Turning to the 2006 film Children of Men, Fisher investigates its surreal normality as a dystopia fit for our age with the world it projects ‘more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours (rather) than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise cofee bars co-exist.’
This tallies with the thinking of Alain Badiou, who writes,
We live in a contradiction … where all existence … is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible … our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it ’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic.
Because capitalist realism has no ofer of a better future – especially so over the course of the last decade – its default logic is one of anti-utopianism. Flat wages, falling home ownership and a warming planet might be bad, granted, but at least we have iPhones. And, yes, you may not be able to access the things your parents took for granted, like afordable homes or free higher education, but you should still be grateful – at least it’s not the sixteenth century.
Over time this argument, seductive for the opening years of the twenty-first century, is being revealed as patently absurd. Capitalist realism, a world where nothing really changes, is giving way to a historic moment defined by crisis. One where, unless we transform our understanding of the future once more, the very worst demons of centuries past will prevail.
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chaos under heaven