit sort of acceptance that there is nothing else left. And Children of Men illuminates this, you know, in a multitude of ways, even though it never really says it explicitly. But I do believe that this idea that futurelessness and our sort of like tacit acceptance of it, no matter how traumatic, is what drives a lot of the sort of like pervasiveness of like market forces in our lives and turning everything, including ideas and relationships, into commodities. Yeah, so wonderfully put. Thank you for that. And I mean, yeah, this is something we've talked about a whole lot. This is something I think about all the time, you know, how capitalism flattens all human experience and simultaneously quantifies it and commodifies it in relation to one thing and one thing only exchange value.

This is something that probably anybody listening right now is like, oh, yeah, like, I totally get that. Fisher talks about it as sort of business ontology, right? Like this idea that life is not an inalienable right, but a series of economic exchanges, right? And I mean, we can see that in really obvious ways, like our healthcare system, right? Like healthcare under capitalism isn't a right. It's not guaranteed. It's not seen as something that people should have just because they're alive. It's something that you have to fight for in a marketplace. And it's not just that that's the case. It's that this business ontology makes the case poorly in my opinion, but it makes the case that this is the best way to do it. This is actually the best way, the right way to do it. Despite the fact that, you know, everything in our, our health and the healthcare system is crumbling around us, spend hours. I made a joke the other day on Twitter that I have like my health insurance company's song, like the hold song stuck in my head all the time because I'm on hold so much with them.

But like, so there's that, right? There's the obvious things like healthcare and stuff. But what I love about this text is that it goes so much deeper than that, right? It's not just like healthcare or education. It's more insidious than that. It's happening in our minds, right? Like in our relationships, in our experiences, everything about the human experience is flattened and turned into an exchange value. And I think about certain times, for example, if I'm in a group, like in a social situation, like I have noticed, especially, you know, during reading this book, like how much conversation, even if it's a story about trauma or something like that, can be often felt like it's turned into a commodity in the particular social exchanges. Like I'm thinking of a couple that I had recently, and I do it too sometimes. Like, for example, I was hanging out with a group of old friends recently that I hadn't

seen in a really long time right and so we were talking about music and all of a sudden I realized that like the conversation felt like we were talking about music trivia sort of or like just kind of you know I saw this band at this time and then someone else would be like, oh, well, I actually saw them at this time. And like, so I saw them a couple of years before you and it was just sort of, it felt a little bit like, oh damn, like, and I was doing it too. And it was like, oh, we're, we're not talking about like anything super connective or like the music itself. Like we're sort of quantifying and extracting and like turning into data, these experiences that we can just exchange in a social market sort of.

And it feels like so much interaction is like that, especially in the Bay Area. I have to say, like after living in different places for so long and living here for so long and going back and forth, like I really notice a difference in quality of even just like the standing in line at the grocery conversations and I feel like a lot of it has to do with just like capitalism is at least feel so much more totalizing here in terms of how deeply it's permeated into our very souls in the Bay Area but I don't know I feel like that's just one example it's sort of like one of the ways that I think about it is like when we know the lyrics but we don't know the music right like we know

the lyrics but we don't know the music we we know how to turn these things into exchange values that we can sort of leverage in a conversation somehow but like it doesn't feel like there's a connection there right like something a right? Like something a little sacred or something a little profound. Gosh, you're sparking so many things for me. I have like, three things I want to say, you just like sent fireworks off in my head. Particularly this idea of like, when we're talking about something cultural like music right that is ideally more qualitative and experiential and emotional and sensorial and less an artifact of like capital and like monetary value that so often it ends up getting perverted into a conversation about artifacts or like commodities.

And, you know, you note this when you said like it felt more like trivia. And I think that social media has really exacerbated this. Like this is already an impulse of the late stages of capitalism, particularly neoliberalism, because everything is a market. Right. stages of capitalism, particularly neoliberalism, because everything is a market, right? And that is the promise that all sort of problems will be solved in the market, all ideas will be generated in the market, etc. But social media specifically is a phenomenon that has created an environment where the idea of like selling spectacle and selling like the performance of spectacle is what is rewarded and that that act in and of itself has extractive value if that makes sense and so like everything we talk about on social media then has to be this performance it has to be this thing that

can be consumed and digested easily readily handily and that value of some sort even if it's in the form of clout can be extracted from and you can't extract value from something that is like not adhering to the market framework you can't extract value from something that is like emotional experiential takes more than 280 characters to describe right like you can't so forcing us to engage with our experiences, with culture, with people, with just like our very existence through the lens of like these social media commodities, these social media like tokens, I think exacerbates this thing that you're talking about even further and has kind of like social media brained everyone to a certain extent, which we'll get into later. But the other thing I wanted to mention is.

Oh, just real quick before you move on from that. Oh, please. Just a real quick response to that. You mentioned, yeah, like how social media is so performative. And I'm thinking when you're saying that, that like the performance becomes the primary experience, right? Yes. performance becomes the primary experience, right? And I tweeted a few weeks ago, this tweet that was something like, if you do something really profound and meaningful, but you don't post about it on social media, does it even count? And you responded to that with like, I think you wrote

something like attacked. And I was like, I met myself. But yeah, I mean, I think that's definitely a very common experience. And so I just wanted to add that little anecdote to what you said, but please go on. in engaging with people and life that way, right? Like, you can't actually connect with someone if you are focused only on the performance and what can be gained from that performance. And I think this kind of ties into the other thing I was going to say, which is that there is another thing that is fundamental to neoliberalism and to capitalist realism sort of being intact and enabled. And that is the linking between the free market and the transactional nature of existing in it and morals, the moralizing of the market. Market dynamics being posited as the highest moral good is fundamental to capitalist realism and also implies that all other systems, all other economic ways of organizing are morally reprehensible. And this is incredibly imperative to capitalist realism,

because it means that if you are not engaging in something that exists within the market framework, then you are morally corrupt. And that thing is morally corrupt. And that is, is it's a terrifying myopia because when you tie moral rectitude to economic exchange you ostensibly in one swift motion remove what is fundamentally human about existence which is like we can exist ideologically emotionally philosophically outside of a market we do that is like the default it is a construct that we don't and in tying these sort of grand ideas of capital g good capital b bad to economic exchange, you remove that possibility. You remove the possibility of us experiencing emotions and forming judgments outside of that framework. And that is like, I mean, it's crazy making when you start to think about it. But it's like it is like what keeps the wheels going and it is what enforces the atmosphere of capitalist realism.

If everything is necessarily a transaction because everything being a transaction is like morally pure, then why would I want to imagine something else outside of that? How could I possibly? That would be a degradation. That would be a sin. Yeah. It's one of the many things within this system that is, like you said, crazy making. And I think Fisher even writes that, I'm pretty sure Fisher wrote this, that depression or anxiety or like ill mental health is the default under capitalism. And I think, you know, as we go through the text, we're going to really get more deeply and explore more and more how that actually plays out. Another thing that I wanted to talk about as we're talking about this sort of business ontology and this flattening of experience, this totalizing of capitalism that we know as neoliberalism. So it's not just true of institutions

and experiences like we've been talking about. It actually extends in this super perverse way, even to the forces that seemingly oppose the system itself, this way that capitalism absorbs and co-opts its own opposition. Fisher writes, quote, this makes capitalism very much like the thing in John Carpenter's film of the same name, a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact. And yeah, there are a lot of interesting examples of this in the book. He talks about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, among other things. I want to know if that brings anything up for you that you'd like to share. Yeah. One of the really brilliant examples Fisher mentions is hip hop. He talks about Kurt Cobain and the sort of like anti-establishment project that he had and how that was co-opted. And he also talks about hip hop music and hip hop culture. And he makes the sort of beautiful and painful argument that the sort of

