Economic realism under capitalism is itself a form of collective insanity

Evidence

How could madness not result when we are invited to consider America’s consuming of $600 billion a year more than it produces “realistic”? (As opposed, so we are told, to Europe’s “unrealistic” social welfare programmes.) Make no mistake, the realists are insane, which more than ever reveals the force of the slogan, “the Real is the impossible, but the impossible which happens”. Ecological catastrophe and mental illness are present in capitalism’s wrap-around simulation as warps, unassimilable discontinuities, that which cannot be but which, nevertheless, cannot be extirpated. Perhaps these negative Reals — these dark shadows which allow us to see Kapital’s striplit mall of the mind for what it actually is — have their complement in a positive Real, an event completely inconceivable in the current situation, but which will break in and re-define everything. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1410

Categorization

• QUESTION: The invocation of a ‘positive Real’ to come is suggestive and deliberately vague — what could count, and how does this thread connect to Fisher’s later work on the future and accelerationism?
• XREF: Directly invokes Lacanian/Žižekian Real and the ‘capitalist realism’ formulation central to Fisher’s own book of that name. — connects to: Accepting senseless contradictions is the exemplary technique of sanity in late capitalism. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 113; Capitalism structurally requires collective mood swings to function — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 75; Capitalist economic laws are both real and socially necessary illusions — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1343 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalist economic laws are both real and socially necessary illusions #expands (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1343