“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!” – Charles Dickens, Hard Times
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It has become perhaps the most popular cliché in opinion columns and political speeches alike – that we are divided, and something must be done to heal this division. The ‘we’, that is divided, presumably refers to citizens in ‘Western’ liberal democracies. There has been a rise in populism, polarising our politics away from the centre, perhaps we need more centrist politicians. The Guardian ran a whole series on ‘Divided Generations’[1], Andrew Grice tells us in The Independent that “Brexit has made us an angrier and more divided nation”[2].
Since 2016, the liberal columnists, a good portion of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and a small number of Conservative MPs have been presenting their solution to our divided society. If we return to a pragmatic politics of moderation, and just focus on The Facts, we will be able to stabilise our democracies and economies. This call was finally realised in the formation of The Independent Group, now the party ‘Change UK’. Their ‘Statement of Independence’ reads:
“Our aim is to pursue policies that are evidence-based, not led by ideology, taking a long-term perspective to the challenges of the 21st century in the national interest, rather than locked in the old politics of the 20th century in the party’s interests.
As The Independent Group we aim to recognise the value of healthy debate, show tolerance towards different opinions and seek to reach across outdated divides and build consensus to tackle Britain’s problems”[3]
Ask what “evidence-based, not led by ideology” means, if it indeed means anything at all, and you have the crux of the issue. If ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’, then precisely what is the Light that is to be shed?
Before we get into the body of this essay, I should accept that there is a degree of Fake News, particularly on Social Media, that are essentially hoaxes. There are probably many interesting things to say about this phenomenon, but I will not focus on it here.
The impossibility of anormative perception
Any student of ethics will be well aware of the Is-Ought Gap, and it will be somewhat useful here. The argument goes as follows: conceiving of propositions as relations between properties and objects, an ought-proposition (e.g. you ought not to kill, or we ought to privatise the NHS) cannot deductively follow from a set of premisses which are all is-proposition, since doing so would involve the introduction of a new relation, that is, an ‘ought-type’ relation. This is generally known as the Naturalistic Fallacy. Here, the lesson is simply that a statement declaring the possibility of a politics that does not include ‘ideological’ or moral presumptions is misguided.
Under this view, the Independent Group’s claim to pursue politics in “the national interest”, may appeal to a broad utilitarian notion of the maximisation of welfare. This is unsurprising: Utilitarianism quite often appeals to people (myself included) on a deeply intuitive level. Maximising welfare seems to be self-evidently a good idea. If I am right about the presence of this background assumption in popular liberal-centrist thinking, then we already have a reason to question liberalism’s commitment to moral neutrality.
My argument goes beyond the simple observation that The Independent Group seem to commit the naturalistic fallacy, and that, therefore, we might expect that there is some implicit instrumental or utilitarian reasoning acting in the background. There is a lot to be said in critiquing the outcome of such reasoning – not least from Horkheimer, that the reduction of individuals to agents of an economy, doomed to fret over the rationality, the instrumentality of their decisions, creates “the withering away of the human” (1974; p.33). Rather, my argument is to critique the view of perception implicit in such instrumental reason. I will argue that the existence of a background ideology necessarily influences our perception, and thus our worldly observation, so that perception itself takes on qualities of our prescriptive ideology.
Hegel observed that the mode of perception that takes the objects of experience as “immediate”, i.e. the pure. This does not really provide us with information that is either useful or unmediated. The empiricist basis of a worldview that professes to make prescriptions made on pure Facts falls down when we begin to analyse the nature of the perception of these Facts. When I point at an object of my experience, it appears to me as just the pure ‘This’. This thing, this object, is the This only by its being Now and Here. When I point to the This I am just locating its existence within time (the Now) and within space (the Here). But Hegel brings out the conflict here. For when I say, for example, that “Now is Night”, it is true. But tomorrow at midday it will not be so. ‘Now’ and ‘Here’ do not define a particular state of affairs, they are universals. So, when we point to the This, and in so doing declare the Here and Now, we attempt to point at a particular thing, but we can only describe in terms of universals. So, we must look for meaning not in the Object, but in the Subject, which is ourselves, the perceiver. The This’s Hereness, Nowness, and then its colour, its smell, in fact all its attributes, gain meaning purely by their being in relation to me. We can only arrive at a definition of the thing by relating it to ourselves: “[the This’s] truth is in the object as my object… it is, because I know it” (Hegel, 1807; §94-100). In more plain terms, there is no simultaneously descriptive and immediate object of experience – consciousness cannot perceive without imposing itself on the object.
