Capitalist Realism - Is There no Alternative

Really Existing Socialism (RES) was shabby and corrupt? Not any of the people, who were all too aware of its shortcomings; nor any of the government administrators, who couldn't but know. No, it was the big Other who was the one deemed not to know – who wasn't allowed to know – the quotidian reality of RES. Yet the distinction between what the big Other knows, i.e. what is officially accepted, and what is widely known and experienced by actual individuals, is very far from being 'merely' emptily formal; it is the discrepancy between the two that allows'ordinary' social reality to function. When the illusion that the big Other did not know can no longer be maintained, the incorporeal fabric holding the social system together disintegrates. This is why Khrushchev's speech in 1965, in which he 'admitted'the failings of the Soviet state, was so momentous. It is not as if anyone in the party was unaware of the atrocities and corruption carried out in its name, but Khrushchev's announcement made it impossible to believe any more that the big Other was ignorant of them.

So much for Really Existing Socialism – but what of Really Existing Capitalism? One way to understand the 'realism' of capitalist realism is in terms of the claim to have given up belief in the big Other. Postmodernism can be construed as the name for the complex of crises that the decline in the belief in the big Other has triggered, as Lyotard's famous formulation of the postmodern condition – 'incredulity towards metanarratives' - suggests. Jameson, of course, would argue that the 'incredulity towards metanarratives'is one expression of the 'cultural logic of late capitalism', a consequence of the switch into the post-Fordist mode of capital accumulation. Nick Land gives one of the most euphoric accounts of the 'postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy'. In Land's work, a cybernetically upgraded invisible hand is progressively eliminating centralized state power. Land's 90s texts synthesized cybernetics, complexity theory, cyberpunk fiction and neoliberalism to construct a vision

All that is solid melts into PR

of capital planetary artificial intelligence: a vast, supple, endlessly fissile system which renders human will obsolete. In his manifesto for nonlinear, decentered Capital, 'Meltdown', Land invokes a 'massively distributed matrix-networked tendency oriented to disabling ROM command-control programs sustaining all macro- and micro-governmental entities, globally concentrating themselves as the Human Security System'. This is capitalism as a shattering Real, in which (viral, digital) signals circulate on self-sustaining networks which bypass the Symbolic, and therefore do not require the big Other as guarantor. It is Deleuze and Guattari's Capital as 'Unnamable Thing', but without the forces of reterritorialization and anti-production which they argued were constitutive of capitalism. One of the problems of Land's position is also what is most interesting about it: precisely that it posits a 'pure' capitalism, a capitalism which is only inhibited and blocked by extrinsic, rather than internal, elements (according to Land's logic, these elements are atavisms that will eventually be consumed and metabolized by Capital). Yet capitalism cannot be 'purified' in this way; strip away the forces of anti-production and capitalism disappears with them Similarly, there is no progressive tendency towards an 'unsheathing' of capitalism, no gradual unmasking of Capital as it 'really' is: rapacious, indifferent, inhuman. On the contrary, the essential role of the 'incorporeal transformations' effectuated by PR, branding and advertising in capitalism suggests that, in order to operate effectively, capitalism's rapacity depends upon various forms of sheathing. Really Existing Capitalism is marked by the same division which characterized Really Existing Socialism, between, on the one hand, an official culture in which capitalist enterprises are presented as socially responsible and caring, and, on the other, a widespread awareness that companies are actually corrupt, ruthless, etc. In other words, capitalist postmodernity is not quite as incredulous as it would appear to be, as the jeweler Gerald Ratner famously found to his cost.

Capitalist Realism

Ratner precisely tried to circumvent the Symbolic and 'tell it how it is', describing the inexpensive jewelry his shops sold as 'crap' in an after-dinner speech. But the consequence of Ratner making this judgment official were immediate, and serious - £500m was wiped off the value of the company and he lost his job. Customers might previously have known that the jewelry Ratners sold was poor quality, but the big Other didn't know; as soon as it did, Ratners collapsed.

Vernacular postmodernism has dealt with the 'crisis of symbolic efficiency' in a far less intense way than Nick Land, through metafictional anxieties about the function of the author, and in television programs or films which expose the mechanisms of their own productions and reflexively incorporate discussions of their own status as commodities. But postmodernism's supposed gestures of demystification do not evince sophistication so much as a certain naivety, a conviction that there were others, in the past, who really believed in the Symbolic. In fact, of course, 'symbolic efficiency' was achieved precisely by maintaining a clear distinction between a materialempirical causality, and another, incorporeal causality proper to the Symbolic. Žižek gives the example of a judge: 'I know very well that things are the way I see them, that this person is a corrupted weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him'. However, postmodernism's

cynical reduction to reality ... falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. Lacan aims at this paradox with his 'les non-dupes errent': those who do not allow themselves to be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction, who continue to believe their

All that is solid melts into PR

eyes, are the ones who err most. A cynic who 'believes only his eyes'misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it structures our experience of reality.