worldview of hip-hop and its origins is one that fundamentally exists as anti-establishment. And regardless of that, at a certain point, the market recognized that there was capital to be made in this anti-establishment posture and in this sort of like network this community of people and artists that had sprung up as a form of resistance to white hegemonic control of all material existence and then co-ops that community into the market and then sort of removes all communal relationships and ties and necessarily enforces this business ontology that we're talking about and i just want to read a quote fisher writes and he's talking about sort of like the commodification of rebellion and anything that's allergic to the

system he writes in the end it was precisely hip-hop's performance of this first version of the real, the uncompromising, and he's referring to uncompromising against this sort of like white hegemonic power that enabled its easy absorption into the second, the reality, we'll get into this later, of late capitalist economic instability, where such authenticity has proven highly marketable. What he's saying here is that this incredibly authentic anti-establishment posture and the performance of it, the expression of it, is something that the system could easily co-opt into a version of it that could be digested by the market and indeed turned profitable and this is one of just like many many examples over the course of like

post-modern history where like particularly in music and in art an oppressed underclass uses their art to fight against their oppression and then the oppressors take that art co-opt it turn it into a market and profit from it and they no choice, those people who were initially fighting against their own oppression to participate in that exchange. There's a material necessity in them doing so. And it's a tragedy that a lot of hip hop artists will write about, ironically enough, and talk about in their art. Yeah, no, thanks for taking the hip hop example and really running with it. Because I think that's a really, really important way that this sort of phenomenon takes place. And I am going to read a little bit of a longer quote just to round this part of our discussion out,

as we're talking about music, because I think the Kurt Cobain and Nirvana example is just really powerful as well as a compliment to the example of hip hop that you just beautifully articulated. So, quote, no one embodied and struggled with this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought, and sold before it had even happened. And just an aside, come after history, he's alluding to the end of history, the idea of,

and the book by Francis Fukuyama. But going back to the text, Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV, knew that his every move was a cliche scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliche. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain is precisely the one that Jameson described. Like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed. And, you know, I listened to a lot of Nirvana

growing up. And, you know, I think we all know that Kurt Cobain ended up tragically committing suicide. And yeah, I mean, that's a thread that we might just sort of put a pin in for now in terms of that leading to the ultimate despair when you're in such a situation that it just feels impossible to escape your escape itself. Your attempts to escape itself themselves are commodified. And so we've been talking about music. I think it would be interesting to get into this sort of concept that we're talking about, but looking at film. And so there is a term that Fisher introduced me to inter passivity. And I believe you've also touched on this idea of recuperation already. Or maybe I'm thinking about one of the podcast episodes on Hit Factory. I can't remember now. Everything sort of melds together sometimes. So this idea of interpassivity is like the kind of sublimation almost of our impulses to change the world. The feeling of wanting to revolt, of smashing the system, all this stuff being exhausted in our minds and achieved through the act of consumption itself. So it happens very much with film and media. You mentioned Don't Look Up earlier,

which I think applies to this, but Fisher also writes about Wall-E. And so just a quick quote from the book, a film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Fowler has called interpassivity. like WALL-E exemplifies what Robert Fowler has called interpassivity. The film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. And yeah, so I'm wondering if you had any examples or if you had any reflections on that idea of interpassivity. if you had any reflections on that idea of interpassivity. I have so many ideas, so many thoughts, so many words. I will do my best to curate. The first thing I'll say is like,

this relates to our conversation about social media, right? Like so often what is gratifying, finger quotes, about our experience online is getting to consume semi-revolutionary, semi-antagonistic ideas passively. And in consuming them, we sort of say like, okay, that's my practice for the day. And what is inherent in that cycle is an admission on my part as a consumer that something is fundamentally wrong, right? Like I have to know that in order to want to consume something that is anti the wrong. And like, that's the sort of twist here is that the concept of interpassivity illuminates this kind of contradiction in a person living under the late stages of capitalism, because it explores this idea that we as late capitalist subjects know that this is wrong, know that the system is wrong, even though sort of outwardly we're

performing that it's right, that it's moral, that it's good, that it's pure, that it's the only way to exist. But the concept of interpassivity illuminates this contradiction by pulling out this idea that we have this impulse to rebel. We have this impulse to disavow. Fisher writes about this disavowal extensively in Capitalist Realism. We have this impulse to disavow. And rather than exercising that impulse to disavow in a way that is destructive to the system, we maintain the system and our compliance in it by engaging in the sort of performance of disavowal, back to this idea of the commodification of performance. And we do that through consumption. And it's that brilliant turn that you mentioned that like the act of consuming is what absolves us of the sin of consumption that's what interpessivity is and in film in particular we see this constantly

there are people going to see don't look up and saying like oh i'm gonna go see this movie because i know climate disaster is real. But I don't want to do anything about that. So I'm just going to buy a ticket about it. And it doesn't even have to happen consciously, right? It exists sort of insidiously, right? The way that this works through us. It's something that Fisher talks about in another portion of the book,

which is capitalist realism influencing our desires like at the level of initial desire so that it isn't even something we are conscious of and and this is the case when we make the decision perhaps to go buy the ticket to don't look up we're not sitting there saying like i'm gonna do this so i don't have to like do climate justice. But like that is what we're saying on some level, even subconsciously, because doing climate justice, finger quotes, would be antagonistic to the system and we don't want to disrupt things ultimately.

That's too traumatic a conceit for us. And I want to talk also about nonprofits, something that you and I have talked about a great deal. And just say, and these views are my own opinion, but when we think about the sort of, finger quotes, nonprofit industrial complex, I'm sorry, everything's an industrial complex now. It in and of itself exists as a kind of grand practice of interpissivity. It is laundering all of our capitalist sins through this kind of like idealized faux praxis in the form of feckless philanthropy. feckless philanthropy philanthropic ventures and and the organizations that support them are crucial to maintaining the capitalist order not just in their sort of like emotional material and psychological laundering but also in their functional role the functional role that they play in ameliorating a very small amount of material hardship, just enough amount of material hardship

to maintain the illusion of progress and quell these sort of feelings of distress we may have when we are in fact confronted with these terrible realities of capitalism. And the very idea of the nonprofit itself cements the notion of an individuated reality and an individuated culpability under capitalism, not a systemic one, not a collective one. We as individuals can contribute to this single organization or that single organization to help some abstract idea of an aggrieved person, an aggrieved individual who is in a position of precarity because of individual circumstances, not because of the system. So our sort of contribution to that nonprofit is ostensibly us saying none of this is the state's fault. Therefore, the solution cannot

lie with the state. It must lie in these sort of like individual actors and sort of satellite entities of individuals. And what it ultimately does is it keeps you from having to admit that things are terrible for specific populations by systemic design and designed by the state and people in power and those who accumulate wealth that we generate from our labor and if we don't have to confront that terrible reality then the lie of capitalist realism is upheld the revolution will not have 501c3 status no it will not i'm gonna read a quote and i actually, I'm going to bust this one out because it's a tweet of yours that I just happened to have on my phone, which is about this exact thing. And

I was literally looking at this tweet today. It's an older tweet. So I love that this came up, but you write in this tweet that billionaire philanthropy and the nonprofit charity model are funded by the very exploitation they profess to address. It's wild how opaque this is for so many people. Billionaire philanthropy and nonprofit charity literally keep the explorative structures of capitalism going. And so just distilling what you just really eloquently talked about in that particular instance of the NGO industrial complex. And Fisher talks about this in capitalist realism as well. And he actually talks about how this exists in protests, which I think is really interesting and like the protest movement. But also I was listening to that

episode that you mentioned at the top of the show on Revolutionary Left Radio's great episode on capitalist realism. And I believe the guest, John, the lit crit guy, is talking about how, you know, when you donate a percentage of your purchase to charity at a retail store, like that within the very act of consumption, you're buying your redemption from consuming. And that's just another, I think, perfect example of how this happens. And just to sort of briefly move us back into the realm of film, I think it's really interesting because like, we were talking about the co-option of capitalism's opposition in like hip hop and with Kurt Cobain and that kind of thing.

in like hip hop and with Kurt Cobain and that kind of thing. But we've gotten to a point almost now where, like, it's not just that the market is co opting these things, the market is actually now creating quite explicitly, these pieces of media that are meant to sort of serve as this exhaustion and then sort of sublimation of your need to revolt right and like we've talked about this and in terms of certain films that are shows even that are really good like i really enjoyed the show and or i really enjoyed squid game but like again they're sort of explicitly created and i actually i shouldn't assume that they are because i don't know exactly what went into the creation the writing in these shows but but at least on the level of the networks, they're explicitly created to perform our anti-capitalism for us and turn it into a very entertaining kind of thing.