Consider any scientific inquiry: whenever we perform some empirical investigation, the results of that investigation are compared with the existing totality of knowledge, which we can call the prevalent ideology. The comparison, that is really the combination, of the ideology and the result, expresses a new unity of knowledge. But at no point was there ever the pure combination of this ideology and result. For consciousness, as we know from Hegel, imposes itself upon the result, and so the ultimate combination is really that of an old expression of an ideology, and the new expression of that same ideology. Althusser criticises this idea when he found that ideology “represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them) but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them” (Althusser, 1971). Inquiry, then, in Spinoza’s words, “is not successful because it is true, rather it is true because it is successful” (sourced in Lechte, 1994). Even supposedly ‘analytic’ philosophers have accepted the force behind this argument: particularly (the Later) Wittgenstein and his intellectual descendants have found that our notion of Truth is best understood as its coherence within a system of knowledge. But I need not go as far as to claim that Truth is identical with coherence, I need merely make the dialectical point that the way that we treat Truth is one of coherence with an existing body of knowledge.
The Fiction of Capital
After a bout of heavy analysis, it might be useful to take stock. I hae tried to argue two uncontroversial theses, and one that is more controversial: irstly, there is a movement in politics which stresses the empirical, seeking out the Facts and attempting to draw normative conclusions from them; secondly, this worldview is flawed, on account of a fairly trivial commitment of the naturalistic fallacy. Finally, and more controversially, I argue that any political philosophy that emphasises the empirical is flawed because there is no such thing as anormative or, at least, our perception is mediated by our consciousness, and this consciousness is likely to be impacted by our practices, and these practices will reflect the status quo – perhaps there are a set of practices that would allow for anormative perception, but it should be fairly clear that we are not operating with such practices. More intuitively, we cannot help but impose our own beliefs on what we think we are perceiving in some universal and perfect way.
The sort of worldview that emphasises The Facts also finds its supporting capitalism. Žižek often quotes Jameson, in saying that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”. This view that there is no (feasible) alternative to capitalism, known as Capitalist Realism, is not so much a statement of fact as it is a subjective belief conjured up by capitalism itself. Yet Capitalist Realism is not just the feeling that there is no alternative, it is the set of propositions about the world which make us feel as though there is no alternative. Mark Fisher quotes Marx and Engels:
“[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade” (op cit; p.4)
With every object (and, indeed, every person), expressible and expressed in terms of their exchange-value, Capital collapses even the most beautiful artworks and meaningful rituals into their ability to be consumed. This is not just the lamentable consequence of a ruling ideology that values money over meaning, but it is the mechanism by which Capitalist Realism is able to claim ‘to have “delivered us from the ‘fatal abstractions’ inspired by the ideologies of the past”’ (Fisher, quoting Badiou, op cit; p.5). How silly those people must have been in the Dark Ages, engaging in practices that could not be converted into exchange-value. This is the true root of the liberal centrist reaction to the post-2008 political climate: Capitalist Realism is so heavily entrenched in these columnists and politicians that this ‘egotistical calculation’ gains a universality and a permanence that anything that does not conform to such a calculation is immediately cast out of the realm of the possible.
But there is a deeper reason why I have called this section “The Fiction of Capital”. It is not just that Capitalism tells us something that is not real, but that it tells us a story What is emphasised far more in Žižek than in Fisher is that Capital not only reconstructs the realm of the possible, to present the illusion that there is no alternative, but it reconstructs the realm of the desirable. Here, it will be useful to draw upon the work of Jacques Lacan, the great 20th-century French philosopher and psychoanalyst. He, like Freud, postulates three orders of the psyche: that he terms the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. They are almost impossible to conceive of entirely separately, and Lacan’s work is fiendishly difficult, but I will do my best to explain them briefly here. The Imaginary is just that, it is what we conceive of ourselves, things, and others to be. The Symbolic is the realm of denotation and metaphor: it determines what signs (that is, words and images) that we relate to one another. So, in this sense, the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic. The Real is, by its nature, extremely difficult to express. Thankfully Fisher, as he does with so many things, finds a neat way of expressing it: “The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of an apparent reality” (op cit; p.18). The terror one feels when reality cracks, not too far away from the Sartre’s Nausea, that is the confrontation with the Real. The important point for our inquiry regarding the Real, which we will return to later, is that “the Real is neither pre-social nor a social effect – the point is, rather, that the Social itself is constituted by the exclusion of some traumatic Real” (2000; p.311).