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. For Baudrillard, phenomena such as fly on the wall documentaries and political opinion polls - both of which claimed to present reality in an unmediated way – would always pose an insoluble dilemma. Did the presence of the cameras affect the behavior of those being filmed? Would the publication of poll results affect the future behavior of voters? Such questions were undecidable, and therefore 'reality' would always be elusive: at the very moment when it seemed that it was being grasped in the raw, reality transformed into what Baudrillard, in a much misunderstood neologism, called 'hyperreality'. Uncannily echoing Baudrillard's fixations, the most successful reality television programs ended up fusing fly on the wall documentary elements with interactive polling. In effect, there are two levels of 'reality' in these shows: the unscripted behavior of the 'real life' participants onscreen, and the unpredictable responses of the audience at home, which in turn affect the behavior of the onscreen participants. Yet reality TV is continually haunted by questions about fiction and illusion: are the participants acting, suppressing certain aspects of their personality in order to appear more appealing to us, the audience? And have the audience's votes been accurately registered, or is there some kind of a fix? The slogan that the Big Brother TV show uses 'You decide' - captures perfectly the mode of control by feedback that, according to Baudrillard, has replaced old centralized forms of power. We ourselves occupy the empty seat of power, phoning and clicking in our responses. TV's Big Brother had superseded Orwell's Big Brother. We the audience are not

Capitalist Realism

subjected to a power that comes from outside; rather, we are integrated into a control circuit that has our desires and preferences as its only mandate – but those desires and preferences are returned to us, no longer as ours, but as the desires of the big Other. Clearly, these circuits are not confined to television: cybernetic feedback systems (focus groups, demographic surveys) are now integral to the delivery of all 'services', including education and government.

This returns us to the issue of post-Fordist bureaucracy. There is of course a close relationship between bureaucracy - the discourse of officialdom – and the big Other. Witness two of Žižek's own examples of the big Other at work: a low-level official who, having not been informed of a promotion, says 'Sorry, I have not yet been properly informed about this new measure, so I can't help you...'; a woman who believed that she was suffering bad luck because of the number of her house, who could not be satisfied by simply repainting a different number herself, because 'it has to be done properly, by the responsible state institution...' We are all familiar with bureaucratic libido, with the enjoyment that certain officials derive from this position of disavowed responsibility ('it's not me, I'm afraid, it's the regulations'). The frustration of dealing with bureaucrats often arises because they themselves can make no decisions; rather, they are permitted only to refer to decisions that have alwaysalready been made (by the big Other). Kafka was the greatest writer on bureaucracy because he saw that this structure of disavowal was inherent to bureaucracy. The quest to reach the ultimate authority who will finally resolve K's official status can never end, because the big Other cannot be encountered in itself: there are only officials, more or less hostile, engaged in acts of interpretation about what the big Other's intentions. And these acts of interpretation, these deferrals of responsibility, are all that the big Other is.

If Kafka is valuable as a commentator on totalitarianism, it is

All that is solid melts into PR

by revealing that there was a dimension of totalitarianism which cannot be understood on the model of despotic command. Kafka's purgatorial vision of a bureaucratic labyrinth without end chimes with Žižek's claim that the Soviet system was an 'empire of signs', in which even the Nomenklatura themselves – including Stalin and Molotov – were engaged in interpreting a complex series of social semiotic signals. No-one knew what was required; instead, individuals could only guess what particular gestures or directives meant. What happens in late capitalism, when there is no possibility of appealing, even in principle, to a final authority which can offer the definitive official version, is a massive intensification of that ambiguity. As an example of this syndrome, let us turn once more to Further Education. At a meeting between Trade Union officials, college Principals and Members of Parliament, the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), the quango at the heart of the FE funding labyrinth, came in for particular attack. Neither the teachers, nor the Principals, nor the MPs could determine how particular directives had generated themselves, since they are not there in government policy itself. The answer was that the LSC 'interpreted'the instructions issued by the Department for Education and Skills. These interpretations then achieve the strange autonomy peculiar to bureaucracy. On the one hand, bureaucratic procedures float freely, independent of any external authority; but that very autonomy means that they assume a heavy implacability, a resistance to any amendment or questioning.

The proliferation of auditing culture in post Fordism indicates that the demise of the big Other has been exaggerated. Auditing can perhaps best be conceived of as fusion of PR and bureaucracy, because the bureaucratic data is usually intended to fulfill a promotional role: in the case of education, for example, exam results or research ratings augment (or diminish) the prestige of particular institutions. The frustration for the teacher is that it seems as if their work is increasingly aimed at impressing the big

Capitalist Realism

Other which is collating and consuming this 'data'. 'Data'has been put in inverted commas here, because much of the so-called information has little meaning or application outside the parameters of the audit: as Eeva Berglund puts it, 'the information that audit creates does have consequences even though it is so shorn of local detail, so abstract, as to be misleading or meaningless – except, that is, by the aesthetic criteria of audit itself'.