Yeah. I mean, these networks, these very real capitalists know that this notion is profitable. They know that we have reached a point in capitalism that the denial of its toxicity is no longer viable, right? That's not economically viable. What is, is the acknowledgement of it. And selling that back to us in the form of media and film is operationalizing this idea of interpossivity into the market. And I think about this a lot when I think about, I'm going to get heady here for a second. Yes, please. Just bear with me. The show is literally called Upstream.

So get as heady as you need. Okay. Thank you for that permission. You may regret it later. I think about this a lot when I think about the question, which I'm sure you and I will discuss later in the conversation about the radical potential of art and of like cultural products, or I should say like cultural output because product is inherently degrading it by giving it a market term and like I ask myself

the question does the production of this thing and my consuming it inherently like defang it from any like radical potential and we can get into more of that later but what I think it applies to in this conversation with like Squid Game and like other examples a recent one is The Menu which is a movie with Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Holton a bunch of other people that came out last year, that is about sort of like the drudgery of service work and like of the inherent ridiculous contradictions of capitalism and its fetishization of luxury and wealth and then the people that sort of like have to make that happen for us. And like, i'm not going to get into whether or not the movie was good because it wasn't but um but like that movie did really well

and you can imagine that like that film even just like 10 years ago probably wouldn't have existed but we've reached this point in the kind of necrosis of of the market that the market has realized that like it has to sell the necrosis back to us this comes in the form of disaster capitalism and a bunch of other things that we could get into but specifically in the realm of film this idea of like talking about this rot, talking about these inherent contradictions, talking about the problems, the ideological conflicts within capitalism in a movie like The Menu, or dramatizing it in the form of a game, a very violent, sinister game like Squid Game, that creating a piece of cultural output that contains all of those ideas is profitable and then therefore enables the system further right yeah and and

you're sort of stuck in this cycle of consuming the ideas that feel sort of revolutionary to a certain extent and give voice to a feeling that you may not have seen expressed in film and media and culture previously but that because they exist within the framework of the market they're upholding the market. And so your participation in that outside of your own control is part of that sinister exchange. And it's been happening for the last 30 years. I mean, it started with slacker culture being turned into a multi-billion dollar industry for Hollywood. How many movies like that came about in the 90s? billion dollar industry for Hollywood. Like how many movies like that came about in the 90s? You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Carly Gumbs,

co-host of the podcast Hit Factory. We'll be right back. I don't believe in free will Free will I just do what I feel Free will I don't believe in free will Free will I just do what I feel That is the deal I don't believe in free will Free will I don't believe in free speech

Free speech I don't believe in free speech Free speech I can't stand what they teach Free speech I don't believe in free speech I can't stand what they teach I don't believe in free speech I can't stand what they teach I can't stand what they preach I don't believe in free speech

I don't believe in free love I don't believe in free love All those kisses and hugs I don't believe in free love All those kisses and hugs I don't believe in free love All those kisses and hugs I prefer turtle tubs I don't believe in free love Well, I just can't believe it when

Yeah, they say that's greed Because in my experience Everything is priced expensively I don't believe in free press Free press I don't believe in free press Free press Yeah, I think it's a mess Free press

I don't believe in free press Free press Yeah, I think it's a mess I don't believe in free press Yeah, I think it's a mess And it causes me distress I don't believe in free press Well, I just can't believe it when They say everything's free Because in my experience Everything is priced expensively

I don't believe in freedom I don't believe in freedom I don't believe in freedom I don't believe in freedom I don't believe in freedom. I don't believe in freedom. I don't believe in freedom. I don't believe in freedom. That was Free Will by Chain and the Gang.

Now back to our conversation with Carly Gomes. I would love it if we could talk a little bit about something that we touched on a little bit earlier, especially in talking about your podcast, Hit Factory. Definitely not a sort of like revivalism kind of podcast, but you do discuss these ideas at length. And so, yeah, I'm wondering, can you talk a little bit about how much of the late 21st century's film and media world has become sort of subsumed in capitalist realism? This idea, Fischer refers to Nietzsche's description of certain ages being oversaturated with history. And I like that term oversaturation of history, like really spoke to me and how this can lead into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself, and a sort of

spectatorialism that replaces engagement and involvement. And so I'm wondering if you can sort of take all of that and sort of apply it to this idea of revivalism, like 80s and 90s revivalism specifically, I think, is where we're at right now culturally and reboots and sequels and how this all fits into this thesis of world of reduxes and reboots and sequels is a sort of grand exercise in the commodification of nostalgia and very much tied to the futurelessness that we were talking about at the top of this conversation and I think why it exists now there's a whole landslide of people smarter than me that have a lot of other answers, but I will posit a kind of reductive theory, which is that as things get increasingly worse, and Fisher talks about this much better than I do, but as things get increasingly worse materially for us living under late capitalism, it stands to reason we would retreat to something that is familiar, comfortable, comforting. And right now, it makes sense that

that would be the 90s, because that was the last time that we felt promise to a certain degree. We were indeed after the end of history. Margaret Thatcher had already asserted that there was no alternative outside of this thing that we were doing. We'd beaten the Russians and everything was fucking great. Right. That's like the story we were being told. And for a lot of people in the 90s, and I say a lot, not all, because there were plenty of people who were not experiencing this boom. But for a lot of people in the 90s, there was a stabilizing coming out of the tumult of the 80s. And so this retreat back to this time is a psychological amelioration from the trauma of this futurelessness that we are confronting daily. But it's also a guaranteed profit-making venture because it is selling us stuff we've

already bought. And it's selling us stuff there is already a market for. And as the grind of the neoliberal market sort of hunches forward and the strictures of the market become more extreme, the margins that need to be generated become larger. The risk taking winnows. It necessarily winnows because there isn't room for that when the margins need to be at $60 billion for a $200 billion movie that you're making. And so there's this environment where these familiar characters and this world of endless sequels and reduxes and franchises that you know go on for decades is a world that is constantly looking back and never forward we're not ever looking at something new or not previously made or market tested for that matter and fisher talks about this a lot when he talks about the

impulse of recursion in our cultural output as an expression of the anxiety that we have in accepting the catastrophe that is capitalism. It's contained in our diluted acceptance that there is no alternative, right? In this recursion, we are exposing the fact that we have accepted that this is a terrible reality that we are in. And the market says, like, what we've loved, we will love again. And this will be a thing that generates profit. But that sort of halo of nostalgia that comes along with it will generate even more capital because that good feeling, that serotonin that comes from that feeling of nostalgia will keep us connected to that teat. And like that drive to capitalize on the things that we loved when we were kids, when things felt better and safer and market to those

