Just reading capitalist realism and listened to his talk that was linked in the current perusall reading series and I'd like to start a discussion about his ideas.
One major theme of Fisher seems to be the assessment, that culture has lost its forward momentum, that technology has progressed but culture stalled "we're basically watching 20th century entertainment on ever increasing resolution" or in regards to music that "the terms retro and nostalgia have lost their meaning, because now there is nothing else but them". And I'm not quite sure what to make out of this. One one hand I think this is somewhat plausible that a world, in which everything is instantly accessible and arbitrarily copy-able, would be overwhelmed by nostalgia for a time when there was still new and authentic stuff.
On the other hand, is this really the case? "In 15 years we went from the beatles to punk rock". Starting around 2000 somewhat staying in the genre we went from nu-metal to indie-soft-rock to ... whatever we have now. Idk if this is a good example. But to me this seems less self evident and more like a sort of vibe-ology. A mix of hipster-hopelessness and boomer "back in the day we had real ..." sentiment.
Please share your thoughts!
It's hard for me to discern his "Slow Cancellation of the Future" thesis from the mess that is trying to value older *art against newer art in general.
Musically, it sure feels like a lot more happened before I was born and from my childhood to my late teens than it feels is happening now. But one of the main caveats of that is that there are still loads of interesting artists doing interesting and novel things. What it really seems to be more is that the mainstream has gotten clogged by a MCM' circuit that demands a low-risk investment, and I think that's even more true for film. Not only do you have the profit motive but the major consolidation of large new releases under just a few franchises. I find it hard to believe that the executives of these franchises will be willing to sign off on anything groundbreaking.
One of the hardest results is not that there's no good art, but you have to take time and energy to get away from the easiest stuff, and it can be lonely if you don't have a community doing the same.
I also wonder if saturation doesn't play a pretty big role. Nowadays I can open Netflix, scroll through thousands of movies and shows, and feel eh about all of them since they're all so cheap and so available from my perspective. If any one of those movies were the only movie I had access to after a few years without, I'm sure I could find something interesting and entertaining in it.
Yes. And I do think he does himself a disservice by not limiting himself to use music/culture as just an example but by doing his analysis through the lens of music and popular culture, because this sometimes obfuscates his point if your outlook on popculture is somewhat different.
I believe that this is mostly due to how we experience time, and how we perceive events at different times of our life. When I was in school, music/taste in music was a more important and identity generating aspect of my life, much less so now. (And I assume this is a common experience). Though there could still be truth to this notion
Yeah I agree, and I think I meant to articulate that in my first sentence. Is there really a bigger gap from 1980 to 2000 than from 2000 to 2020, or is it just my brain?
That being said having just finished Giovanni Arrighi's Long Twentieth Century I also don't find it too hard to entertain the thesis that the financialization of capital in the imperial core, and the movement away from investment in production or even trade (just look at Tesla being the highest value car company to see how stark this is) has had disastrous effects on creativity in the arts.