Corporate anti-capitalist satire reinforces rather than undermines capitalist realism

Evidence

In the cases of gangster rap and Ellroy, capitalist realism takes the form of a kind of super-identification with capital at its most pitilessly predatory, but this need not be the case. In fact, capitalist realism is very far from precluding a certain anti-capitalism. After all, and as Žižek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the ‘evil corporation’. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it. Take Disney/ Pixar’s Wall-E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We’re left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations – or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large – is responsible for this depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 29

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Pfaller’s ‘interpassivity’ as a concept occurring within this explanation.
• XREF: Connects to Žižek’s ideology-of-cynicism work and Baudrillard’s control-through-participation ideas. — connects to: Believing capitalism is bad licenses continued participation in it — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 31; Anti-capitalist messages on screen can end up reinforcing capitalist realism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2223; Capitalist realism’s debunking pose masks its own myth of choice — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2454 (+7 more)

Related

• Corporate anti-capitalism strengthens capitalist realism rather than challenging it. (similarity 0.87)
• Anti-capitalist films can end up affirming capital’s own fantasies (similarity 0.87)
• Anti-capitalist messages on screen can end up reinforcing capitalist realism (similarity 0.85)
• A work faithfully depicting capitalist realism may thereby reinforce it (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalism differs from fascism in requiring no propaganda or subjectively assumed belief (similarity 0.81)
• Capitalism’s ideology is now itself anti-capitalist in content (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism functions on performed belief rather than sincere conviction (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Anti-capitalist messages on screen can end up reinforcing capitalist realism #corroborates (0.97) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2223
• A work faithfully depicting capitalist realism may thereby reinforce it #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2223
• Satire can reveal everyday neoliberalism by exaggerating life-organizing trends #contradicts (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 259
• Capitalist realism’s debunking pose masks its own myth of choice #expands (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2454