Sublime

Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.

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.

Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante write in Panic: The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington, “The ideology of modern finance replaced the capitalist’s appreciation for free markets as a context for human creativity with the worship of efficient markets as substitutes for that creativity. The result was a divorce of entrepreneurial

interesting headline that contains some relevance, self-interest, and emotion.

Harvey argues that neoliberalization is best conceived of as a ‘political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’.

This strategy – of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question – has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism, that ‘motley painting of everything that ever was’, whose dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as its production and disposal