Capitalist Realism, the book, has, in ten years, become a phrase: “what Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’” or ‘as Mark Fisher has described, “capitalist realism.”’ Fisher’s diagnosis is accepted but the risk is that the substance of Capitalist Realism the book is uncannily absent. The success of the title is at the expense of the book. That is why I want to return to the “substance” of the book, but in a particular fashion. The substance of the book is not simply the substance of capitalist realism. Certainly, few could be as devastating as Fisher in making resonant and felt the “political phenomenology of late capitalism,” in which we experience “a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centreless, abstract and fragmentary.”1 There is, however, another “substance” at work in the book, which is those desires, experiences and lived moments that call to another collective order not oriented to value. This call, as we will see, involves a process of the education of desire to both free us from capitalist realism and to develop a non-capitalist life. As with the Walter Benjamin of “The Life of Students,” Mark Fisher is a writer for students.2 This is not in a patronizing fashion of condescending to them. In Fisher’s statement for the Zero Books series, in which Capitalist Realism appeared, Fisher declares the need to go beyond “interpassive stupor” to achieve another kind of discourse: “intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist.”3 This is writing for students, on their behalf, and for us all as students.

The dual form of this substance is why it is important to consider the breakdown of capitalist realism in a dual sense. It first refers to our experience of crisis and austerity, which capitalist realism is supposed to naturalize and justify. Capitalist realism appears to be stretched to its limit as in our increasingly apocalyptic present alternatives seem more likely to take fascist forms than communist. Capitalism, for Fisher, is consonant if not coterminous with catastrophe: “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”4

Despite Fisher’s mordant brilliance at capturing the worst of the present moment, he did not cease in thinking the better. Fisher’s writing could often oscillate between despair and elation, something in the style of Franco “Bifo” Berardi.8 This oscillation reflects Fisher’s own tendency to split the interiority of capitalist culture from the “outside” that refuses integration. The interiority of capitalist culture merits Fisher’s acidic skills of diagnosis, and a sense of despair, while the “outside” offers weird possibilities and a sense of elation. Fisher’s “substance”, this peculiar Spinozism, tries to move beyond the “sad passions” of the attachment to this interiority towards this “outside.”9 This divided substance, a substance in tension, is what accounts for the oscillation present in Fisher’s work.

Central to Fisher’s analysis of capitalist realism are the issues of mental health and education. This is one reason why the book Capitalist Realism resonates with students, but also why the central insight of the book pertains to how we experience crisis as it runs through self-reproduction. In terms of mental health, the breakdown of capitalist realism is not only a social breakdown, but also a psychic breakdown that condenses the forms and processes of the continual series of breakdowns and crises that compose capitalism. While “Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect)”,10 the effect of crisis is to further estrange and de-naturalize capitalism, mental health, and, of course, the weather. Overlapping forms of breakdown strike at the very heart of the usual ideological mechanism, central to the analysis of Roland Barthes in Mythologies, of treating what is cultural as natural.11 Now, with the widespread recognition and reality of climate catastrophe, even nature is no longer natural.

The response to this situation, Fisher argues, is to politicize mental health. Mental health is not ‘natural’ fact, a ‘genetic’ disorder, requiring treatment by pharmacology and mechanisms of adjustment. This is not to say no such factors could be in play, something Fisher’s interest in the neurological attests to, but such forms of explanation deny any social causation. As Fisher states: “[i]t goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation.”12 If this politicization refuses capitalist naturalism it also refuses the script of Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-psychiatric path of celebrating the figure of the “schiz” as revolutionary. Rather than tracing some signature disorder as a sign of immersion or exit from capitalism, Fisher preferred to focus on the ambient suffering of stress, tiredness (TATT – Tired All the Time), and anxiety. Fisher’s move is deflationary, away from “high” anti-psychiatry, but at the same time attentive to everyday suffering and its intimate connection to capitalist forms. The psychic landscape of high capitalism is chaotic, and, for Fisher, “as production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems.”13 Precarity is a lived psychic experience that fragments the possibilities of the future.

