Against the postmodernist suspicion of grand narratives, we need to reassert that, far from being isolated, contingent problems, these are all the effects of a single systemic cause: Capital. We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against a Capital which presents itself as ontologically, as well as geographically, ubiquitous.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 77

But this impasse – it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic – is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals – but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-a-subject: Capital.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) pp. 69-70

The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot's claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 3

This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious 'end of history' trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a 'terminal beach' was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation of an age with history'. 'It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself', he wrote in Untimely Meditations, 'and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) pp. 6-7

So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Zizek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behaviour precisely depends upon the prior disavowal – we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 13

'With the breakdown of the signifying chain', Jameson summarized, 'the Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time'. Jameson was writing in the late 1980s – i.e. the period in which most of my students were born. What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture – a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 25

Instead of saying that everyone – i.e. every one – is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that's the very problem. The cause of eco-catastrophe is an impersonal structure which, even though it is capable of producing all manner of effects, is precisely not a subject capable of exercising responsibility. The required subject – a collective subject – does not exist, yet the crisis, like all other global crises we're now facing, demands that it be constructed. Yet the appeal to ethical immediacy that has been in place in British political culture since at least 1985 – when the consensual sentimentality of Live Aid replaced the antagonism of the Miners Strike – permanently defers the emergence of such a subject.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) p. 66

The present generation thinks it has found history, it thinks it is even overburdened with history. It moans about historicism – lucus a non lucendo. Something is called history which is not history at all. According to the present, because everything is dissolved into history, one must attain the supra-historical again. It is not enough that contemporary Dasein has lost itself in the present pseudo-history, it also has to use the last remainder of its temporality (i.e., of Dasein) in order entirely to steal away from time, from Dasein. And it is on this fantastical path to supra-historicity that we are supposed to find Weltanschauung. (This is the uncanniness that constitutes the time of the present.)

Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1992) p. 20E

For a long time I've walked through this world with the desire, like in 'Rear Window' , to look into other people's lives because I know that there is a way in which I am the same as so many of the strangers that I see. Oftentimes I just think of making music as a way of illuminating those connections. You don't know. That's the thrill of making a record-- to see. I don't have to walk anonymously by this corner anymore because the man on this corner and I have a deeper connection that we didn't have a way of addressing before. I know for a fucking fact that I am not alone and sometimes everybody feels alone but we have to know that we aren't. And rather than giving that responsibility for assuring us that we are not alone over to the incapable hands of organized religion, let's do it ourselves and say, "What's the connection?"

Will Oldham, Interview with Pitchfork, 2011-10-10

In our time anyone who says population in place of people or race, and privately owned land in place of soil, is by that simple act withdrawing his support from a great many lies. He is taking away from these words their rotten, mystical implications. The word people (Volk) implies a certain unity and certain common interests; it should therefore be used only when we are speaking of a number of peoples, for then alone is anything like community of interest conceivable. The population of a given territory may have a good many different and even opposed interests – and this is a truth that is being suppressed. In like manner, whoever speaks of soil and describes vividly the effect of ploughed fields upon nose and eyes, stressing the smell and colour of earth, is supporting the rulers' lies. For the fertility of the soil is not the question, nor men's love for the soil, nor their industry in working it; what is of prime importance is the price of grain and the price of labour. Those who extract profits from the soil are not the same people who extract grain from it, and the earthy smell of a turned furrow is unknown on the produce exchanges. The latter have another smell entirely [...]

Bertolt Brecht, 'Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties' in Hans Haacke (Phaidon, 2004) pp. 96-97

But the notion of 'the end of history' also expresses a blockage of the historical imagination, and we need to see more clearly how that is so, and how it ends up seeming to offer only this particular concept as a viable alternative. It seems to me particularly significant that the emergence of late capitalism [...], along with the consequent collapse of the communist systems in the East, coincided with a generalized and planetary ecological disaster. It is not particularly the rise of the ecological movements I have in mind here [...]; rather, it is the end of a Promethean conception of production that seems to me significant, in the way that it makes it difficult for people today to continue to imagine development as a conquest of nature.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 91

The function of the sublime, the modern, of the one half of art, is taken over by Theory; but this also leaves room for the survival of art's other half, namely the Beautiful, which now invests the cultural realm at the moment in which the production of the modern has gradually dried up. This is the other face of postmodernity, the return of Beauty and the decorative, in the place of the older modern Sublime, the abandonment by art of the quest for the Absolute or of truth claims and its redefinition as a source of sheer pleasure and gratification (rather than, as in the modern, of jouissance). Both Theory and the Beautiful are constituent elements of that 'end of art' which was the postmodern.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 86

Imagine models floating above each other as in distinct dimensions: it is not their homologies that prove suggestive or fruitful, but rather the infinitesimal divergences, the imperceptible lack of fit between the levels – extrapolated out into a continuum whose stages range from the pre-choate and the quizzical gap, to the nagging tension and the sharpness of contradiction itself – genuine thinking always taking place within empty places, these voids that suddenly appear between the most powerful conceptual schemes. Thinking is thus not the concept, but the breakdown in the relationships between the individual concepts, isolated in their splendour like so many galactic systems, drifting apart in the empty mind of the world.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 76

One cannot, consequently, admit the crude separation of sciences and arts prescribed by modern Western culture. As we know, it has as its corollary the relegation of the arts and literature to the miserable function of distracting human beings from what hounds and harasses them all the time, i.e. the obsession of controlling time. [...] It must never be forgotten that if thinking indeed consists in receiving the event, it follows that no-one can claim to think without being ipso facto in a position of resistance to the procedures for controlling time.

To think is to question everything, including thought, and question, and the process. To question requires that something happen that reason has not yet known. In thinking, one accepts the occurrence for what it is: 'not yet' determined. One does not prejudge it, and there is no security. Peregrination in the desert. One cannot write without bearing witness to the abyss of time in its coming.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 74

Modernity is not, I think, a historical period, but a way of shaping a sequence of moments in such a way that it accepts a high rate of contingency.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 68

It scarcely seems that this generalized accessibility offered by the new cultural goods is strictly speaking a progress. The penetration of techno-scientific apparatus into the cultural field in no way signifies an increase of knowledge, sensibility, tolerance and liberty. Reinforcing this apparatus does not liberate the spirit, as the Aufklärung thought. Experience shows rather the reverse: a new barbarism, illiteracy and impoverishment of language, new poverty, merciless remodelling of opinion by the media, immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul, as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno repeatedly stressed.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 63

Postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity's claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 34

For it is of the essence of desire to desire also to free iself of itself, because desire is intolerable. So one believes one can put an end to desire, and one fulfils its end (this is the ambiguity of the word end, aim and cessation: the same ambiguity as with desire). One tries to remember, and this is probably a good way of forgetting again.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 29

The striking thing about this metaphysics of development is that it needs no finality. Development is not attached to an Idea, like that of the emancipation of reason and of human freedoms. It is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according to its internal dynamic alone. [...] It has no necessity itself other than a cosmological chance.

It has thus no end, but it does have a limit, the expectation of the life of the sun. The anticipated explosion of this star is the only challenge objectively posed to development.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 7