7

‘...if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another’: capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder

‘Being realistic’ may once have meant coming to terms with of a reality experienced as solid and immovable. Capitalist realism, however, entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment. We are confronted with what Jameson, in his essay ‘The Antimonies Of The Postmodern’, calls ‘a purely fungible present in which space and psyches alike can be processed and remade at will’. The ‘reality’ here is akin to the multiplicity of options available on a digital document, where no decision is final, revisions are always possible, and any previous moment can be recalled at any time. The middle manager I referred to above turned adaptation to this ‘fungible’ reality it into a fine art. He asserted with full confidence a story about the college and its future one day – what the implications of the inspection were likely to be; what senior management was thinking; then literally the next day would happily propound a story that directly contradicted what he previously said. There was never a question of his repudiating the previous story; it was as if he, only dimly remembered there ever being another story. This, I suppose, is ‘good management’. It is, also, perhaps the only way to stay healthy amidst capitalism’s perpetual instability. On the face of it, this manager is a model of beaming mental health, his whole being radiating a hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie. Such cheerfulness can only be maintained if one has a near-total absence of any critical reflexivity and a capacity, as he had, to cynically comply with every directive from bureaucratic authority. The cynicism of the compliance is essential, of course; the preservation of his 60s liberal self-image depended upon his ‘not really believing’ in the auditing processes he so assiduously enforced. What this disavowal depends upon is the distinction between inner subjective attitude and outward behavior I discussed above: in terms of his inner subjective attitude, the manager is hostile, even contemptuous, towards, the bureaucratic procedures he supervises; but in terms of his outward behavior, he is perfectly compliant. Yet it is precisely workers’ subjective disinvestment from auditing tasks which enables them to continue to perform labor that is pointless and demoralizing.

The manager’s capacity to smoothly migrate from one reality to another reminded me of nothing so much as Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. It is a novel about George Orr, a man whose dreams literally come true. In time-honored fairy tale fashion, however, the acts of wish fulfillment quickly become traumatic and catastrophic. When, for instance, Orr is induced by his therapist, Dr Haber, into dreaming that the problem of overpopulation is solved, he wakes to find himself in a world in which billions have been wiped out by a plague; a plague that, as Jameson put it in his discussion of the novel, was ‘a hitherto nonexistent event which rapidly finds its place in our chronological memory of the recent past’. Much of the power of the novel consists in its rendering of these retrospective confabulations, whose mechanics are at once so familiar – because we perform them every night when we dream – and so odd. How could it ever be possible for us to believe successive or even co-extensive stories that so obviously contradict one another? Yet we know from Kant, Nietzsche and psychoanalysis that waking, as much as dreaming, experience, depends upon just such screening narratives. If the Real is unbearable, any reality we construct must be a tissue of inconsistencies. What differentiates Kant, Nietzsche and Freud from the tiresome cliché that ‘life is but a dream’ is the sense that the confabulations we live are consensual. The idea that the world we experience is a solipsistic delusion projected from the interior of our mind consoles rather than disturbs us, since it conforms with our infantile fantasies of omnipotence; but the thought that our so-called interiority owe its existence to a fictionalized consensus will always carry an uncanny charge. This extra level of uncanniness is registered in The Lathe of Heaven when Le Guin has Orr’s reality-warping dreams witnessed by others – the therapist, Haber, who seeks to manipulate and control Orr’s ability, and the lawyer, Heather Lelache. What, then, is it like to live through someone else’s dream coming true?

[Haber] could not go on talking. He felt it: the shift, the arrival, the change.

The woman felt it too. She looked frightened. Holding the brass necklace up close to her throat like a talisman, she was staring in dismay, shock, terror, out of the window at the view.

[...] What would it do to the woman? Would she understand, would she go mad, what would she do? Would she keep both memories, as he did, the true one and the new one, the old one and the true one?

Does she ‘go crazy’? No, not at all: after a few moments of bewildered fugue, Heather Lelache accepts the ‘new’ world as the ‘true’ world, editing out the point of suture. This strategy – of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question – has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism, that ‘motley painting of everything that ever was’, whose dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as its production and disposal of commodities.

In these conditions of ontological precarity, forgetting becomes an adaptive strategy. Take the example of Gordon Brown, whose expedient reinvention of his political identity involved an attempt to induce a collective forgetting. In an article in International Socialism, John Newsinger remembers how

Brown told the Confederation of British Industry conference that ‘business is in my blood’. His mother had been a company director and ‘I was brought up in an atmosphere where I knew exactly what was happening as far as business was concerned’. He was, indeed he had always been, one of them. The only problem is that it was not true. As his mother subsequently admitted, she would never have called herself ‘a business woman’: she had only ever done some ‘light administrative duties’ for ‘a small family firm’ and had given up the job when she married, three years before young Gordon was even born. While there have been Labor politicians who have tried to invent working class backgrounds for themselves before, Brown is the first to try and invent a capitalist background.

Newsinger contrasts Brown with his rival and predecessor as British prime minister, Tony Blair, a very different case. While Blair – who presented the strange spectacle of a postmodern messianism – never had any beliefs that he had to recant on, Brown’s move from Presbyterian socialist to New Labour supremo was a long, arduous and painful process of repudiation and denial. ‘Whereas, for Blair, the embrace of neoliberalism involved no great personal struggle because he had no previous beliefs to dispose of, Newsinger writes, ‘for Brown it involved a deliberate decision to change sides. The effort, one suspects, damaged his personality’. Blair was the Last Man by nature and inclination; Brown has become the Last Man, the dwarf at the End of History, by force of will.

