Cluster

Desire in the Dark: From Capitalist Realism to Postcapitalist Desire

By Robin Blyn

“But again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.”

—Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark1

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“Pessimism is not an adequate response against things happening.”

—Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness2

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By way of introduction to Capitalist Realism (2009), Mark Fisher turns to Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) as an exemplary instance of that “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”3 Fisher’s conclusion parallels the film’s final scenes. The ship named “Tomorrow” approaches, but we never see Kee and her miraculously conceived baby lifted onto it. The screen simply goes dark and, as the title of the film appears in white letters against the black screen, we hear the sound of children laughing and shouting in play. Then the credits begin to roll to the rousing refrain of John Lennon’s “Freda People.” It is a suspiciously hopeful ending to a film that gives us little reason to believe that the future will be any better than the dystopian conditions that the protagonists so desperately try to escape.4 It is as if the film wills a happy ending into being that it literally cannot imagine taking place; even a director with the formidable talents of an Alfonso Cuarón cannot give image to it. Children of Men’s conclusion thus performs a double movement pervasive in post-Cold War fictions that address neoliberal globalization: It posits a future that the arc of its narrative denies.5 In so doing, Children of Men opens a modest space between desire and belief that Fisher’s short volume does not quite admit, and thereby the film testifies to the perpetuation of postcapitalist desires in the guise of the melancholic and the abject.

In light of this body of fictional texts like Children of Men that cry out for a world in which systems of mutual aid and democratic governance triumph over neoliberal globalization and state repression, the anti-capitalist movements of the post-Cold War decades to which these fictions refer, and Fisher’s own work in the years between the publication of his surprise best seller and his premature death, I suggest a minor change in emphasis in our understanding of “capitalist realism” that nonetheless has significant implications. If, fifteen years after the publication of Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, “[i]t is [still] easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”; this is not because we can no longer imagine what Fisher calls “a coherent alternative to capitalism.”6 Rather, what defies the imagination is a scenario in which any of the alternatives we can imagine might actually succeed in replacing an incarnation of capitalism so assiduously advanced by forces of neoliberal globalization and so brutally protected by militarized nation-states. It is the failure of the imagination that accounts for the “resignation or fatalism” of capitalist realism, not the absence of alternatives. To draw such a distinction is to affirm the potency and resilience of postcapitalist desires without denying the pervasive sense, as Jodi Dean puts it, of “unbearable stuckness in an unbearable system.”7 That is, the distinction between desire and hope makes visible postcapitalist desires that can neither be reduced to “left melancholy” and “ideological fantasy,” nor to incoherence.8 While postcapitalist desires are by no means immune to capitalist capture, they are nonetheless irreducible to it, and, as Children of Men insists, they constitute the very condition of futurity.

To be sure, desire is not necessarily coextensive with hope or with the political will to actively work toward the desired end. This is why Antonio Gramsci’s maxim about pessimism and optimism proves insufficient for understanding the complexity of a film like Cuarón’s and the social movements from which it takes inspiration. Gramsci’s belief in “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” neither recognizes the significance of desire, in all of its messiness, nor the extent to which desire informs imagination, intellection, political will, and the affective conditions of “optimism” and “pessimism” that variously inflect its expression.9 If, as Gramsci’s maxim reminds us, we can act to advance a cause we don’t actually believe can succeed, it fails precisely because desire is not delimited by belief.  Neither, of course, is hope, that anticipatory stance toward a desire whose expression Ernst Bloch detected so prodigiously in the artifacts and aesthetic experience of art and culture. In Children of Men, Bloch might well have found the sensuous affirmation of the utopian “not yet” that he identifies with hope for a postcapitalist future, yet such affirmation flies in the face of the drama the text performs: the drama of provoking and sustaining postcapitalist desire in the absence of the anticipation of its fulfillment. Rather, as Sara Ahmed points out, this film “is not about the availability of belief as a form of optimism… nor does it idealize pessimism as a form of wisdom…. Something beyond the technology of belief is expressed here.”10 I name that “something” desire, and it is because of this desire that Cuarón’s film allows for action toward a better future without the assurance of the ontological fact of hope upon which Bloch relies. Children of Men thereby affirms the vulnerable, anxious, and ultimately generative space between desire and hope where doubt and despair live in intimate contact with “dreams of a better tomorrow”11, and the demand for collective political action finds expression precisely in the failure to achieve the tomorrow the film posits without giving image to.

