Mark Fisher
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exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.
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Mental health, in fact, is a paradigm case of how capitalist realism operates. Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political- economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James's claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The 'mental health plague' in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.
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In any case, resistance to the 'new' is not a cause that the left can or should rally around.
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The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico- biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de- politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico- biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs).
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The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so- called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge.
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This strategy- of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question- has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism, that 'motley painting of everything that ever was', whose dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as its production and disposal of commodities.
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In conditions where realities and identities are upgraded like software, it is not surprising that memory disorders should have become the focus of cultural anxiety- see, for instance, the Bourne films, Memento, Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind.
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On the one hand, this is a culture that privileges only the present and the immediate- the extirpation of the long term extends backwards as well as forwards in time (for example, media stories monopolize attention for a week or so then are instantly forgotten); on the other hand, it is a culture that is excessively nostalgic, given over to retrospection, incapable of generating any authentic novelty.
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Extrapolating a little from Brown's arguments, we might hypothesize that what held the bizarre synthesis of neoconservatism and neoliberalism together was their shared objects of abomination: the so called Nanny State and its dependents. Despite evincing an anti- statist rhetoric, neoliberalism is in practice not opposed to the state per se- as the bank bail- outs of 2008 demonstrated- but rather to particular uses of state funds; meanwhile, neoconservatism's strong state was confined to military and police functions, and defined itself against a welfare state held to undermine individual moral responsibility.
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The delusion that many who enter into management with high hopes is precisely that they, the individual, can change things, that they will not repeat what their managers had done, that things will be different this time; but watch someone step up into management and it's usually not very long before the grey petrification of power starts to subsume them. It is here that structure is palpable- you can practically see it taking people over, hear its deadened/ deadening judgements speaking through them.
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But this impasse- it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic- is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals- but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep- level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/ expressions of the ultimate cause- that- is- not- a- subject: Capital.
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As Badiou has forcefully insisted, an effective anti- capitalism must be a rival to Capital, not a reaction to it; there can be no return to pre- capitalist territorialities. Anti- capitalism must oppose Capital's globalism with its own, authentic, universality.