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!

  • BeanBoy [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I think Fisher, especially with his music examples, is just poorly illustrating Frederic Jameson’s description of cultural production under postmodernism:

    Postmodern cultural productions therefore amount to "the cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the 'neo'"

    Fisher making actual judgement calls about the quality of music being created now compared to what was happening when he was a lad is boring and distracts from what he’s trying to say.