people us who have spendable income now means that like most of our media is based on children's artifacts from 30 years ago and like franchises and properties that were originally made for children are now being converted into artifacts for adults. Like, it's a wild, psychotic landscape we're living in right now, in terms of like, cultural output. And it's interesting, too, because it's not like, you know, I love history, as I'm sure, you know, a lot of people listening to this would relate to really enjoying learning about history and diving into history. Like I love it. And this isn't some kind of examination of the past, right? This is a much more superficial submersion into almost a dream world of the past. And it doesn't have

the same effect of actually like studying history or being aware of historical events and sort of tying them into the present. It's much different than that. And so also, you know, you were talking a few times, we've mentioned this idea of hauntology, right? And I was first introduced to this term when you all, and I think you mentioned this at the top too, you at Hit Factory interviewed Aaron Thorpe, a writer and also co-host of the Trillbillies podcast on the Matrix 4 Resurrections. And this was based off of a piece that Aaron wrote and also a piece that Mark Fisher wrote, an essay titled Ghosts of My Life. And what I really liked about this idea of hauntology that really sort of resonated with me is this idea that, and we've been batting this back and forth a bunch,

but this idea of there not really being an imaginable future. And the way that Fisher sort of takes this idea of hauntology is, I believe he talks about sort of inverting this idea of the specter of communism that Marx talks about in the Communist Manifesto, but that now we're no longer haunted by the specter of a communist future, but quite the opposite, right? Rather, by the futures that failed to happen, the futures that failed to happen, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, which really marked this incredibly important point in capitalism's progression. This was when capitalism began to really be able to exist in the world without an oppositional force, a serious structural oppositional force in its way. It began to become so totalizing and began to lead to

sort of the place that we are now and all the things that we're discussing now. So yeah, I just really like that idea of hauntology and especially the conversation that you guys had on Hit Factory with Aaron Thorpe. And I think for anybody who wants to dig into that and listen to a really, really good episode about The Matrix 4, definitely check out that episode of The Hit Factory. Thank you for that. I will just say that when we talk about art and its potential to still be radical, I think Lana Wachowski is fundamental to that conversation. And I think that Resurrections, Matrix 4, and Aaron Thorpe's piece really helped me understand this, is a really prime example of taking this kind of necrotic, ontological posture of our culture

and actually using it to examine and tear at the tensions inherent within it. And that's where like we can start to talk about art still being radical. But that idea of hauntology is one that is helpful in understanding this kind of like recursive posture. But I also think it's really important to understand that like there can be kind of like radical nostalgia there can be kind of like a hauntological impulse inherent in like something that is more antagonistic by using these artifacts that haunt us in order to sort of comment on our relationship with them which is what lana does in that incredible film yeah yeah definitely i need to re-watch that i just re-listened to the podcast episode that you all did now i need to actually go back and watch the film that movie gets a lot

of garbage but like it's i think it's a masterpiece yeah yeah i remember really enjoying it and and just being like damn this is so meta and and trying to that tension between enjoying it like in just like i'm plopped on the couch kind of high or whatever, drinking a beer and then like being like, oh, this is something I need to take notes on. Right. Totally. Same constant struggle for me. So a little while ago, you alluded to, I believe, in one of your quotes, this idea of the real versus reality. And you said we'd get back to it. And so for listeners who were eagerly anticipating the return of that topic, this is your moment. We are going to be talking about the real versus reality. And so Fisher talks about the idea of there being two sort of realities, actual reality, for example,

things like climate change. We most recently have experienced these realities in places like Maui and the Northwest Territories of Canada where there are crazy wildfires raging right now. Those things are considered to be real with a capital R. Whereas there's another form of reality, which is actually manufactured and constructed through capitalism itself. And this is the reality that is infused into us by capitalist structures and ideologies. And Fisher talks about how the real and the capital are things like climate change. Those are things that like we would actually experience as being quite traumatic if we actually had to confront them and think about them in a real way that if capitalism and capital were actually forced to confront the real that would be quite traumatic and in fact it would suggest its inevitable collapse right and so it's unable to actually explore that reality. It has to exist in this manufactured reality. And so yeah, Fisher uses this idea of environmental

destruction and the tech utopian response to flesh this idea out, like the real being climate change, but capitalist reality cannot fathom this, right? And so instead of actually doing anything about climate change, we see capitalists like Elon Musk fantasize about colonizing Mars, or we hear about how not yet invented technologies will swoop us up and whisk us out of the hell world that we're getting closer and closer to with every degree increase in global average temperatures. And I mean, of course, we all operate in this way, right? It's almost impossible not to. We all have this sort of harder, soft climate denialism, right, that pervades our society. We have to act as if climate change isn't real in order to function, right? Because if we did, we would have to immediately stop everything that we're doing and completely

shift, right? But we're not going to do that. We can't do that. The system can't confront it. So we just sort of exist in this sort of in between space. And there's really no piece of data about our impending planetary collapse that's going to change that, right? It's not about data. It's about capitalism having manufactured this reality sphere for us that we exist in. And I know that was a lot, but I'm wondering if there are any reality spheres that come to your mind aside from maybe climate change, or if you want to expand on the climate change idea for you when you think about this distinction between the capital real and the reality of late stage capitalism.

of late stage capitalism yeah i think this concept of the real and reality is like so fundamental to like just maintaining a revolutionary posture in even just ideologically because you have to be able to separate those things but it's so it's such a hairy one and like i even when Fisher got into this part I had to like reread it a couple times because it can be tricky but I think it's really really fundamental so I'm so glad we're talking about it I can't really think of I mean we're talking about Wachowski but I can't I can't think of the real and reality without thinking about morpheus's incredible line in the very first matrix when he says to neo welcome to the desert of the real and he's sitting in this leather chair in sort of like a darkened rocky landscape welcome to the desert of the real.

He's still within the construct of the Matrix, but it is a construct that reflects the actual real of the machine world and human society's collapse which is really interesting because he's saying welcome to the desert of the real but they aren't in the machine world they're in the matrix when he says that but they're in a matrix rendering of the machine world in order for neo to be able to confront it. Because actually confronting the machine world. And it's sort of like raw unadulterated state. Would be too traumatic.

And so this program is designed to sort of filter some of that trauma out. And make it more palatable for Neo as he's falling down this rabbit hole. And I love that the Wachowskis are just like so fucking based that they were able to like explore the concept of the real and the reality in that one line and in that one sort of like flourish of it taking place in the matrix. And I think it's a helpful framing for me to understand this concept. So hopefully it's helpful to other people too. Because the presentation of the real, even if it's a presentation of it in whatever medium, is still an important exercise because it it helps us sort of confront that which is traumatic and kind of like gets us halfway there but I think that like in terms of

other like spheres of the real versus reality the thing I sort of broadly tend to think about when I think about what the real is is that it is sort of existence that is not contingent upon like us observing it or like even describing it and we can think about perhaps like the collapse of a lot of like actual physical infrastructure as another example of this where like you know you've got like steam liners getting caught in fucking canals and like bridges collapsing and trains carrying like incredibly destructive substances exploding and like all sorts of examples of like infrastructure collapsing that like we filter through language of media and the exchanges of the market to talk about and discuss and politicize but those things are happening regardless of whether or not we But those things are happening regardless of whether or not we narrativize them or even observe them. And the sort of like reality, the capitalist version of that real is maybe what we get presented to us in like the New York Times, right?

