museumification

We do not need to wait for Children of Men's near-future to arrive to see this transformation of culture into museum pieces. 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 -- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism.

After my own trip to this place, I have to say I thoroughly agree - this passage from Fisher illuminates that nagging feeling I had the whole time. However, I still think hierarchies persist even within this system of equivalences:



Thus, whilst I'm inclined to agree, I'm not sure if Fisher repeats the same kind of blunt logic (mirroring the bluntness of the logic he is critiquing, in fact) that McKenzie Wark's essentialism of the digital also evinces - i.e., the notion that the binary nature of the digital, and these bits' indifference to what it is they carry, creates a similar situation of flattened, endless exchangeability.

On that note, I think there's conceptual similarity between Fisher's 'capitalist realism' (the current condition in which no social system alternative to capitalism seems even a potential) and Wark's 'atopia' of gamespace, something like the dystopia of the now.

Also up for consideration here is the very question of the artefact, and its politics: "In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts" (Fisher). And yet Benjamin saw something redemptive in the collector.