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July 3, 2010
In his review of Jim McGuigan's Cool Capitalism in the New Statesman---- The Age of Consent”--- Mark Fisher from k-punk says:
The story of this decade has been about the defeat of bohemia by business. Now business wants not only to control culture, but to be culture, too. On the other hand, culture prostrates itself before business, like a cowed kid sucking up to a swaggering bully.
Our visual culture is mostly advertising, culture under neo-liberal mode of governance is all about ”market forces”, and museum policy, eco-tourism, and corporate branding have incorporated elements of counter-cultural critique.
Where once cultural value was deemed sufficient justification for art-oriented activities, now cultural value is subsumed into economic value. Everyone has to justify culture's marketability - culture becomes valuable only because it contributes to the economy. This suggests that capitalism now incorporates disaffection into capitalism itself, absorbing rebellion and thereby neutralising opposition to the present system of culture and society.
Fisher's concern is with the creeping triumph of a cultural conservatism that has insinuated itself so thoroughly into mass media that it now goes unperceived. You can sense it in the lack of both a political motivation and a critical edge in contemporary cultural studies; a consequence of its embrace of cultural populism. This involved hitching culture to the market and to government policy.
Fisher, however, is ever hopeful:
...the 2008 bank crisis robbed the business class of much of its credibility. So much of popular culture - all those property and home improvement shows, as well as the reality/entertainment matrix - now looks like the relics of a bygone era: glossy ruins that are still standing only because there is nothing yet to bulldoze them away. But if bohemia can rouse itself from defeat and depression, the cultural terrain seems open for contest in a way that it has not been for a long time.
Its true that the old neoliberal story is no longer viable. But where is bohemia these days? Does it still exist? Is it Richard Florida's creative economy and urban regeneration? Or the cultural bloggers in digital world? Is cyberculture the new bohemia? One that has little nostalgia for the exhausted paradigms of the old left.
Bohemia, if it is to have any meaning, must be concerned with the free development of culture, of creativity and resistance to the market and the state. It implies that there is still some space left for rebellion against the seductive power of the free market economy. This resistance needs to be connected to the digital public sphere.
In this interview Fisher refers to the work that had been developed on the blog networks, which was then picked up by Zer0, which, in turn, established a para-space, between theory and popular culture, between cyberspace and the university.
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Mark Fisher book-- Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? argues that after 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework.
In the interview at readysteadybook.com he says:
He then explores the the deleterious psychic effects of neoliberalism on our subjectivity ---stress and depression.