This is, however, not only a negative phenomenology. Staying true to Deleuze and Guattari, Fisher considers capitalism as a “desire machine.” Adapting their question about fascism, Fisher asks why we desire capitalism? Why do we displace our desires to capitalism and “launder our libidos”?14 The phenomenology of high capitalism is a phenomenology of our libidinal investment in high capitalism. Here is where the problem of education turns into one of the education of desire. I am reminded of Fredric Jameson’s contention that our problem “lies in trying to figure out what we really want in the first place.”15 Utopias are negative lessons, finally, that teach us the limits of our imagination in the face of the addictive culture of capitalism. It is only, Jameson insists, once the utopia has impoverished us, undertaken an act of “world reduction,” that we can undertake a “desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the invention of the desire called Utopia in the first place.”16

While Jameson, in the text I am quoting from, sought this experience of impoverishment and the birth of desire in Andrei Platonov’s communist modernist novel, Chevengur, Fisher sought such experiences in popular culture – the weird and the eerie, the remnants of 1970s social democracy, and in the inventiveness of dance music culture. The television series Sapphire and Steel (1979-1982) incarnates a low budget temporal weird.17 This story of time detectives, played by Joanna Lumley and David McCallum, is one of emotional austerity as these detectives investigate temporal anomalies and, finally, the stopping of time. This moment allegorizes neo-liberal capitalism as the cancellation of the future. Yet, the melancholy apprehension of the end of time is also the coding of desires and futures lost, or better cancelled. To watch Sapphire and Steel with Fisher is to undergo an education in desire brought to an end, but also a world reduction that would force us to re-invent desire. In Jameson and Fisher we see a project of education, a teaching of the “desire to desire” out of an act of “world reduction.” 18

Fisher argued that: “the most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird.”19 He saw in the weird and eerie, as detailed in the book of that name, experiences of estrangement that not only registered the forms of high capitalism in their psychic dimensions but that also promised us liberation from them. The breakdown of capitalist realism is not only a breakdown of capitalism but also a breakdown of realism. Unlike the various contemporary projects that aim to re-think the possibilities of critical realism, in the wake of Lukács and Jameson, Fisher remained attached to the possibilities of the surreal and, in his unfinished work on “acid communism,” the psychedelic.20

We should note that even these projects of critical realism are articulated to engage with the phantasmagoric and “irreal” as key constituents of the fabric of capitalism.21 Fisher directly engages with the weird as the promise of a liberation from capitalist realism. This brings him into proximity with the work of China Miéville, whose novel The Last Days of New Paris (2016) evinces a surprising belief in the powers of surrealism. In both cases, these acts of recovery are not blind to the different historical contexts in which these experiences are being re-activated. In the case of Miéville’s novel, the form of endless conflict that has resulted from the detonation of the S-blast, a surrealist weapon that unleashes their fictional creations into “reality,” does not carry the air of liberation. Internal to the text is a sense of surrealism as the interruption of history, but also the risk of a suspension that is cut off from history and an endless repetition of surrealist estrangement. It is perhaps for this reason that the novel remains “thin” and unsatisfactory. In a similar fashion, Fisher’s “hauntological” reconstructions of the weird charge carried by forms of cultural production marked by British social democracy suggest the temporal disruption these unfollowed paths might cause.22 As we have seen with Sapphire and Steel, its ending on a moment if suspension prefigures the birth of neoliberal capitalism, while its strange melancholy encodes lost desires. The return to the past notes its limits, but also the possibilities of a leap into the future.

The utopias that Fisher implies are established in the ruins and fragments of capitalist modernity, which echo something like the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge: “For the symbolic structures which made sense of the monuments have rotted away, and in a sense what we witness here is the unintelligibility and the inscrutability of the Real itself.”23 If the prehistoric past lacks an intelligible Symbolic that can be reconstructed, confronting us with the Real as remnant, then the “ruins and relics” of high capitalism in which all is rendered as value, confronts us with another form of the Real as remnant. The “eeriness” of the places of high capitalism needs to be rendered and outbid by the weird opening to the outside. Again, this is the “world reduction” that Jameson suggests, a levelling in which we can reconstruct and educate our future desires by educating us into a desire for the future.

At the same time, this “outside” is an equivocal figure of externality, which serves to deny the “closed” vision of abstract capitalism as desiring machine. Here lies a tension or oscillation that is not explicitly confronted or resolved. There is a split between the interiority of capital that reaches down into the nervous system and an “outside” that is another, different, form of liberation into the inhuman. The substance of capitalist realism remains split between inside and outside and not articulated. It is in the coordination of the “hauntological” and the “accelerationist” moments of Fisher’s work that an articulation is attempted: reaching back to those moments of haunting that can then be activated and accelerated to realize a “missed” future.24 Yet, this articulation remains often limited and fantasmatic, and here is where the project of the education of desire might have been fleshed out to think a phenomenology of capital that could also trace its fractures without supposing a leap into a great “outside.” The project of a phenomenology of capitalism needs to be supplemented, in the Derridean sense of a necessary addition, with a project of education and reconstruction.