Blair was the man without a chest, the outsider the party needed in order to get into power, his joker hysterical face salesman-smooth; Brown’s implausible act of self-reinvention is what the party itself had to go through, his fake-smile grimace the objective correlative of Labour’s real state now that it has completely capitulated to capitalist realism: gutted, and gutless, its insides replaced by simulacra which once looked lustrous but now possess all the allure of decade-old computer technology.

In conditions where realities and identities are upgraded like software, it is not surprising that memory disorders should have become the focus of cultural anxiety – see, for instance, the Bourne films, Memento, Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind. In the Bourne films, Jason Bourne’s quest to regain his identity goes alongside a continual flight from any settled sense of self. ‘Try to understand me... ,’ says Bourne in the original novel by Robert Ludlum,

I have to know certain things ... enough to make a decision... but maybe not everything. A part of me has to be able to walk away, disappear. I have to be able to say to myself, what was isn’t any longer, and there’s a possibility that it never was because I have no memory of it. What a person can’t remember didn’t exist.... for him.

In the films, Bourne’s transnational nomadism is rendered in an ultra-fast cutting style which functions as a kind of anti-memory, pitching the viewer into the vertiginous ‘continuous present’ which Jameson argues is characteristic of postmodern temporality. The complex plotting of Ludlum’s novels is transformed into a series of evanescent event-ciphers and action set pieces which barely cohere into an intelligible narrative. Bereft of personal history, Bourne lacks narrative memory, but retains what we might call formal memory: a memory – of techniques, practices, actions – that is literally embodied in a series of physical reflexes and tics. Here, Bourne’s damaged memory echoes the postmodern nostalgia mode as described by Fredric Jameson, in which contemporary or even futuristic reference at the level of content obscure a reliance on established or antiquated models at the level of form. On the one hand, this is a culture that privileges only the present and the immediate – the extirpation of the long term extends backwards as well as forwards in time (for example, media stories monopolize attention for a week or so then are instantly forgotten); on the other hand, it is a culture that is excessively nostalgic, given over to retrospection, incapable of generating any authentic novelty. It may be that Jameson’s identification and analysis of this temporal antimony is his most important contribution to our understanding of postmodern/post-Fordist culture. ‘[T]he paradox from which we must set forth,’ he argues in ‘Antimonies Of The Postmodern’,

is the equivalence between an unparalleled rate of change on all the levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of everything – feelings along with consumer goods, language along with built space – that would seem incompatible with such mutability... What then dawns is the realization that no society has ever been as standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, social and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogenously. ... What we now begin to feel, therefore – and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension – is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.

No doubt this is another example of the struggle between the forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization which Deleuze and Guattari argue is constitutive of capitalism as such. It wouldn’t be surprising if profound social and economic instability resulted in a craving for familiar cultural forms, to which we return in the same way that Bourne reverts to his core reflexes. The memory disorder that is the correlative of this situation is the condition which afflicts Leonard in Memento, theoretically pure anterograde amnesia. Here, memories prior to the onset of the condition are left intact, but sufferers are unable to transfer new memories into long term memory; the new therefore looms up as hostile, fleeting, un-navigable, and the sufferer is drawn back to the security of the old. The inability to make new memories: a succinct formulation of the postmodern impasse....

If memory disorder provides a compelling analogy for the glitches in capitalist realism, the model for its smooth functioning would be dreamwork. When we are dreaming, we forget, but immediately forget that we have done so; since the gaps and lacunae in our memories are Photoshopped out, they do not trouble or torment us. What dreamwork does is to produce a confabulated consistency which covers over anomalies and contradictions, and it is this which Wendy Brown picked up on when she argued that it was precisely dreamwork which provided the best model for understanding contemporary forms of power. In her essay ‘American Nightmare: Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, and De-democratization’, Brown unpicked the alliance between neoconservatism and neoliberalism which constituted the American version of capitalist realism up until 2008. Brown shows that neoliberalism and neoconservatism operated from premises which are not only inconsistent, but directly contradictory. ‘How’, Brown asks,

does a rationality that is expressly amoral at the level of both ends and means (neoliberalism) intersect with one that is expressly moral and regulatory (neoconservatism)? How does a project that empties the world of meaning, that cheapens and deracinates life and openly exploits desire, intersect one centered on fixing and enforcing meanings, conserving certain ways of life, and repressing and regulating desire? How does support for governance modeled on the firm and a normative social fabric of self-interest marry or jostle against support for governance modeled on church authority and a normative social fabric of self-sacrifice and long-term filial loyalty, the very fabric shredded by unbridled capitalism?

But incoherence at the level of what Brown calls ‘political rationality’ does nothing to prevent symbiosis at the level of political subjectivity, and, although they proceeded from very different guiding assumptions, Brown argues that neoliberalism and neoconservatism worked together to undermine the public sphere and democracy, producing a governed citizen who looks to find solutions in products, not political processes. As Brown claims,

the choosing subject and the governed subject are far from opposites ... Frankfurt school intellectuals and, before them, Plato theorized the open compatibility between individual choice and political domination, and depicted democratic subjects who are available to political tyranny or authoritarianism precisely because they are absorbed in a province of choice and need-satisfaction that they mistake for freedom.

Extrapolating a little from Brown’s arguments, we might hypothesize that what held the bizarre synthesis of neoconservatism and neoliberalism together was their shared objects of abomination: the so called Nanny State and its dependents. Despite evincing an anti-statist rhetoric, neoliberalism is in practice not opposed to the state per se – as the bank bail-outs of 2008 demonstrated – but rather to particular uses of state funds; meanwhile, neoconservatism’s strong state was confined to military and police functions, and defined itself against a welfare state held to undermine individual moral responsibility.