While Fisher never articulates the shift in emphasis I am suggesting, his project nonetheless evolves from the critical pedagogical stance of Capitalist Realism to the conception of a positive political project that confronts “the libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism” by implementing “a counterlibido to capitalist desire—a postcapitalist desire.”12 In fact, Capitalist Realism has relatively little to say about desire. As part of its elaboration of capitalist realist despair, however, the book draws attention to our disavowed desire for capitalism as a primary cause of our perception of political impotence. Reclaiming a real political agency, Fisher writes, “means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital” (15). This is a refrain that Fisher returns to in his final lectures collected as Postcapitalist Desire (2021).13

While Fisher’s critique of the counterculture and the “hedonic infantilism” of the hippy was often scathing, in both the unfinished introduction to Acid Communism and in his final lectures, the counterculture plays a crucial role in creating the revolutionary conditions that emerge in the U.S. and Great Britain in the early 1970s. In the introduction to Acid Communism, Fisher reframes neoliberalism as “a project aimed at destroying—to the point of making them unthinkable—the experiments in democratic socialism and libertarian communism that were efflorescing at the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies.” The ultimate goal was to exorcise the “‘the spectre of a world that could be free”: a world beyond endless, meaningless toil.14 These desires often infiltrate mainstream culture. In The Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon,” the Beatles’ “I’m Only Dreaming,” and Small Faces’ “Lazy Sunday,” for example, Fisher finds an articulation of the “refusal to internalize systems of valuation that claimed that one’s existence is validated by paid employment.”15 Neoliberalism’s triumph in replacing “the different forms of collectivity that clamoured out of the Sixties” is also the erasure of “the egalitarian and democratic spaces” created by the counterculture and evoked in art.16 Fisher thus credits the counterculture with “the production of new forms of desire.”17 It is not that Fisher thinks, as a certain sector of the counterculture did, that desire is sufficient for social transformation. Rather, his stance, and my own, is that desire is a necessary condition for that transformation. 

To what extent does the postcapitalist desire produced in the counterculture persist in the midst of neoliberal hegemony and capitalist realism? In the unfinished introduction to Acid Communism, Fisher writes that “[when] conditions for the struggle are no longer there, you can still appeal to… the transformational libido” that finds expression in the best of countercultural arts.  It is thus tempting to argue that Children of Men appeals to the extant traces of countercultural libido in actor Michael Kaine’s John Lennonesque depiction of Jasper and in the Sixties-dominated soundtrack, which includes Lennon’s “Freda People,”  a cover version of Lennon and McCartney’s “Tomorrow Never Knows,” King Crimson’s “Court of the Crimson King,”  Donovan’s “There is An Ocean,” and The Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday.” However, Children of Men is more nostalgic for the 1960s than interested in reactivating what its  counterculture had to offer. Instead, the film evinces the narrative that Fisher challenges in his final lectures and in the unfinished introduction to Acid Communism that quite simply  “the ‘Sixties led to neoliberalism.’”18 This point becomes visible when the camera slowly pans across the photos and news clippings on Jasper’s mantle to reveal a history that, as Jayna Brown writes, simply skips over the Seventies as it moves from John Lennon to Naomi Klein, the Iraq war, the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and to clippings about the onset of an infertility epidemic and the criminalization of refugees in Britain.19 As it evades the Seventies, Children of Men neglects the decade when, Fisher argues, the uniting of “organized labor and the countercultural libido” emerges with so much revolutionary potential that its destruction was imperative for the instantiation of neoliberal hegemony in the U.S. and Great Britain.20

The demand to “free the people” that erupts onto the soundtrack as the credits begin to roll only recovers the experiments in democratic socialism and libertarian communism of the Sixties by way of a reference to the so-called “Battle of Seattle,” an iconic moment in the alter-globalization movement: a radically democratic, horizontalist network of movements that recognized the shared interests in resisting the neoliberal policies devised and dominated by the Global North via institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the G7, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. During the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999, labor advocates, student groups, environmentalists, indigenous rights organizations, and many other non-government organizations effectively shut down the WTO meeting by occupying the city streets and preventing access to the conference center. In 1999, the city of Seattle notoriously responded to the protesters with a militarized police force, subjecting the overwhelmingly peaceful protesters to violent attacks, removal, and illegal arrests. Hence the city’s response forecasts the kind of police state that Children of Men attributes to its British nation-state. In this film, however, “The Battle of Seattle” becomes “The Siege of Seattle,” suggesting that the alter-globalization movement has been isolated and reduced to self-defense, but remains, if only barely, alive. The fate of this “movement of movements” remains literally invisible. As the newscaster announces that it is “day 1000 of the Siege of Seattle,” the screen itself is imageless with the newscaster’s voice emanating, like the voices of children at the end of the film, from complete darkness.21 Children of Men can neither imagine the success of such a movement nor disavow its desire for it. Witness the failure of the resistance movements at the film’s Bexhill Refugee Camp to unite against their shared enemy.  Instead, Cuarón’s film cries out for a better world from the depths of its capitalist realist abjection, articulating its desire and pressing us into action to create the conditions for a hope it cannot itself produce.