Where they're talking about the explosion in East Palestine and waffling about who did what and what should happen. That is a reality. That's not the real. The real is the actual collapse of the infrastructure. That's another one that I think about. And like, again, like what's important here is that the real is something that is not, I think they actually talk about this on the RevLeft Radio episode on capitalist realism that like it is not dependent on like our sensorial experience with it it exists regardless yeah yeah it's independent of us right in our our sensorial experiences and ideologies and I think a couple of other examples that I'm thinking of like one one of them is really obvious, right? COVID, like the real capital R COVID is killing people every day and throwing, you know, who knows how many people, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people into

long term disability. But the reality is that we're acting as if it doesn't exist, like individually, collectively, and, you know, especially in policy, like I'm actually just in the process now of getting kicked off of Medi-Cal, which I've been on for years, because they ended the public health emergency and never actually did anything about it. You know, I actually saw a tweet on Blue Sky recently, a skeet, if you will, that was, you know, it was saying that it's more likely that we're going to create a whole new extra alphabet to name new COVID variants and name all of the extra hurricanes that happen after the one that, you know, starts with the Z. So we're,

we're going to be doing that instead of actually doing anything about these things. So I think, you know, COVID is a really big example of the real versus reality, like that's a big one. But also like in smaller, more everyday ways, we feel things like I'm thinking of Bidenomics and, you know, this push, it seems like a concerted push, almost like a coordinated coordinated concerted push by the media to tell us all that inflation is down and actually the economy is doing much better and i'm sitting there listening to that as i'm spending a hundred dollars on groceries that used to cost like 25 bucks and it's like okay so there is my reality at the checkout stand and then there's the reality that is being told to me and like the tension between

that we're just so divorced from the real and it pops up constantly all over the place and so i think i want to i want to move ahead here a little bit to looking at how mark fisher spent so much time focusing on culture because you you know, that's a realm that you're really quite adept at and have a lot of experience exploring in your podcast and I'm sure in many other ways. And I think I love that Mark Fisher really exists, like a lot of this book exists on the terrain of culture. And it reminds me a little bit to what I'm about to say here is an idea that I kind of came across when I was listening to Matt Chrisman, who's also been on the show a couple times, but you all probably know him best as the co host of Chapo Trap House, but he has his own sort of personal podcast that he does.

And I know that you listen to it as well, Carly. So maybe you've come across this, but this idea of culture being sort of the last place, the last bastion where we can actually exercise our creative imaginations of an actually felt future. being like sort of a new explorer, right? Like throwing us into these spaces similar to what could have been imagined by like, you know, early humans arriving into previously unexplored or uninhabited territories or even the only spaces where we can, you know, really truly feel like we're fighting against an all-pervasive system are these like cultural realms now. And so I'm interested in sort of hearing what you think about that, because I know that you have a lot to say about that. But then also, you know, potential follow up and sorry if I'm throwing too many questions at you in one place here, but I'm interested how you think this interacts with the idea of inter passivity that we talked about earlier? Like,

does media consumption necessarily have to remain as an interpassive interaction? And how could we potentially move it into a more material realm of action? I think this topic is incredibly important and one that like has to be part of any revolutionary conversation. So I'm really glad that you brought it up. So the focus on culture is one, importantly, that should not be considered like mutually exclusive to an anti-capitalist project. And you mentioned Matt and the Chapo guys also really like insisting on sort of like the importance of culture and where kind of generative ideation can take place. which he capitalizes in title case, as like something that can be radical, that like presenting something new rather than a recursive version of a thing is a potentially radical act, and that we can still do that within the realm of culture. We can ideate the new and imagine alternatives and express them readily in cultural outputs.

But I also think necessary to that exercise is an understanding of how that cultural output is related to the system of dissemination that it is existing in. Because that's where you start to get into like the degradation of maybe its radical potential. But we don't need to get into that. I think that the sort of headline for me is that Fisher and I think you and I and also Matt Chrisman and a lot of other people believe that culture is still a place where revolutionary ideas and expressions and antagonisms toward the system itself can take place. And we were talking about film earlier, and I mentioned Resurrections, Matrix Resurrections. I think that's a great example of that, particularly one working within the confines of like a franchise Hollywood

system and other films like a film from the 90s by a French director named Olivier Assayas called Hermes Vep. And he has now turned that into an HBO series. And he is an artist who consistently reflects upon his own work and the nature of his relationship to his work and other people's relationship to his work and his work and its relationship to the system that it exists within and I think like that examination is inherently a radical one. And he's still operating within the confines of HBO and like their entire like streaming system something new trying to utilize artifacts of the past in

order to create something that hasn't existed before and change our relationship with the thing that he made previously so i think there is radical potential in culture and another person who talks about this we've mentioned in this conversation several times is Aaron Thorpe. And he writes about this in his piece on his sub stack. And the piece is called just to mention again, what may have been. And I just want to quote it briefly. He says, revolutionary culture was instrumental in disseminating ideas of resistance and change through newspapers, pamphlets, literature, plays, films, and music. The old becomes new again. What was once taboo and subversive is now socially acceptable and profitable. As an aside, we talked about this,

right? Interpressivity, the co-opting of radical ideas understood in this way aaron says culture like history is never fixed but upholds within it contradictions and repeated contests over power and influence between the classes the left should exploit these tensions and fissures building a revolutionary popular culture that isn't just an exclusive club or echo chamber or menagerie of haunting victories, but is focused on the relation between culture and questions of hegemony, the class struggle in and over culture. Doing so in the here and now might be one way to wean ourselves off of this pre-recession nostalgia, to exit a neoliberal culture of recursion, and to challenge capitalist realism and futurelessness.

There is no true refuge in the past, nor is a better world waiting for us. We have to make it. And I think what he's saying here is that within culture and what becomes dominant popular culture, finger quotes, and then dominant structures of power coming in to co-opt those things. But at the point at which that tension takes place, there is an opportunity for us to exploit that tension, exploit that desire of the dominant power structure, and perhaps create something different or antagonistic out of that tension. And I think a step further is allowing the co-opting, allowing that sort of subsumption, and then utilizing the framework of those dominant structures of power to explore our relationship with them. And I want to come back to Lana Wachowski and Matrix Resurrections because I think that she does that beautifully in that film. She's operating within the Hollywood system. She's

operating within a franchise that has all of its tentacles outstretched over the last 20 years in various markets. And she's using the language and the artifacts of those systems in order to comment on them and confront us with our relationship to them. So there's like two ways we can go, and I think both are possible. There is taking this point of tension when the dominant power structures come in and try to subsume that which is radical and exploiting that tension to make something that is antagonistic towards that desire of the dominant power structure toward that profit motive. And then there's allowing that co-opting and working within the framework of the dominant power structures in order to confront us with our relationship to it and use the language of recursion

to comment on it and to illuminate the problems inherent in it. And that's where I do think culture can be truly radical yeah yeah absolutely i couldn't agree more like i'm thinking you know there's this uh the sort of the trope that the the capitalist will sell you the rope that you hang him with and it's like what do you do with the rope sort of like how how do you leverage that transaction It's like, what do you do with the rope? How do you leverage that transaction so that it doesn't end with the subsuming or the that. And we'll expand on that and analyze it. But I think right now I want to turn the conversation in the direction of mental health, because that's something that's definitely an ongoing theme in this book. And for folks who

are not familiar with Mark Fisher, he did commit suicide himself, and he experienced mental health issues as well, as many of us do in this society. And yeah, I want to read a somewhat lengthy passage from the texts, not too long, but just bear with me here. And then I'm going to ask you to sort of respond to another question that I have that's related to this. But okay, so the quote goes, many of the teenagers I've worked with had mental health problems or learning difficulties. And of course, this is Fisher talking about this. He's, he's a instructor, a teacher. So going back to the text, depression is endemic. It is the condition most dealt with by the National Health Service and is afflicting people at increasingly younger ages. The number of students who have had some variant of dyslexia is astonishing. It's not an exaggeration to say

that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness. And this ending of this quote is just super powerful to me. This pathologization already forecloses any possibility of politicization. By privatizing these problems, treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual's neurology and or by their family background, any question of social systemic causation is ruled out. And yeah, I wanted to explore this a little bit with you because, you know, I know we've talked quite a bit about this and well, you know, not just talking about social causes of certain, you know, mental health conditions, but also like, you know, Upstream did our episode,

