Preface
This essay was written in 2012–2013, unfolding concurrently with the preparation of my final exhibition at the Royal Academy Schools. It was born out of a specific interregnum: a moment when the demand to create something genuinely new in the studio clashed with the pervasive cultural stasis described by Mark Fisher as “reflexive impotence”.
Focusing tightly on the ideological traps of postmodernism, this text examines the precise point where critical diagnosis is itself reduced to a commodity. Capitalist Realism serves as a vital tool throughout the essay. While I take Fisher’s framework apart—arguing that his conceptual apparatus lacked the means to generate a resolution and merely described the trap from within the trap—I do so entirely in the debt of his clarity.
Fisher’s death in 2017 adds a profound weight to these arguments. He diagnosed a paralyzed culture, but ultimately, he stood up and was counted. This text is an exploration of the ground he laid, standing today as a theoretical wager: an attempt to find a way to act non-dialectically and step forward, becoming the subject for whom the act is coherent even before the justification is securely in place.
Postmodernism and the Hegelian Turn
Capitalist Realism (2009) is a book that knows it cannot work. Mark Fisher’s diagnosis of the current socio-political landscape — a condition he calls capitalist realism, crediting the formulation to Jameson and Žižek’s proposition that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ — is also, by its own terms, a demonstration of the condition it describes. Fisher defines capitalist realism as ‘what happens when postmodernism is naturalized,’ and its subjective correlate as ‘reflexive impotence’: the self-fulfilling prophecy in which knowledge that the system is broken produces accommodation rather than resistance. A book that diagnoses reflexive impotence cannot escape being received reflexively and impotently. Fisher knows this. He writes anyway. The question is whether that act of writing constitutes a theoretical failure, a political wager, or both.
Fisher invokes Gramsci’s ‘Philosophy of Praxis’ to argue that capitalist realism ‘can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable.’ But Gramsci’s more resonant formulation appears elsewhere: ‘the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Fisher’s book is one of those morbid symptoms. It belongs to the interregnum — lucid, precise, and structurally incapable of ending it. From here Fisher asks: ‘how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?’ The question echoes Marx’s grave: ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’ But interpretation, under conditions of capitalist realism, is all Fisher offers. The diagnosis is his contribution. Its limitation is that diagnosis, within the system it describes, has become a commodity.
Fisher presents his central terms — capitalist realism, reflexive impotence — as advances on postmodernism and existentialism. They are repackagings. Central to both is reflexivity: in the “realism” of capitalist realism, in the “reflexive” of reflexive impotence. This is already the organising principle of the Hegelian phenomenological turn: ‘mind knowing itself in the shape of mind.’ Postmodernism via Lyotard, existentialism, and Fisher’s own vocabulary all rotate on this axis. The claim that capitalist realism represents a step on from postmodernism is moot. Fisher has not moved the terrain; he has renamed it. The failure runs deeper than redundancy. Fisher is not simply repeating the Hegelian reflexive turn — he is caught in its pathological completion. Hegel’s phenomenology moves toward Absolute Knowing: the moment at which mind knows itself entirely and is reconciled with its object. Capitalist realism is this moment, arrived at without its resolution. The system is transparent to those it dominates; the knowing produces paralysis rather than freedom. The Hegelian structure is complete. Only the Hegelian resolution is missing, and it is missing because Fisher’s conceptual apparatus has no means to generate it. He has described the trap from within the trap.
In his introduction to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, Jameson observes that the ‘prefix post reminds us that legitimation becomes visible as a problem only at the point at which it is called into question. This is the Hegelian gesture: reflexivity becomes legible only at the moment of its crisis. Fisher repeats the gesture — naming, diagnosing, calling into question — without recognising that the gesture alone changes nothing. Every negation is also an affirmation. Fisher’s negation reproduces the structure it negates.The tautology has a material basis that the philosophical critique alone does not reach. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard describes the transformation of knowledge under post-industrial capitalism:
‘The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds, or even of individuals, is becomingobsolete … Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its “use-value.”’
This is the alienation of knowledge itself — the foreclosure of Hegel’s ‘organic community’ by the reduction of thought to commodity. If knowledge is produced only for exchange-value, then critical theory is not exempt. Capitalist Realism was written, published, marketed, bought, and consumed. Its diagnosis of reflexive impotence is reproduced in its own circulation as a cultural product. Fisher’s readers consume the critique of their consumption. The tautology is not a logical error; it is built into the political economy of critical publishing under the very conditions Fisher describes. His book sells. That is its problem.
Lyotard also traces how Nietzsche showed that ‘European nihilism resulted from the truth requirement of science being turned back against itself’ — a ‘process of delegitimation fuelled by the demand for legitimation itself.’ Fisher’s atemporality is the cultural form of this nihilism. The delegitimation machine turns on critical theory too; Fisher’s intervention is consumed and neutralised by the same process he diagnoses. Gramsci’s interregnum names the political form of this stasis: the old refuses to die, the new cannot be born, and what fills the gap are morbid symptoms — among which Fisher’s own lucid, defeated book must be counted.
Žižek’s story of the priest and the atheist illuminates the ideological structure of Fisher’s failure. The priest asks the atheist whether he believes in God. Effectprecedes cause: the act produces the subject who performs it. In moments of crisis the atheist prays — not out of hypocrisy but in acknowledgement of the possibility of being wrong. One acts just-in-case, and in acting becomes the subject for whom the act is coherent.
