Culture Recyling & Capitalism Realism

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Whereas post-war popular modernism, as we just saw, was driven by utopian visions of alien futures, what is distinctive of popular culture under late capitalism – again, as Jameson correctly predicted in his work on postmodernism – is its inability to act as anything but a reflection of late capitalist reality through a naturalisation of pastiche and retrospection. When Mark spoke of his early experiences of rave culture – jungle in particular – he liked to describe it as a feeling of a ‘future shock’: the future rushing in and fundamentally altering the conditions of the present. Yet this is completely absent from popular culture under capitalist realism, which instead is characterised by an obsession with the near past through constant cultural recycling. Mark’s point here is not that all forms of culture under late capitalism are bad, but rather that there is very little – if anything – genuinely new; that is, cultural material capable of producing the same kinds of future shocks as rave and previous forms of post-war popular modernisms. Instead, what is distinctive of popular culture today is a kind of ‘formal nostalgia’: the seemingly endless recycling of previous cultural forms within a digital hi-tech environment.

But there is even more to this cultural deceleration, since the past conveyed in a culture of formal nostalgia is not the actual past, but a simulated past that emerges precisely when digital technology is being utilised in cultural recycling. For the cultural clash between an unacknowledged, formal attachment to the past and the utilisation of high-definition digital technology for articulating it means that the cultural material itself ends up belonging neither in the past nor in the present, but in what Fisher and Jameson both refer to as some kind of glossily simulated, eternal 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and so on. The major symptom of formal nostalgia is therefore a temporal flatness in which real history has been transformed into pseudo-history because of our inability to experience historical time organically and to organise it into a coherent sequence of past-present-future. This is Jameson’s ‘waning of historicity’ at full force, in the form of an aggravated postmodernism where ‘retro’ no longer designates a particular kind of culture but instead has become the modus operandi of popular culture as such (what Simon Reynolds has named ‘retromania’).

Aesthetic experimentation is obviously crucial for overcoming this dead-end, but what is equally important is to rebuild the cultural ecologies of post-war popular modernism but geared towards today’s digital environment. Because one of the reasons why analogue popular modernism enjoyed such prominence over such a great length of time was because there were enough social channels and structures to support it: free art-schools, squatting and cheap housing, publishing networks, pirate radio, and so on. So how to revitalise this vibrant sociocultural infrastructure at the digital present – when most of these previous cultural resources have been eliminated by capitalist realism – is another important way to challenge the reality imposed by late capitalism and prompt us to demand others instead.