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Endnotes

  1. Rebecca Solnit, Desire in the Dark (Nation Books, 2006), 1.
  2. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, 2010) 179.
  3. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2006), 2.
  4. On this point I agree with Matthew Sweedler: “The hope that the film offers is the dim prospect that humanity might continue to exist in its current bleak form.”  See Sweedler’s Rumble and Crash: Crises of Capitalism in Contemporary Film (SUNY Press, 2019), 28.
  5. Elsewhere I read Cuaron’s film in terms of the history of Mexican melodrama.  As melodrama, I argue, the film must be understood as both a retrograde retreat from political struggle and a demand for it. See my “Melodrama Against the State: Children of Men’s Unimaginable Tomorrow,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2023.2219595.
  6. Sweedler, 20.
  7. Jodi Dean, “Capitalism is the End of the World” in Mediations 33, no. 1-2 (2020): 149-150, https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/end-of-world.
  8. The contemporary conversation on left melancholy begins with Wendy Brown’s “Resisting Left Melancholy” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 19-27.  Jodi Dean offers her influential rereading of the phenomenon in her chapter on “Desire” in The Communist Horizon (Verso, 2019), 157-206. See also Enzo Traverso’s Left-wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (Columbia University Press, 2021) and Rodrigo Nunes’ chapter on “One or Two Melancholias?” in his Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021), 51-80. I take the term “ideological fantasy” from Slavoj Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, 1989), 33. 
  9. Antonio Gramsci delivered his maxim in “An Address to the Anarchists.” L’Ordine Nuovo, April 3-10, 1920. https://libcom.org/article/address-anarchists-antonio-gramsci-1920
  10. Ahmed, 180.
  11. “Dreams of a Better Tomorrow” was Bloch’s initial title for the opus that became The Principle of Hope.
  12. Mark Fisher, “Postcapitalist Desire” in What Are We Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto, eds. Federico Campagna and Emanuele Campilglio. (Pluto Books, 2012) and Matt Colquhoun, “Introduction: No More Miserable Monday Mornings” in Postcapitalist Desire, Mark Fisher (Repeater 2021), 10-11.
  13. Consider, for example, the seriousness with which Fisher’s final lectures take Lyotard’s scandalous assertion of the masochistic desire of the working class as an elaboration of this “insertion at the level of desire” that sustains both capitalism and its subjects. Postcapitalist Desire, 180.  Like Baudrillard, Marcuse, and Deleuze and Guattari, Fisher explains, Lyotard’s provocation is an attempt to think of desire and politics together, for to reject the desire for capitalism results merely in the reinscription of moralism and the disavowal of desire, a result that Fisher has always argued is a political dead end. In Postcapitalist Desire, then, as in his unfinished introduction to Acid Communism, Fisher rejects the moralistic rejection of capitalist desire for “the production of new forms of desire.” He raises the “spectre of a different kind of desire,” a collective “desire for a transformed world.”  In order to perceive that “spectre,” Fisher performs a noteworthy reversal: His re-evaluation of the counterculture. Postcapitalist Desire, 175.
  14. Fisher, “Unfinished Introduction to Acid Communism.” K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016). Ed. Darren Ambrose. Foreword Simon Reynolds. (Repeater 2018), 674.
  15. Fisher, K-Punk, 680
  16. Fisher, K-Punk, 683.
  17. Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire, 175.
  18. Fisher, “Unfinished Introduction” to Acid Communism, 677. Indeed, Fisher’s goal in this text was to recover the promise of that “acid communism,” to see how it came into being, how it failed, and how we can produce the conditions for it anew.
  19. Jayna Brown, “The Human Project: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Black Heroine in Children of Men and 28 Days Later.” Transition 110 (2013): 128.
  20. Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire, 177.
  21. The headlines on televised news that Children of Men announces in the dark also include the renewal of the Homeland Security bill and the Moslem community’s demand for an end to the army’s occupation of a mosque.  However, unlike the “siege of Seattle,” the filmic world confirms the conditions spawned by these two events: the horrendous treatment of immigrants and the Moslem uprising in Bexhill.

  • Robin Blyn

    Robin Blyn is a Professor of English at the University of West Florida. Her first book, The Freak-Garde: Extraordinary Bodies and Revolutionary Art in America traces the development of a distinctly American avant-garde tradition that developed in response to the consolidation of liberal capitalism in the U.S. Her current book-in-progress disentangles the legacies in literature and film of the socialist anarchist movements that emerged following the fall of the Berlin Wall in response to neoliberal globalization. She has published essays in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Narrative, and Twentieth-Century Literature.