Fisher’s project has this structure, but inverted. He writes for an audience that, by his own account, cannot be moved by writing. Marx’s formula for ideology is ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’ — the subject acts within a structure invisible to them. Fisher’s condition is its precise inversion: his readers know it, and they are not doing it. Knowledge has been fully decoupled from action. This is not a failure of information — the information is abundant — but the structural feature of the ideological moment Fisher describes. By producing more knowledge about this condition, Fisher reproduces it. His book does not escape capitalist realism. It is one of its cultural products, circulating within the system whose closure it announces. The tautology is ideological in the strict Marxist sense: Fisher mirrors at the level of theoretical practice the very structure he diagnoses at the level of politics.
Fisher’s question — how long can a culture persist without the new? — is also Nietzsche’s. In The Century (2005), Badiou describes how Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism was accompanied by a ‘voluntaristic certainty of a Great Noon, a certainty bearing no relation to the domination of nihilism, whether as its result or as its dialectical sublation. The Great Noon is not derived from nihilism. It does not follow from European nihilism as its logical resolution. It stands against it, non-dialectically — a will that precedes its own justification.
This is what Fisher cannot generate. Reflexive impotence remains inside the dialectical structure: knowledge of the system turned back on the subject who holds it. Any resistance produced from within carries the structure’s logic with it. The new vocabulary arrives defeated because it is produced by the same machine. What Nietzsche offers — and what Badiou draws from him — is an act that refuses the terms on which the machine measures validity.
Badiou describes the problem of the century as the ‘non-dialectical conjunction of the theme of the end and that of the beginning,’ demanding ‘two very distinct tasks: to destroy the old, and to create the new. As Jameson implies through the prefix post in Lyotard, all terms remain available for renegotiation — old and new, beginning and end, an Ouroboros in which the only genuine novelty is produced through a renegotiation of knowledge itself, what Lyotard calls ‘language games. Fisher’s refusal to engage at this methodological level is the site of his failure. He renegotiates the nouns without touching the grammar.
Through his discussion of Pétainism, Badiou names the political form of this failure: the abject accomplice, ‘all the more abject in being passive, preoccupied only with its own survival.’16 Today’s maxim, he writes, ‘calls for renunciation, resignation, the lesser evil together with moderation, the end of humanity as a spiritual force, and the critique of “grand narratives.”’ The declaration of grand narratives’ end — Lyotard’s declaration, which Badiou reads as a ‘melancholic farewell to the century’ and above all ‘the end of Marxist politics, the end of the proletarian narrative’18 — is the theoretical form of the same accommodation. Fisher’s reader, reflexively impotent, knowing and inactive, is this abject accomplice: not malicious but habituated. The interregnum has been internalised.
The material conditions for this habituation are traceable. Lyotard declared in 1979 that the ‘status of knowledge is altered’ as cultures enter the postmodern age, a process underway ‘since at least the end of the 1950s.’19 Following Harvey, 1979 also marks the shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. In Britain, the end of the proletarian narrative takes concrete form through deindustrialisation and the dismantling of collective structures under Thatcher — what Gramsci would recogniseas the destruction of the organic intellectuals of the old order without the creation of new ones. What replaces them is the knowledge economy Lyotard describes: thought as commodity, critique as product, the university as supplier of exchange-value rather than site of Bildung. Hegel had concluded that Phenomenology reaches a point at which ‘knowledge is no longer compelled to go beyond itself.’ Postmodernism is this point: the exhaustion of the transcendent impulse. Fisher’s capitalist realism names the moment accurately. His error is to believe that naming it is sufficient to disturb it.
Badiou’s response to the end of grand narratives is not to mourn them but to re-found them on different terms. The Communist Hypothesis (2010) is not a programme. It is what Badiou calls an Idea: a subjective operation connecting individual practice to a universal truth-procedure, whose force does not derive from historical conditions but is posited against them. It does not follow from nihilism as its resolution; it refuses nihilism as its premise. This is the non-dialectical move Fisher cannot make from within his own framework.
Hegel would have predicted the failure of actually existing communism: a revolutionary struggle motivated by emancipation in response to capitalism, rather than emerging as the free expression of social reason, cannot produce an organic society. It produces compulsion. Singer captures what survives the failure: ‘If we finally accept that no one ever will succeed, we will have to acknowledge that freedom, in Hegel’s sense, cannot exist. Even that would not invalidate Hegel’s claim to have described the only genuine form of freedom, and this form of freedom could still serve as an ideal.’ The ideal survives its historical instantiations because it was never reducible to them. It is regulative, not programmatic.
In the final pages of The Meaning of Sarkozy (2007), Badiou writes: ‘We cannot rest content with the dialectical relationship between the state and the mass movement… We must re-establish the hypothesis in the field of ideology and action.’ To re-establish the hypothesis is not to derive it from present conditions — which are, by Fisher’s account, those in which no alternative seems possible. It is to posit it without derivation: to act before the justification is in place, to become, through the act, the subject for whom the act is coherent. This is Žižek’s atheist praying — not hypocrisy but a wager on the possibility of being wrong about what is possible.
Bibliography
Badiou, A., The Meaning of Sarkozy, Verso, 2008.
Badiou, A., Communist Hypothesis, Verso, 2010.
Fisher, M., Capitalist Realism, Zero Books, 2009.
Gramsci, A., Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971.
Harvey, D., A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Jameson, F., Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 1991.
Badiou, A., The Century, Polity, Cambridge, 2005.
Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, 1984 [1979].
Marx, K., Theses on Feuerbach [1845], in Engels, F. (ed.), Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 1886.
Singer, P., Hegel: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1983
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