New bureaucracy takes the form not of a specific, delimited function performed by particular workers but invades all areas of work, with the result that – as Kafka prophesied – workers become their own auditors, forced to assess their own performance. Take, for example, the 'new system' that OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) uses to inspect Further Education colleges. Under the old system, a college would have a 'heavy' inspection once every four years or so, i.e. one involving many lesson observations and a large number of inspectors present in the college. Under the new, 'improved' system, if a college can demonstrate that its internal assessment systems are effective, it will only have to undergo a 'light' inspection. But the downside of this 'light' inspection is obvious – surveillance and monitoring are outsourced from OFSTED to the college and ultimately to lecturers themselves, and become a permanent feature of the college structure (and of the psychology of individual lecturers). The difference between the old/heavy and new/light inspection system corresponds precisely to Kafka's distinction between ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement, outlined above. With ostensible acquittal, you petition the lower court judges until they grant you a non-binding reprieve. You are then free from the court, until the time when your case is re-opened. Indefinite postponement, meanwhile, keeps your case at the lowest level of the court, but at the cost of an anxiety that has never ends. (The changes in OFSTED inspections are mirrored by in the change from the Research Assessment Exercise to the

All that is solid melts into PR

Research Excellence Framework in higher education: periodic assessment will be superseded by a permanent and ubiquitous measurement which cannot help but generate the same perpetual anxiety.)

In any case, it is not as if the 'light' inspection is in any sense preferable for staff than the heavy one. The inspectors are in the college for the same amount of time as they were under the old system. The fact that there are fewer of them does nothing to alleviate the stress of the inspection, which has far more to do with the extra bureaucratic window-dressing one has to do in anticipation of a possible observation than it has to do with any actual observation itself. The inspection, that is to say, corresponds precisely to Foucault's account of the virtual nature of surveillance in Discipline And Punish. Foucault famously observes there that there is no need for the place of surveillance to actually be occupied. The effect of not knowing whether you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance apparatus. You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed. Yet, in the case of school and university inspections, what you will be graded on is not primarily your abilities as a teacher so much as your diligence as a bureaucrat. There are other bizarre effects. Since OFSTED is now observing the college's self-assessment systems, there is an implicit incentive for the college to grade itself and its teaching lower than it actually deserves. The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration. At one point, when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light inspection system, he told us that the problem with our departmental log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical But don't worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and will never be acted upon; as if performing selfflagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in cynical bureaucratic compliance were any less demoralizing.

Capitalist Realism

In the post-Fordist classroom, the reflexive impotence of the students is mirrored by reflexive impotence of the teachers. De Angelis and Harvie report that

practices and requirements of standardisation and surveillance obviously impose a huge burden of work on academics and few are happy about it. There have been a number of responses. Managers have frequently suggested there is no alternative (TINA) and have perhaps suggested that what we need to do is 'work smarter, not harder'. This seductive slogan, introduced to dampen staff resistance to further change which in their (our) experience has a devastating effects on working conditions, attempts to couple the need for 'change' (restructuring and innovation) in order to meet the budget pressure and increase 'competitiveness', with staff's resistance not only to worsening of their condition of work, but also to the educational and academic 'meaninglessness' of the 'changes'.

The invocation of the idea that 'there is no alternative', and the recommendation to 'work smarter, not harder', shows how capitalist realism sets the tone for labor disputes in post-Fordism. Ending the inspection regime, one lecturer sardonically remarked, seems more impossible than ending slavery was. Such fatalism can only be challenged if a new (collective) political subject emerges.

All that is solid melts into PR

...if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another': capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder

'Being realistic' may once have meant coming to terms with of a reality experienced as solid and immovable. Capitalist realism, however, entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment. We are confronted with what Jameson, in his essay 'The Antimonies Of The Postmodern', calls 'a purely fungible present in which space and psyches alike can be processed and remade at will'. The 'reality' here is akin to the multiplicity of options available on a digital document, where no decision is final, revisions are always possible, and any previous moment can be recalled at any time. The middle manager I referred to above turned adaptation to this 'fungible' reality it into a fine art. He asserted with full confidence a story about the college and its future one day – what the implications of the inspection were likely to be; what senior management was thinking; then literally the next day would happily propound a story that directly contradicted what he previously said. There was never a question of his repudiating the previous story; it was as if he, only dimly remembered there ever being another story. This, I suppose, is 'good management'. It is, also, perhaps the only way to stay healthy amidst capitalism's perpetual instability. On the face of $\mathbf { i t } ,$ this manager is a model of beaming mental health, his whole being radiating a hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie. Such cheerfulness can only be maintained if one has a near-total absence of any critical reflexivity and a capacity, as he had, to cynically comply with every directive from bureaucratic authority. The cynicism of

Capitalist Realism

7