But also like, you know, Upstream did our episode, we did an entire episode on this with Danielle Jose, Hatam Bidet Nunez and Harriet Fraud. And, you know, even now, whenever I share about that episode on social media, we get a decent amount of pushback from some folks who are like, you know, hey, you are erasing my mental illness by saying it's got social causes, you know, whether it's ADHD, depression, you know, whatever. And I find that so, so interesting, like this idea that somehow because your mental health illness has social causes or, you know, is even partially triggered by social conditions that somehow that invalidates it. somehow that invalidates it. And, you know, we've talked about this. And one of the explanations that we batted around was that, you know, maybe this feels like an attack or an erasure to some people because they do see it as an individual identity, right? Like their mental illness is an identity. It's an individual identity. And by suggesting there's something social going on, something collective that we're all subjected to, for some, this might strip away that identity. It might take away from the meaning they've ascribed to it because we do live in such an atomized and individual culture that it would

make sense that mental illness would become an individual identity, right? It's much easier to commodify and put into the market that way. And it gives us individual meaning in a world that has grown more and more meaningless. And so I understand how under capitalism, suggesting a collectively experienced social cause, if it's something that we're all in together, then it doesn't really serve that same purpose of providing individual meaning or identity, an inherent part of like who you are. And I think, of course, those, those two things can coexist, right? That, of course, you know, it's not just one or the other, like it can be individual and social in certain ways, like those things can coexist. But I think sometimes when the focus is on social causes, it can be uncomfortable to confront that.

And yeah, so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts or reflections on any of that that you'd like to share. I have so many thoughts. Big surprise. and foremost, it's interesting to note that like a revulsion toward acknowledging social implications in something I experienced personally, like depression or schizophrenia or ADHD, the revulsion towards acknowledging those social implications is a very real example of capitalist realism at work, right? So like, it's perfect that we're talking about this. And it's why I think Fisher writes about it. He doesn't specifically talk about the denial that we're talking about. The denial of the social implications of our mental health is not something that fisher discusses explicitly he sort of does but this has become i think more apparent in like the age of social media and

everyone like again we're talking about the performance the performance of struggle the spectacle of struggle who gets to perform it who gets to capitalize off of it it's all tied together the commodification of trauma the commodification of trauma you said it and so i think like this idea that in talking about the social material causes of mental illness you are stripping someone of their identity, that becomes distressful for people because there is no identity under capitalism, right? Like we are workers. We are generators of capital for some abstract entity on high. And so much isn't within our control. We are reminded of that daily. And yet we have this overarching narrative in America specifically, but I would argue the West broadly, that we are always in control of our own destiny, that individualism is the thing that powers our

very society and so this contradiction is one that people can't quite make sense of that like okay i have no identity under capitalism i may not know that consciously but i certainly feel it to a certain extent. But I'm also operating under the belief that like, my will is something I can exercise at any point. And so talking about the ways in which I struggle, and then someone saying to me, like, well, that's not you. That's like the system removes me of my agency to do anything about it potentially. Ironically, it does not, but it might feel that way. And it also denies American exceptionalism and the moral rectitude of individualism. But I think a bigger piece of this that was an unlock for me in one of our conversations about this, Robbie, is that in individuating mental illness, you are still operating within a capitalist framework of your understanding of mental illness.

understanding of mental illness and you're still operating within the context of a market of exchange because by individuating my identity and saying like no I have this mental illness because of things that are specific to me not because of like anything systemic you're still operating in a landscape of markets I can buy medication for that I can purchase therapy sessions I can post about it for likes I can create a set of memes online talking about it like whatever it may be like we're still operating in the currency of the market in individuating our mental illness and so like that I think is the biggest key here and I'm I don't want to downplay that there are absolutely physiological, chemical, and personal factors in mental illness. But the denial of anything social or structural is a problematic one in my mind. And one that I think prevents you from ever truly finding healing or or anything that feels even remotely like health and like just to wrap it up with something

we talked about earlier this idea that there is moral purity in the act of consumption that there's this sort of like cleansing that takes place when we consume if we're converting our mental health issues our material identities into artifacts for consumption by individuating them then there is a sort of tacit understanding that like I may be fucked up but like I can still operate within the system I don't have to tear it down I can still exist even flawed within the current framework of our existence and in that act i'm ultimately just commodifying my mental health issues but like that's the thing that makes that makes it okay right does that make sense i'm kind of like all over the place here but oh no no no no that makes total sense i totally agree with like everything that you just

said, including the comment about memeing and, and mental health, right? Like, I mean, I have definitely partaken in that. And I'm sure most of us have. And it's hard not to when you're so alienated in this society. I also I want to acknowledge that we've been talking about some really, really heavy and complex ideas now for about two hours. I think we're, you know, we're trying to make sense of a lot here, a lot of huge ideas, and I've been loving this conversation. And before we sort of move on from this discussion about the text and mental illness, you know, or also, you know, I wanted to bring this up to what Beatrice Adler Bolton in our episode on health communism recently suggested the term madness as an alternative to mental illness. And I definitely want to acknowledge

that as well. If you want to learn more about that specifically, I'm not going to get into it here, but feel free to check out that episode health communism. But I think one last thing I want to say here, which I think is really important, obviously, we're not mental health experts, and we're just batting around some ideas, you know, that are informed by the text and our personal experiences. And, you know, from what I understand, mental illness or madness has both personal and social components to it that we're sort of pre-wired or predisposed and then there are social triggers which can activate things and also just on a personal note I personally have struggled quite a bit with depression and I have family and loved ones who have chronic mental health conditions diagnosed

bipolar and depression and, and, uh, you know, some undiagnosed and yeah, I feel like I am coming at this with a little bit of personal experience. Um, but of course, nowhere near an expert at all. So just, you know, take this all how you will. And yeah, I don't know this, you know, it's a tricky and touchy topic and I hope that we handled it with, with care and sensitivity. And, uh, yeah, I do't know this, you know, it's a tricky and touchy topic. And I hope that we handled it with with care and sensitivity. And yeah, I do want to talk again, bringing it back to the text more explicitly. Fisher explores what he has observed in the youth that he teaches as a generation for whom time has been distorted, because of what he calls the entertainment matrix, a twitchy sort of agitated interpassivity and inability to concentrate or focus, which

I think I can definitely relate to that. And, you know, we sort of just play that off as having short attention spans, right, because of social media or whatever, but it's much deeper than that. And I think this is also relevant to a conversation that we had previously with Jenny O'Dell exploring the attention economy recently. But so to bring it back to the text real quick, I'm going to read a quote from Fisher. Okay, so the quote goes, I challenged one student about why he always wore headphones in class. He replied that it didn't matter because he wasn't actually playing any music. In another lesson, he was playing music at a very low volume

through the headphones without wearing them. When I asked him to switch it off, he replied that even he couldn't hear it. Why wear the headphones without playing music or play music without wearing the headphones? Because the presence of the phones on the ears, or the knowledge that the music is playing, even if he couldn't hear it, was a reassurance that the matrix was still there, within reach. And who boy, when I read that, I was like, holy shit, I totally do that. I go on long walks pretty much every day. And I usually listen to either music or podcasts. But, you know, sometimes I do, I'm just like done. And I just want to, you know, not listen to anything and unplug. But I actually still keep my headphones in my ears. I noticed

that after I read that passage, I was like, holy shit, I do that. And, you know, yeah, I think, after I read that passage, I was like, holy shit, I do that. And, you know, yeah, I think, you know, it's this idea of needing to feel that the world is still reachable. And yeah, I'm curious if you have anything like similar to that, or if you have any like thoughts or reflections on that idea. I think this is so related to something I've, I've talked a lot about online and written a bit on, which is this idea of our existence under late capitalism being hypermediated. Every aspect of our waking and sometimes even our sleeping life is mediated and technologized to a certain extent. And that means that unmediated acts, like, I don't know, fucking reading a book or just like standing somewhere without looking at your phone, feel foreign or boring or bad. We've grown really accustomed to being tethered and it's important the distinction is tethered

not together not to each other but all tethered to something as individuals that being untethered feels unmanageable feels unbearable and that i think is it is a result of increasing alienation under late capitalism, but it's also a chicken egg. To be tethered to this mediation. This mediated life. And escape the meat world that might be traumatic or scary. Or feel uncomfortable or boring or strange. And it's why a lot of people on the left will say. There's only so much organizing you can do in a digital space. It can certainly be part of a revolutionary project. And indeed, like in 2020, we certainly saw the mass dissemination of information very rapidly in order to galvanize more people than had ever been brought together before in protest.

