Voici un bref extrait d'une vidéo trouvée chez Zero Books, une maison d'édition, gauche de la gauche théorique, uniquement en anglais malheureusement. Ils ont une chaîne youtube que je vous recommande de fréquenter. C'est assez lourd, mais toujours mélangé à un peu de pop culture sur un fond de vaporwave plutôt plaisant. Et c'est aussi une bonne porte d'entrée vers Fredric Jameson, où le regretté Mark Fisher, entre autres.
Ici ça parle temps, histoire et futur à l'âge du néolibéralisme. L'extrait commence à 07:50 et je vous mets la vidéo juste en-dessous.
The problem we are facing is not that we are obsessed with the past or that we have a tendency to romanticize the past. In fact, according to Mark Fisher, a return to the past is in order. What holds back such a retro move however, is our capitalist realism, or the pervasive belief in perpetual present, a frozen moment, where what is now is all that can be.
What Fisher called capitalist realism and Jameson called the cultural logic of late capitalism, might also be called post-modernism. And the latent argument in both Jameson and Fisher work is this:
By losing our notions of universality, transcendence, and ultimately the notion of the real, we have also lost our ability to change.Under capitalism, social relations are mediated by things, and people are but at the service of these things. All of life revolves around the maintenance and reproduction of these social objects called commodities. The ultimate outcome of this way of life, is in our very self understanding: the entire history of our relationship to the world is itself transformed into a commodity. And the more developed and domineering capitalism becomes the more other forms of authority are undermined and absorbed.
It’s worth noting that as much as Fisher decries the end of history, the death of the future, he gives this tendency to destroy the future historical designation: Post-modernity, capitalist realism, the culture of late capitalism. All of these are also known as neoliberal, or neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is an historical phase in our political economy. It’s what came after Fordism, and it was brought about by changing conditions in profitability, production, communication technology, and so on. If we can fit even the death of history into historical time, if we can understand this new a-temporality as a rising out of history, can we really say that history has ended?
The historical dynamic of capitalism ceaselessly generates what is new, while we’re generating what is the same. This dynamic both generate the possibility of another organization of social life, and yet hinders this possibility from being realized. Marx grasps this very complex historical dynamic with his category of capital. The historically specific abstract form of social domination intrinsic to capitalism than is the domination of people by time.
