Thematic Crit (research)- Capitalism
Thematic Crit
Capitalism
This critical group discussion was interesting due to the strong political turn it took from the very beginning. Some very overpowering members of the group took over conversation completely and forced their own opinion. However, regardless of this, the discussion with Mark and the rest of the group was interesting in understanding the complicated nature of how all aspects of life integrate with capitalism now.
Much of what was discussed are things I have already researched or am currently researching. This lead me to feel that many people are lacking understanding of just how deeply our own consumer behaviour influence and are involved within the capitalist state.
This resonated with me and made me panic at the lack of time left to raise awareness of the direction our societal structure is heading. As I continue my work and research, the more I start to become overwhelmed. People are used to looking back at history and seeing things much clearer. However, many do not seem to see that the time we find ourselves in now is pinnacle for the future of the species. Although it is a social structure, capitalism's involvement with so much else means that it can not be removed easily, thus causing great concern for future sustainability.
Capitalist realism
Mark Fisher
https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%20No%20Alternat%20-%20Mark%20Fisher.pdf
After finishing this book I am struck with the vast amount of information, theory and reference used. All of which took time to look into and understand individually. The two aspects analysed within the book (education system and new bureaucracy) were things I had not considered within society previously. The influence of capital on mental illness and youth involvement was very prominent to me, due to the fact I can see a new wave within my own generation of individuals who have much less understanding or knowledge of the system we function under and the problems caused by such. The repression of their conscious will and desire is being translated into a 'lazy' unmotivated generation with little drive for more than a 'well paid' job. I speak of well paid in such a way due to the fact that the higher cost (such as environmental and human) is balancing the good wage received by the western worker. The sections below taken from the book were information I wished to retain. unfortunately, this file corrupted and deleted much of the notes on each section. Without reading the book again I am not able to recreate these exactly. I will aim to read the book again however this comes secondary to further research and work.
As part of my research I am reading both capital realism and 'Chaosophy' which includes a collection of Guattari's work and relevance to the fields. Reading capital realism reminds me of the desperation for awarness to stop the failure of the future. The evoke a realism and not just a 'modernism' as modernism can offer a very temporary feel, disallowing for projection of future implication.
https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/guattari_chaosophy.pdf
Capitalism
This critical group discussion was interesting due to the strong political turn it took from the very beginning. Some very overpowering members of the group took over conversation completely and forced their own opinion. However, regardless of this, the discussion with Mark and the rest of the group was interesting in understanding the complicated nature of how all aspects of life integrate with capitalism now.
Much of what was discussed are things I have already researched or am currently researching. This lead me to feel that many people are lacking understanding of just how deeply our own consumer behaviour influence and are involved within the capitalist state.
This resonated with me and made me panic at the lack of time left to raise awareness of the direction our societal structure is heading. As I continue my work and research, the more I start to become overwhelmed. People are used to looking back at history and seeing things much clearer. However, many do not seem to see that the time we find ourselves in now is pinnacle for the future of the species. Although it is a social structure, capitalism's involvement with so much else means that it can not be removed easily, thus causing great concern for future sustainability.
Capitalist realism
Mark Fisher
https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%20No%20Alternat%20-%20Mark%20Fisher.pdf
After finishing this book I am struck with the vast amount of information, theory and reference used. All of which took time to look into and understand individually. The two aspects analysed within the book (education system and new bureaucracy) were things I had not considered within society previously. The influence of capital on mental illness and youth involvement was very prominent to me, due to the fact I can see a new wave within my own generation of individuals who have much less understanding or knowledge of the system we function under and the problems caused by such. The repression of their conscious will and desire is being translated into a 'lazy' unmotivated generation with little drive for more than a 'well paid' job. I speak of well paid in such a way due to the fact that the higher cost (such as environmental and human) is balancing the good wage received by the western worker. The sections below taken from the book were information I wished to retain. unfortunately, this file corrupted and deleted much of the notes on each section. Without reading the book again I am not able to recreate these exactly. I will aim to read the book again however this comes secondary to further research and work.
'Easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism'Referencing films and the projection of the 'future' that the modern world revels in. The hopeless future for mankind at the hands of the state. Ironically enough,as leaders such as trump step into power, this seems more and more likely unless a system re work is fully engaged with by the people at grassroots levels. This could influence the creative world due to the fact ideologies such as DaDa already aimed to protest the irony of the french elite and the influence of industry and legislation. Therefore, historical irony works throughout and can not be shaken from any modern concepts of protest art. ‘The widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ This is the mantra that my art work intends to fight against. The concept of the 'norm' of social structure and how, from a young age, our brain is developed and interlinked so many aspects of capitalism into our everyday choices. 'There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn't end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart' This seems to be taking place currently with those in economic benefit being fully aware of the situation. Individuals providing the profit however are not and are often subject to 'willful blindness'.
'T.S. Eliot looms in the background of Children of Men, which, after all, inherits the theme of sterility from The Waste Land. The film's closing epigraph 'shantih shantih shantih' has more to do with Eliot's fragmentary pieces than the Upanishads' peace.'
'In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs ofprevious cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself.'
'In the years since Deleuze and Guattari wrote thetwo volumes of their Capitalism And Schizophrenia, it has seemedas if the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism have beenconfined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces ofreterritorialization.'
As part of my research I am reading both capital realism and 'Chaosophy' which includes a collection of Guattari's work and relevance to the fields. Reading capital realism reminds me of the desperation for awarness to stop the failure of the future. The evoke a realism and not just a 'modernism' as modernism can offer a very temporary feel, disallowing for projection of future implication.
https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/guattari_chaosophy.pdf
'Jameson used to report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into the very unconscious; now, the fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment.'
'If the concept of ideology is the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge', he argues, then today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way ... to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them
'Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism.'
'So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.'
'Environmental catastrophe is one such Real. At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being 'unrepresentable voids' for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market (In the end, Wall-E presents a version of this fantasy - the idea that the infinite expansion of capital is possible, that capital can proliferate without labor - on the off world ship, Axiom, all labor is performed by robots; that the burning up of Earth's resources is only a temporary glitch, and that, after a suitable period of recovery, capital can terraform the planet and recolonize it). Yet environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system. The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital's 'need of a constantly expanding market', its 'growth fetish', mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.'
'Another British study James cites compared levels of psychiatric morbidity (which includes neurotic symptoms, phobias and depression) in samples of people in 1977 and 1985. 'Whereas 22 per cent of the 1977 sample reported psychiatric morbidity, this had risen to almost a third of the population (31 per cent) by 1986'. Since these rates are much higher in countries that have implemented what James calls 'selfish' capitalism than in other capitalist nations, James hypothesizes that it is selfish (i.e. neoliberalized) capitalist policies and culture that are to blame. '
Much of Baudrillard's work was a commentary on this same effect: the way in which the abolition of the Symbolic led not to a direct encounter with the Real, but to a kind of hemorrhaging of the Real.
'We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against a Capital which presents itself as ontologically, as well as geographically, ubiquitous. '
' The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.'
Comments
Post a Comment