4 ms·
"One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma’s coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would cr
by Sharlin 2y ago
"One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma’s coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead."
—Joyce Messier in Disco Elysium
Probably inspired by Mark Fisher:
"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that
capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one
effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural
objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or
Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum,
where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled
as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a
powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of
practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of
previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into
artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of
realism; it is more like realism in itself."
- jhbadger 2y agoThat's a pretty weird description of the British Museum. Yes, I know people can (and do) criticize the collection they have as the spoils of colonialism, but in no way do they present their collection as "merely aesthetic objects" -- they do explain what the artifacts are in terms of the cultures that created them.
- icegreentea2 2y agoI believe "merely aesthetic objects" in this case should be interpreted as "dead objects". The very word "artifact" signifies the distinction. These objects were once alive - they were parts of active interactions. Now they are dead and ossified. This is the difference between your album CDs when you actually listened to them, and then when you put them on a display case on the wall.
- bscphil 2y agoIn addition, the idea here is one of commodification of culture. An idol of religious significance and a spear used for fishing are the same kind of "stuff" from the point of view of a collector or someone visiting a museum. They can be traded, exchanged, which decontextualizes them from the non-capitalistic cultures in which they were created.
- rcxdude 2y agobut in most cases they were dead before they were in the museum. In some cases dead before capitalism even existed. I don't really see how this amounts to a criticism of the museum itself (or capitalism alongside it). (I will agree in the cases where they were not: there are certainly a lot of infamous examples there, where even if the objects were dead relative to the culture that created them, they are also being seperated from the closest culture that exists today)
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoAnd lots came from places where the original culture of the objects had been replaced and/or was being erased.
- icegreentea2 2y agoI don't think the original quote is really a criticism (in the sense of "this is bad and must change") of museums in itself. It's using museums as an example of capitalist realism - the idea that capitalism today is so dominant and malleable that it's able to basically "corrupt or co-opt" anything, and that we reflexively view everything through capitalist lenses. That even these artifacts that might have once been immensely important to the workings of a non-capitalist society, now exist dead, entombed within a capitalist construct - and as a sibling notes, as literally little pieces of capital.
- astrange 2y agoBut that's not true. The objects in museums are used by museum visitors (who look at them, or draw studies of them, etc) and researchers (who remove them from the displays and study them). Mark Fisher is just an idiot like the bullshit jobs guy, who doesn't respect anyone he doesn't personally know and thinks they're all faking doing real work. Note that the other thing Fisher was known for is writing an essay about how Russell Brand is cool and people should stop caring that he's a rapist.
- justonceokay 2y agoRight but the bowls aren’t being eaten out of, the urns have had the organs removed. The instruments lay silent and the religious artifacts hold no more spirits. You might take a collection of dried leaves and put them on display and call it a “tree museum”, but your visitors aren’t going to get a good appreciation for what trees are like just by looking at their dead refuse
- robertlagrant 2y agoThe urns and bowls that were used weren't preserved, because they were used. Only the ones no longer used exist at all.
- Levitz 2y agoBut then this is rather a critique of teaching history no? It's basically impossible for anyone to get a good appreciation for any historic subject from studying history. You can read books about WW2 nonstop and it would be futile, hell, I could tell you about what I did last weekend but I'm afraid you just had to be there.
- Sharlin 2y agoI’m not so sure about that part either, although ethnographic museums certainly have a history of, well, not being exactly respectful – or factually accurate – of the cultures they exhibit. Plus, of course, the BM is not a great example of capitalism, being free of charge to visit! I just included the quote because I found it while googling what Joyce’s exact phrasing in DE is and thought it gave interesting context.
- torginus 2y agoWhile Disco Elysium gets a pass for it as it's meant primarily as an entertainment product (and the ridiculousness of the sentence might serve as a parody of the idea, which would be incredibly on brand for the game), I've found Mark Fisher's analysis in Capitalist Realism to be incredibly surface level and either wrong, or so vague, as to be meaningless, and it revolves around Fisher's obession with pop culture, and failure to distinguish between images of the thing and the thing itself. Obviously dyeing ones hair green does not constitute a meaningful attempt to subvert capitalism. In order to combat capitalism, one must first decide what capitalism actually is, what's actually bad about it and how to combat it. Let's say the evil of capitalism is that it allows an incredible concentration of capital, therefore the enemy are the rich, and the solution is to raise social support for taxing them. Wearing a t-shirt saying 'tax the rich' is a hilariously inept mode of delivering said message in an impactful way, and serves more of a low-effort consumerist way of supporting the good cause, rather than geniune activism. Yet it can't be dismissed entirely. If someone wrote a book on why the rich must be taxed, and said book became popular and influential, and influenced the tax policy in the end, you can't say capitalism won in the end, because people paid money for the book, or the author is a hypocrite because he got rich off of royalties. As for the bit about the British Museum, it's utterly nonsensical - what does a state's military dragging away cultural artifacts by force, and displaying it in a state institution have to do with capitalism?
- wfewras 2y agoMy understanding is that most people who dislike capitalism dislike multiple features of it, features that are not downstream of one single variable to be optimized. So if you break up the wealth concentration effect, you are reducing dissatisfaction overall, but you are also reducing the likelihood of any future alteration to any number of more minor dissatisfactions that seem characteristic of this system — e.g., the way it makes people's lives repetitive, predictable, robotic; the way it often preferentially rewards behaviors that service medium-term goals rather than ultra-short or ultra-long term goals; the way it reduces the dimensionality of the activities that are needed, from the average individual, and the way this reduction of dimensions along which one might be needed can make a person feel less like a person, etc. I do not myself agree with anti-capitalists that all these patterns are best explained in terms of capital. You see similar tendencies correlated with, for example, most any attempt to scale culture. My point is just that the people who are trying to formulate the grandiose complaint are, deep down, generally not trying to designate as evil some single feature (even if they have latched onto that feature as being strategically their best line of attack); generally, I think, they are not saying, "Man, I see this nose everywhere and am sick of this nose," they are saying, "Why is it that people seem to be looking increasingly similar?" which sentiment (however flawed statistically) we expert statisticians might charitably translate as, "Why is it that there seems increasingly to be a single stable equilibrium for an increasing number of the increasingly divided planes of our diminishing existence?" And maybe that last formulation is also empirically incorrect — but isn't there a general thrust in it that you recognize? "One default, one optimal path and anything I do to get out of it is either wasteful or imitated until it is the rule." Can you come up with a tax policy that will break up the concentration effect at that level? Maybe you can. Would it really break up the monoculture, or would it strengthen it? I don't know. I suppose reformers and revolutionaries have always diverged at this juncture.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoI have yet to see cooperations integrating radical islam.