So I think a mediated environment can be powerful for revolution, but you can only go so far there. You do have to actually exist in the meat world and exist outside of that mediated space and be untethered in order to connect with other human beings. Yeah, no, absolutely. So one of the most fascinating discussions in this book, I think, came around this idea of capitalism's centralistness. Like, we're so used to thinking of capitalism and the state as these powerful hegemonic forces. And, you know, they are. And yet, there's this really interesting dynamic there where there's not really a center to point to always, right? And just a quote that I'm going to read here from the text, quote,

at the level of the political unconscious, it is impossible to accept that there are no overall controllers, that the closest thing we have to ruling powers now are nebulous, unaccountable And he talks more about the center being missing, right? And we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there. It is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility. And that was another quote there. And so, yeah, I mean, this idea of like capitalism not having a center and yet, you know, there being a center, but it's never seeable. It's never knowable. He talks a lot about Kafka and how that comes out in a lot of Franz Kafka's books. And also, it's really illustrated quite, I thought quite beautifully in the idea of the

call center. And I remember when I read this passage, I texted you like a bunch of exclamation points, and you said that this passage also I texted you like a bunch of exclamation points. And you said that this passage also really spoke to you. So it's a bit of a long passage, but I'm just going to go ahead and read it. And then I know that you have a film example that you might want to draw in as well. But let me quote here from the text about this idea of the centralistness of capitalism with this description of the call center. So quote, the closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centralistness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center.

As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two distinct realities, right? Like that's what we talked about earlier, reality versus the real. Back to the text. The one in which the services are provided without hitch and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call

centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren't the systemic consequences of a logic of capital, which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can't actually sell you anything. The call center experience distills the political phenomenology of late capitalism, the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since, as is very quickly clear to the caller, there is no one who knows and no one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting. It is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system, but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive,

impersonal, centerless, abstract, and fragmentary, you are as close as you can to be confronting the artificial stupidity of capital in itself. And oh my god, when I read that, I was just like, there were like sparks flying out of my head. Like I had to get up and like walk around my room for a few minutes. I mean, we've all experienced that. And it's just, you know, it's just such a perfect emblematic sort of example of the centralistness of capitalism. And yeah, I mean, I would love to know your thoughts on that. And if you want to, you know, talk about any media that you think might also depict this idea.

Well, firstly, I have to just say, like, if that passage doesn't convince you to read this book, like, I don't know what will. Because, like, what kind of writer can write about a fucking call center and make a text so revelatory and like explosive like i mean i'm just like blown away by fisher's capacity here yeah when i got to this part in his book i also like i think i texted you i was like my third eye opened like i felt like i was seeing into like an abyss of of clarity actually because he's right like this entity this call center is such a perfect distillation of everything contained within capitalism and its false promises and I think I also got to this point in the book and couldn't help but think of Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil, which I have to recommend vehemently to any listener. It's so wild and politically salient and fun and cinematic and dark and hilarious all at once.

It is a dystopian fantasy of sorts, but it is not unlike Children of Men, kind of an exacerbation of our current society. And Brazil is really all about. This place where bureaucracy reigns supreme. And that's in air quotes. Because the entirety of the film is about. The lack of supremacy. Inherent in bureaucracy. And Gilliam is really adept in.

The sort of musical format. And I think it's really perfect for this subject because he oftentimes uses the spectacle and sort of like grand audacity of a musical sequence to highlight the ridiculousness of a system of bureaucracy. Kidding decision makers. No, interpret it. I'm expecting big things to publish the pilot of. Sir, sir, don't let progress see those. Between you and me, Larry, this no-no department, tell records to get stuck, is about to be up great again.

Ah! Here we are. Your very own number on your very own door. And behind that door, your very own office. Congratulations, DZ stroke 015. Welcome to the team. Yes. No.

Cancel that. Send two copies to my office. And the sort of like hilarity of it, which Fisher also touches on in his excerpt here. You can tell he's kind of like writing this with like a rueful grin on his face. And Brazil is, you know, I don't need to get into the plot. All you need to know is about it's about this guy just trying to do something. That's like fundamentally what it's about. And it is about all of the things that get in his way that are part of the system. That get in his way. That are part of the system.

That is supposed to help him. And all of these sort of ridiculous. Exchanges between him. And these people who are pursuing him. And his attempts. To try to clear his name. And accomplish this thing. That he wants to do.

And how frustrated. Psychologically and physically frustrated. He he is in accomplishing that because of all of these layers of bureaucracy and Gilliam does such a beautiful job of revealing the just kind of like dark comedy of these layers of bureaucracy that exist in this centerless void where you know we're told like all of these systems are organizing around something that has like a fundamental morally pure order that like is the best way to do things and will help you accomplish all the things you need to get done and time and time again in the film we are confronted with the fact that there's nothing there there's nothing that it's organizing around it's just the serpent eating itself it's just like such a perfect example of this idea of centerlessness. And it's

a really, really great example of the ways that art and media and film can be critical of our society and not necessarily have to be dour. It's a very fun movie despite it being deeply dark. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great summary of it. And one thing that I think came to my mind too, when we're talking about this centerlessness was actually sort of an ongoing refrain in the book Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris, which he talks about how capitalism is an incredibly impersonal system that sort of acts through people, that there's sort of these forces that work their way through people. It's quite impersonal. And at the same time, it's really interesting too, because it is also a very individualizing system, right? Like we are taught to individualize a lot of the structural issues that we experience on a day-to-day

basis. And that sort of, that tension is really interesting to explore. There's a lot of richness there. And it's also one of the reasons like going to the sort of individualization or what Fisher talks about as being sort of the responsibilization, individualizing structural collective issues, naturalizing what is political, exhausting any idea of a collective subject or class consciousness. This is one of the reasons why capitalism is really inherently unable to respond to structural issues a lot of the time, like climate change, for example. If we're all individually responsible for climate change, then the only response is through individual action, which doesn't work. And also, there is no collective subject under capitalism. There can be no collective response. So I'm going to read another quote here and then let's see where that takes us. To reclaim political agency means, first of all, accepting our insertion at the level

of desire in the remorseless meat grinder of capital. What is being disavowed in the objection of evil and ignorance onto phantasmic others is our own complicity in planetary networks of impression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our cooperation. The most gothic description of capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker, but the living flesh that it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants. The miserable service they provide us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly represent for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us at all.