The elaboration of the project of the education of desire remains one of the losses caused by Mark Fisher’s death. It is a project that remains to be reconstructed, from the complete collection of his writings, but also to be collectively constructed. Fisher’s own work as a teacher, both within and without educational institutions, was central to his phenomenology of high capitalism and to the alternative forms of “substance,” of desire, that were possible. We might speak, considering the influence of psychoanalysis, of a project of “unconsciousness raising” as well as “consciousness raising.”25 This is particularly true of the project of “acid communism.” Earlier Fisher had identified psychedelia with “the denial of the existence of the Symbolic order as such,” as a “psychotic” regression that fails to register sociality at all.26 At this point Fisher remains within the punk moment of “never trust a hippie,” and the dismissal of psychedelia as “flabby” regression. The fragment of acid communism tries to re-evaluate experiments in consciousness change, now as visions beyond or outside capitalist realism. The tensions remain, however, between an interior world of capital that is embedded in the nervous system or the unconscious and a psychedelic “outside” that we can somehow reach.

It is also important to consider Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, which suggests “it is essential to educate the educator,” and that: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”27 If Fisher is writing largely outside of this context, as are we all, then we still have to consider this problem of education and self-education. The various attempts made at educational forms “outside” neo-liberal capitalist forms are often equivocal, even reproducing those forms in the dream of the “private”. Perhaps the closest we have to such experiments arise in the “teach-ins” or “outs” that have arisen in various struggles against privatizing education. These, however, remain temporary and are limited in addressing questions of self-reproduction in the context outside the wage. There is no simple solution to the problem and the difficulty of even sketching such forms speaks to our moment.

It is this project of education that remains before us and is left implied as the true substance of which “capitalist realism” is the truncated and mutilated form. To make good on this project we would need to articulate the weird “outside” with the eerie spaces of “absence,” of the fractures and dialectical tensions of capitalism with its empty appearance. This is the difficult bridge to be forged that is marked in the joining and divide of The Weird and the Eerie. Whether the acid or psychedelic would have been the sufficient mediator remains a question, and one which any continuation of Fisher’s project would have to suggest. I would argue, however, that any such project of education needs to abandon the conceptualization of inside and outside for a more dialectical grasping of the “interior” limits of capitalism and the articulation of those “limits” and their possibilities with that “interior.” This is where Fisher’s project requires urgent re-thinking.

Amongst the utopian suggestions of Jameson is one that seems resonant to me for Fisher’s project: “a Utopia of misfits and oddballs, in which the constraints for uniformization and conformity have been removed, and human beings grow wild like plants in a state of nature.”28 This, it seems to me, is something of what Fisher’s work implies: a “wild” substance, a “wild” desire, which, as Capitalism Realism insisted, was not oddly foreign to forms of discipline and organization. This is another tension, hopefully a productive one, which marks Fisher’s oeuvre: an attention to dynamics of liberation, which is also a considered reflection on the missteps and failures of liberation. It is in and out of this tension, perhaps, that we might find the possibilities of the education of desire today.

1. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009) 64.
2. Walter Benjamin, “The Life of Students,” Selected Writings Volume 1 (1913-1926), ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002) 37-47.
3. Mark Fisher, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (London: Repeater, 2018) 103.
4. Fisher, Capitalist Realism 4.
5. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014).
6. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016).
7. Mark Fisher, K-Punk. The fragment on “Acid Communism,” 751–770.
8. In particular, see Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes (London and New York: Verso, 2015).
9. K-Punk 695–699.
10. Capitalist Realism 19.
11. Roland Barthes, Mythologies(London: Paladin, 1973).
12. K-Punk 436.
13. Capitalist Realism 34.
14. Capitalist Realism, 15.
15. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 75.
16. Jameson, The Seeds of Time 90.
17. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life 2-6.
18. On Jameson as educator, see Robert T. Tally, Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (London: Pluto Books, 2014).
19. Capitalist Realism, 76.
20. See Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015); David Cunningham, “Capitalist Epics: Abstraction, Totality, and the Theory of the Novel,” Radical Philosophy 163 (2010): 11–23 and “Here Comes the New: Deadwood and the Historiography of Capitalism,” Radical Philosophy 180 (2013): 8–24; Fredric Jameson, “Marx and Montage,” New Left Review 58 (2009): 109–117.
21. For “irrealism,” see WReC (Warwick Research Collective), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).
22. Ghosts of My Life; K-Punk.
23. The Weird and the Eerie.
24. For my criticisms of accelerationism and its own forms of nostalgia, see Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014).
25. K-Punk 764.
26. K-Punk 83.
27. Karl Marx, Early Writings, intro. Lucio Colletti, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1975) 422.
28. The Seeds of Time 99.