Risk-loving capitalism is culturally more conservative than centralized state institutions.
Evidence
It is another irony that capitalism’s ‘society of risk’ is much less likely to take this kind of risk than was the supposedly stodgy, centralized culture of the postwar social consensus. It was the public service-oriented BBC and Channel 4 that perplexed and delighted me with the likes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Pinter plays and Tarkovsky seasons; it was this BBC that also funded the popular avant gardism of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which embedded sonic experimentalism into everyday life. Such innovations are unthinkable now that the public has been displaced by the consumer. The effect of permanent structural instability, the ‘cancellation of the long term’, is invariably stagnation and conservatism, not innovation. … Meanwhile, films such as the aforementioned Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker -plundered by Hollywood since as far back as Alien and Blade Runner – were produced in the ostensibly moribund conditions of the Brezhnevite Soviet state, meaning that the USSR acted as a cultural entrepreneur for Hollywood. Since it is now clear that a certain amount of stability is necessary for cultural vibrancy, the question to be asked is: how can this stability be provided, and by what agencies? — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 159
Categorization
- SEED: Article angle: the ‘society of risk’ manages to be the society of maximal aesthetic timidity — instability breeds the cult of the minimal variation.
- CANDY: That the Brezhnevite USSR bankrolled the very avant-garde cinema Hollywood later plundered is a striking two-sentence talking point.
- XREF: connects to: Corporately funded monument structures embody conservative rather than radical values.