Capitalism sustains itself by recycling readymade archaisms, never creating the new

Evidence

Capital is nothing if it is not parsimonious, and for the last thirty years it is has sustained itself by relying on readymade forms of existential affiliation. This reliance on already-existing forms of identification — all those nationalisms and religions, with any number of archaisms ready to crawl out of the crypt — is what postmodernism has been. … It faces not a confident capitalist modernity, but a capitalism that has retreated from the present, never mind the future. Left to its own resources — or rather, left to the resources it retains from previous forms of exploitation — capital can never come up with anything new. Postmodernism was its ideal form, and the naturalised postmodernism of capitalist realism was its optimal solution to political and cultural antagonism. The UK has specialised in developing the steampunk model: Victorian social relations, but now with iPhones. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2021

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off the hauntology and ‘futures represented in forms of the past’ claims from chapters 34 and 66, and ch61 on citational culture. — connects to: Capitalism’s material system is interwoven with cultural reproduction — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 122; Capitalism subsumes all prior history by converting beliefs into monetized aesthetic objects — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 13; Capitalists are opportunistic adapters, not the germ of a new rational order
• DEEPTHINKING: Condenses the whole book’s argument: a capitalism unable to imagine the new is also one that cannot restrain ISIS’s cybergothic recombination of ancient and contemporary.

Broader Connections

• Capitalism subsumes all prior history by converting beliefs into monetized aesthetic objects #exemplifies (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 13
• Capitalists are opportunistic adapters, not the germ of a new rational order #corroborates (0.78)
• Capitalism’s material system is interwoven with cultural reproduction #complicates (0.72) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 122