Let us focus on the Symbolic order. What Lacan called the ‘big Other and that Žižek draws great attention to, is the universal structure of the Symbolic When I say ‘universal’ here, I do not mean ‘universal’ in some eternal, necessary sense. Rather, I mean the big Other qua symbolic order that structures the Symbolic (i.e. the relations of representation and metonymy), under a give hegemonic social order and thus structures the field of inter-subjective interactions. In Lacanian terms, this is where Capitalist Realism resides, the mechanism being that possibility is universally associated in a metonymic relation with Capitalism. But the Symbolic order is where we also find the expression of our desires, as this is where our wants and needs are expressed through the words and images that the Symbolic provides us. Fisher, and even Žižek to my knowledge, model the functioning of this Realism as a limitation of possibility, but I am not certain this is enough:this is where we can come to think of Capital as a Fiction, we must consider how Capital structures the realm of the desirable
Back when I was studying The Great Gatsby for A-Level, a good friend asked: ‘How do we know Gatsby is going to die?’. It is true – through the last 80 or so pages of Fitzgerald’s novel, there is a palpable sense of inevitability that means that when Gatsby is finally shot by Wilson, it feels correct. An ending where Gatsby had secured Daisy’s love would have seemed entirely unsatisfying. Through Fitzgerald’s language, in ways that I am sure literature students can better explain than I, he constructs exactly what we want to happen. After all, is this not what we mean when we say that a work of storytelling is engaging? We care about the end result. If Fitzgerald’s fiction is admirable, then Capital’s is outstanding. By the pervasiveness of Capital in everyday life, the big Other is reconstructed by Capital, and our associations of desire become inexorably linked to it. We not only fetishize commodities, but we begin to fetishize work itself – it is somehow a mark of virtue if someone works 18 hour days for poverty wages. Capitalist Realism, then, functions as a story does. And so just in the same way that it would not feel right if Gatsby did not die, certain ideas and events simply do or do not feel right under the fiction of Capital.
This leads us well to the issue of the far-right, or, as it has become fashionable to call it, “the rise of the alt-Right”. I am not sure that this category of the ‘alt-Right’ is a particularly useful category. In it seem to be lumped the neo-conservatives of Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopolous, and outright white supremacists like Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux. Both of these groups are familiar, there is nothing alt- about them. We should refer to the former merely as reactionaries, and the latter as what they are: white-supremacists, racists, and, often, National Socialists.
But it is clear to anyone engaged with politics, particularly on Twitter, that there has been a rise in the popularity of reactionary political ideas. For many, this phenomenon has happened overnight. So how has this occurred? It seems to me that both the neo-conservatives and the white-supremacists have engaged with the story that Capitalism seeks to tell. By appealing to near-universally acceptable liberal values of free speech and empiricism, they are able to place the stories of ‘white genocide’ and ‘Cultural Marxism’ not only in the realm of what is politically feasible, but also in the realm of what could be reasonably desired. When an all-too-gullible chairperson turns to a Leftist and asks “why will you not just hear out this white supremacist and refute them in the free marketplace of ideas?”[4], what underlies it is “don’t you think someone could reasonably find this persuasive?”. This is why it would seem ridiculous to debate whether the Earth is round or flat, because the Earth being flat is not a reasonable continuation of the story that Capitalism tells us.
No one, I think, is more aware of this than Ben Shapiro, whose “Facts over feelings” slogan, and constant valorisation of civil discourse allow him to be invited on US Late Night talk-shows[5], and thrust directly into the realm of cultural acceptability. His slogan so directly echoes The Independent Group’s demand for “Facts over ideology” that, after our investigation into Capitalist Realism and the big Other, we can see that the liberal centrists’ demand for Facts, and the Right’s reaction against the supposed nihilism of postmodernism are really two sides of the same coin: they are both trying to make themselves the next chapter in the story of Capital.