And so this quote really weighed heavily on me when I read it because it makes me ask, you know, how does one separate one's desires from the desires evoked by capitalism? Is it possible to live rightly in a wrong world, as Adorno asked? And is just asking that question important in and of itself? And so, yeah, I know there's a lot that I just threw at you there. So I'd love to hear, you know, any responses or thoughts on any of that. Go ahead and, you know, attack that from whatever direction you want. Yeah, I think the first thing that he talks about in the quote that you read kind of relates to this thing that we've talked about previously in the conversation, which is that like, you know, the redemptive power of consumption, right, that are only sort of offers

for solution lie within the system that caused the problems itself. And that's the individuating that we've been talking about. But on this question of like, is it possible to live rightly in a wrong world? I think anyone that comes into contact with like capitalism's terrors and is able to grok some sort of like anti-capitalist understanding capitalist understanding will ask themselves this. And it is inherently a stressful question. And I think it's why a lot of people, when confronted with the traumatic realities of capitalism, recede away from them into further consumption, denial, ignorance, whatever. further consumption, denial, ignorance, whatever. But it's an important question. And I do think that just asking it is important because in asking it, you are acknowledging that something is wrong, right? Like you are acknowledging that capitalism exists and that it's like not good.

And that sounds like fundamental fundamental but for a lot of people that's a huge jump so I think even just like asking yourself like what is my role as like a subject of late capitalism like can I live rightly under the system is important because it does acknowledge that the system is a problem. But I think it's less about living rightly. And I think it's more about the relationship that you have with your understanding of capitalism and your place in it. And that you understand that there's a relationship that exists there in the first place. And then I think once you can understand that, then it is about finding ways to engender community, or I should say more specifically,

communal dynamics, because the word community has, of course, like everything else under capitalism, been perverted thanks to social media and identitarianism. But when you acknowledge that you have a relationship with this system of capitalism, and you understand your place in it, from there, you can have enough of critical distance, this critical distance that we've been talking about, I think to try to connect with others in ways that are not dependent on that relationship. And that doesn't mean you can't connect with people through mechanisms of the system. I think our relationship is a really great example of that. Your relationship with your listeners is a really great example of that. Your relationship with your listeners is a really great example of that. We're engaging with one another, meeting each other, having conversations through text, online. These are all mechanisms and technologies of the system. But that doesn't

mean that the actions that happen on them are inherently degraded or like problematic. But it does mean that I have to be intentional about the ways that I connect with people in those mechanisms and through those mechanisms. And like we'll get into this idea of disavowal, which we've talked about a couple of times. which we've talked about a couple of times but like Zizek and Fisher discussed this explicitly that this sort of like disavowal of capitalism can't just be that interpassive one that we were talking about but it is fundamental to getting us out of our acquiescence to it so you can start from a place of disavowal, but you then actually need to go into a place of acceptance. Like you have to actually accept that our desires, our thoughts sometimes are being informed by capitalism and drawn out by capitalism.

And when you accept that, that our thoughts and our desires may not be our own all the time, rather than trying to distance yourself from the system and individuate your experience, then you can actually find community, true community. When you accept your place in this system,

you can then connect with others and find true community. When you accept your place in this system, you can then connect with others and find true solidarity. CB I love that. And yeah, I think Fisher talks about how capitalism's rapacity depends upon various forms of sheathing itself, right? It cloaks itself. And one of the first steps is to realize that as an individual, right, to like make that conscious. And then I think extending outwards from that is the task, you know, the ever present and weighty task for us on the left to build class consciousness. And I think that is one of the really sort of big takeaways at the end that Fisher presents us with is building class consciousness, sort of realizing that we're in the water of capitalism and extending that out in a sort of like a collective way

is one of the potential ways out of the cage that we're in. One of the ways that Fisher thinks that maybe, you know, this can happen is he ends with a call for media makers to break out of the recursion to, you know, what's felt safe and pacifying in the past and to be able to escape the capitalist realism that's burnt into our brains through media. And yeah, so I guess I'll, you know, I'll turn the mic over to you and ask you, like, what are your thoughts on this idea of how the left proceeds in our time. Fisher wrote this book in 2008. I think it's safe to say a lot has gotten worse. Some things have gotten better. But I'm wondering, yeah, what would

you say are your thoughts on how the left can proceed, what role media and culture have to play, and yeah, how we can begin to sort of recognize the water and and help others around us do that as well I think that the insistence from Fisher on revolution taking place first and foremost within media is an important one for us to just pause on for a second because I think that that really illuminates the power of like the media arm of the state to be coercive and to enable the state's dominance and to enable a capitalist order but that also means that there's an incredible amount of power contained in that arm of the state that can be used for other things and can be used for socializing, socializing other ideas about different ways of organizing ourselves. ourselves and Aaron Thorpe brought that up in the passage I mentioned from his piece that like we can use media and art as a means of broad dissemination of radical ideas but it requires actors within that construct to be willing to take a risk to do so. And, you know, not everyone is able to materially take

that risk without putting their own life on the line. And it's designed that way. But to go back to the question of like, well, what do we do? I think we've been circling around this idea of like culture as a place where like, imagination of alternatives can take place and that's where I think we start and seeking out examples of cultural output even from dominant structures of power that are different or challenging is, I mean, this sounds like sort of feckless, but it's like a radical act at this point when so much of what we strive for is a curated, algorithmically designed experience of our life. Doing anything to sort of buck that and say like, well, I'm going to watch this movie that like wasn't recommended to me or whatever you know like it's a small thing but that may expose us to ideas and

perhaps even entire ideologies that are alternatives and I think it also necessitates that we try to do something with this very precious gift that Fisher has given us, which is this critical distance, this psychic distance from capitalism that we talked about at the beginning of the conversation. We have to do something in that space. And I think making sort of cultural output and art that is alternative and different and imagines something beyond or outside of capitalism is something to do in that space. But I also think like reconnecting with the sensorial and fighting against the sort of like imposed passivity that are like incredibly mediated existence demands of us is really crucial to any sort of revolutionary project and to put that in more simplistic terms it's like allow yourself to feel things allow yourself to be uncomfortable allow yourself to like physically and physiologically engage with something not just like mematically

engage with it and so too is the case with people like force yourself to confront other people's humanity and not like see them as like a signifier of an idea and in order to do that you have to unplug a little bit you have to remove yourself from from the sort of tethered space that we've been talking about and fisher is giving us a means with which to do that. And the means with which to do that is acknowledging capitalist realism and what it is and understanding your participation in it and its hold on you gives you enough room to be able to say like, okay, if I know that, then like I can accept my place in this system and potentially like understand that what I might finger quotes believe is also part of that system and that then maybe allows you to connect with someone you may not have otherwise and just like have a real conversation I think this is like fundamental in anyone living in the Bay Area, but specifically in San Francisco, when like, if we rely solely on like the mediated narrative of what the city is and who the people in it are, we will not be engaging with the real. We will only be engaging with reality.

And we will villainize the people that this city has turned its back on. Some 11,000 people living unhoused, not through any fault of their own. You don't have that many people living unhoused all because they have individually fucked up. housed all because they have individually fucked up. You don't have that kind of mass immiseration in a single corner of a state unless it is something systemic. But it's so easy to ignore something that obvious when you only engage with this mediated capitalist realist experience of what life is and in order to find some sort of real communal dynamic you need to detach from that a little bit and remember that like we are all human beings something i say a lot is that like not only is capitalism not like the best way for things to run which I think like we have lots of evidence of that being the case mental health disorders being on the rise is one

but also just like climate disaster and you name a million other things but like not only is it not the right and best way but it's also deeply anti-human. It constantly at every turn forces us to suppress what is natural and tells us that that suppression is actually what's natural and it's not. And it's why we are terrorized so often by feelings of overwhelm and distress because you do want to feel something when you see someone hurting. It's unnatural not to. Humans are not inherently bad. Humans are bad under capitalism. And allowing yourself that grace and other people that grace is where I think something truly generative can happen. in. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Carly Gomes, co-host of the podcast Hit Factory. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned

in this episode. Thank you to Carolyn Rader for the cover art and to Chain and the gang for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Independent Arts and Media, any donations you make from the U.S. are tax exempt. For more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts,

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