# Questioning Capitalist Realism: An interview with Mark Fisher



## somnambulist (Jan 13, 2010)

Mark Fisher is the author of ‘Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative’ out recently from Zer0 Books http://www.o-books.com/obookssite/book/detail/358/ As a blogger he writes K-Punk http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/
Capitalist Realism is one of the most acute diagnoses of contemporary politics as it is played out in one small island off the coast of Europe. After skewering the marketisation of everything, the privatisation of stress, and the triumphalism of moronic bureaucracy as the guiding principles of governance, the book goes on to speculate about new forms of politics and culture. In doing so, it takes the reader through a lively argument about education, film, socialism and the compulsory stupidity of quality control mechanisms.

This interview, originally published on Mute News & Analysis following some of the themes from Capitalist Realism was carried out via email in the second week of December 2009.

Q (Matthew Fuller): One figure that you come up with that I think is particularly useful is the idea of a business ontology, something that crops up early and towards the end of the book. One can imagine that this is something that combines both the classical understanding of an ontology and the more technical description of the ordering of relations in a computing ontology, one is flattened into the other.

A (Mark Fisher): Well, I wasn’t thinking of anything too sophisticated with the idea of Business Ontology, and I’d certainly like to hear more about how the concept could be related to a computing ontology. Business Ontology as I understood it was simply the idea that everything is folded inside a business reality system, that the only goals and purposes which count are those that are translatable into business terms. The problem is that Business Ontology has no place for anything like ‘the public’. It’s time to reinvent the concept of the public; and also for workers in public services to start to drive out business interests and business methods. Up until the credit crisis, we bought the idea that business people somehow have a better handle on reality than the rest of us can muster. But, after the credit crisis, that’s no longer tenable. And as I say in the book, if businesses can’t be run as businesses, why should public services?

Q: Capitalist Realism is in your account extremely evident in education, which is a zone which is at once suffering immense restructuring from the introduction of pseudo-markets and the intense pressures of constant audit and competition; it is also a space which offers one of the last forms of refuge from the blunter stupidities of a traumatised and simplistically reduced range of opportunities and forms of life within contemporary capitalism, and as such is expected to absorb an immense amount of problems in society. Education no longer represses desires in a mode of high intolerance, but produces and incubates stupidities and ‘holds’ unsolvable problems?

A: Yes, there’s a way in which capitalist realism can only really be felt in areas - such as public service - which had previously been relatively free of business imperatives. Elsewhere, in many ways, capitalist realism is taken for granted! But the phrase ‘pseudo-marketization’ is crucial - what we have in public services is an absurd simulation of market mechanisms rather the market as such, a kind of worst of all worlds scenario in which a simulated market goes alongside continuing surveillance and monitoring from state bodies. (At the same time, it’s important not to demonise markets, or to let capitalism claim that it is equivalent to marketization. I take seriously Manuel DeLanda’s idea that capitalism is in fact an anti-market, and I think there’s a great deal of political potential in this kind of thinking.) If the market is supposed to deliver the best results all on its own, why do we still need inspection regimes, league tables etc? Neoliberal ideology likes us to believe that bureaucracy has decreased under it, but the reality is that it has simply changed form, and the average teacher or lecturer is doing much more bureaucracy than ever before - and this is not ‘necessary’ bureaucracy, or bureaucracy that ‘improves performance’; on the contrary, as we all know, it is a purely empty activity,a dead ritual that is at best useless, at worst actually counter-productive. What I mean by ‘capitalist realism’ is partly the imposition of these mechanisms - whose real significance might be to ensure ideological compliance at this ritualized level - and also the acceptance of those mechanisms by workers (and managers), who go along with them because ‘that’s just how things are now.’

Education is still often thought of as an ivory tower, even by teachers and lecturers. There were people at the FE college where I used to work whose partners worked in business who would make this claim - that we were somehow fortunate not to be in the dog-eat-dog world of business where people are sacked if their performance is not up to scratch. It was a laughable claim then; it’s even more manifestly absurd now after the bank bail outs, which have showed that it isn’t public services that are an ivory tower, but big business, where catastrophically bad performance, far from being punished, continues to be rewarded, and if people are sacked, they receive a handsome severance package.

But, far from being an ivory tower, education has been at the core of all of the social mutations of the last thirty years. With parents stressed and overworked, with the family disintegrating (even as it assumes a kind of hyper-normativity), education is increasingly required to take on socialisation and pastoral care tasks, and to contain and manage a kind of inchoate discontent that certainly isn’t being expressed in political terms. Post-16 education has been massively expanded, without a commensurate increase in resources, so lecturers now have to deal with more and more students who don’t really want to be doing academic study, but who are effectively forced into staying on at school. Teachers and lecturers find themselves in an impossible position, having to continually switch between the disciplinary role of authority figure and the consumer role of ‘providing a service’.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.


----------