I want to now show how a Lacanian analysis of Capitalism can help us understand the near-hysterical reaction of these liberals to 2016 and the political events following it. Dealing purely with the Symbolic has sufficed until now, but now the Real (‘the unrepresentable X, the traumatic void’) will be a useful tool. Adrian Johnston notes that in Lacan’s later work,
“Real dimensions are added to the unconscious, with its Symbolic dimensions being made to orbit around black holes of unsymbolizability impossible to represent via the signifier-like ideational representations… of the language-like sides of the unconscious” (2018)
The Real is unrepresentable, but it functions not in a separate area to the Symbolic or the Imaginary (after all, it is a part of the psyche); it is, rather, “the resistant kernel within the symbolic process itself” (Zizek, 2000; p.311). Capitalist Realism, as with any other reality, is faced with structuring our laws, practices, and signs that form the Symbolic, around this ‘traumatic void’ that we are so terrified to confront.
But here is where Capitalist Realism confronts its dualistic lacuna. Fisher compares Capital to John Carpenter’s The Thing, as
“a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis” (2009, p.6)
That is to say that to maintain its permanence, and still function as a realism, Capital must adjust in response to crises. Just as modes of production must break down and reform after the economic crises of 1929 and 2008, so must political discourse change in response to political crises, such as that of 2016.
But in so doing, the Symbolic must adapt on the subjective, psychic level. If our discourse changes, then our orders, our practices, that is our norms, inevitably change in response. So the cries, bemoaning the ‘post-Truth’ era, seeking explanation in Russian Collusion, and Electoral Fraud, rather than structural inadequacies in the way our society functions, are a reaction to the plastic nature of language under Capitalism. By necessitating a restructuring of the Symbolic, it appears, for these establishment liberal centrists who have so frequently determined political discourse, that the True signified (that is what should be signified by any particular sign, i.e. the Facts), slips away from the corresponding signifier. So, what happens when the metonymic relations of the Symbolic break down? We are forced to confront the Real. Rather than orbit around the “black holes” in the unconscious, meaning is sucked into a confrontation with the perpetual contingency of the big Other.
To understand this, recall Žižek’s point that “the Social itself is constituted by the exclusion of some traumatic Real” – the trauma, here, can be thought of as the contingency of the associations of liberal democracy – human rights, freedom, universal franchise. But our norms and practice qua symbolic order are structured by and for the understanding of our lives within the cultural and institutional framework provided by liberal democracy – in this way, the contingency of such associations becomes this thing with which we, by constructing a political ‘reality’ through fiction, must avoid confrontation.
Again, thinking in broader, more intuitive terms: when the world ceases to make sense, we are always forced to try and make sense of it in whatever way possible. In 2016, the world stopped making sense to liberal centrists, so fantastic stories of collusion and corruption were dreamt up to avoid confronting the Real. Rather than see the death of their god, they, like fans of Elvis and 2Pac, invented ways that the death was faked.
The beginning of a new story
What I have sought to do here is try to situate recent political events in a more rigid theoretical framework. Doing this has involved understanding that one of the ways in which Capitalism is able to remain stable is construct the very way we think about the world – which is where the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis have been invaluable. Capital portrays itself as not only as the only possible system, but the only system worth desiring.
It would be nice to end on a more positive note, so to any sympathiser with moderate politics, who wishes we could deal with climate change, or poverty, or racism, I say just this: know that there may well be alternatives. Capital tells a powerful story, but there may well be others, and perhaps embracing new fictions will help us stop suffering, and avoid an ecological apocalypse. Embrace the fact that if there was ever a time for radicalism, it is now: if political struggles seem helpless, it is because you have reached the end of this book: it is time to pick up a new one.
Bibliography
Fisher, Mark (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. & Findlay, J. N. & Miller, Arnold V.,. (1977). Phenomenology of spirit. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Johnston, Adrian, ‘Jacques Lacan’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/lacan/
Lechte, John (ed.) (1994). Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity. London: Routledge.
Žižek, Slavoj (2000) ‘Holding the
Place’, in Butler, J. Laclau, E. Žižek, S Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality. Croydon: Verso.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/series/brexit-divided-generations
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-final-say-eu-referendum-research-vote-statistics-theresa-may-a8751261.html
[3] https://www.theindependent.group/statement
[4] I can think of no better illustration of this centrist gullibility than this video by the incorrigible Natalie Wynn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPa1wikTd5c&t=533s