In the 2009 era-defining book Capitalist Realism, the writer Mark Fisher defined ‘reflexive impotence’ as state beyond that of apathy and cynicism; a reflex of impotence to the state of the world, societal affairs – the very things changing and affecting our everyday lives. The belief that any possibility of changing anything has already been made impossible.
Fisher published Capitalist Realism in the dying days of a New Labour mode of governance that he laid the blame on for naturalising Margaret Thatcher’s claim that there was no alternative to capitalism (no alternative to a world where everything including our own identity is subject to market forces).
I first read Capitalist Realism in the summer of 2010, 2 months after the Conservative Party formed a coalition with the Lib Dems and 2 months before the total reversal of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s promise of abolishing University tuition fees, which in turn triggered the most angry protests by young British people in a generation – the very people Fisher suggested were most affected by the state of ‘reflexive impotence’.
What radicalised these young people, turning them left-ward was not necessarily an anger with capitalism per se, but that the prospective careers and futures they had been promised by this very system had to now be sacrificed at the alter of ‘austerity capitalism’. This knowledge, this awareness that the future that millennials had expected, was now being taken away, made them frantically look for alternatives.
As Fisher would continue to write before his death in 2017, the emergence of antagonistic forces to capitalist realism didn’t change the fact that everyday public, social and symbolic life was still capitalist realist in nature. However, these leftward desires of the 2010s that eventually found a figurehead in the-then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn briefly had an agency that was, at the very least, antagonistic to capitalist realism.
I always wonder what Mark Fisher would have thought about the 2020s. Dying so close to that reality-melting moment when Corbyn’s goverment very nearly beat the Conservatives in the 2017 General Election, Fisher had just previously pitched a theoretical antidote to capitalist realism, called ‘Acid Communism’, arguing that although the neoliberal order that had created the state of capitalist realism felt time-immemorial, that ‘all of this was temporary’.
More specifically, I wonder how the ‘reflexive impotence’ of 2000s compares to our current state in 2026…
I have struggled intermittently with mental health battles all way through my life. But since the 2nd Covid 19 lockdown I have been continually in a state of depression, both with and without medication.
One thing that I feel is a crucial ingredient to the state of ‘reflexive impotence’ is self-hate, or more specifically the lack of an innate conviction that your life is ‘worthy’ . Positive political action, the kind that makes you joyously want to participate in collective action, requires you to first and foremost believe you are worthy of the life you have.
Whilst cynics resign themselves to a state of life in which they don’t think very well of themselves at all, those like myself, self-aware of their own self-hatred, and their lack of political involvement, are tormented by this situation. The cynic has the ability to forget how little they feel themselves worthy of a better life/world – they are able to reframe this pain as pleasure.
I believe that self-hatred is silently rife amongst a demographic of British people who have lost any progressive cause to naturally align with since the destruction of unionism and worrk-place solidarity – leaving them only with affilitions, and relationships with institutions that routunely humilate them).
This situation is identical to everything else stated above, but specifically this is about the erasure of the idea of any kind of social relations that don’t revolve around anything but competition between individuals and the consequential and never-ending state of self-evaluating yourself.
We all remember the 2000s for the reality TV shows, shows chocked full of people who were ‘failures’ in some way or another, for their inability to succesfully constantly self-evaluate and compete, with their bodies, minds and spending power, against everyone else. The noughties most hated, ‘The Chav‘, became a subject who self-identified, consciouslly or not, with cultures and behaviours that were viewed as degenerate, and low-life. 2016’s Brexit was, as much as it was racist/imperialist, about rejoicing in the disgusting, degenerate, destructive (this time with rare political agency).
Yet today, reflexive impotence and self-hated have qualitively different expressions. The evisceration of the opportunities for another political agency in the 2010s have led to what I, at least personally, am experiencing as ‘the dark night of the political soul’.
The term ‘doom scroll’ didn’t exist when Fisher first wrote about ‘reflexive impotence’ – it mightnot have been in use even when he passed away in 2017, in a time before long-form media was truly destroyed by video-shorts and Ai slop.
As an artist, who could, if I give myself credit, articulate the contemporary psycho-political landscape in a way that at least gave me a personal momentary sense of potency, I am deeply lost in a deluge of imagery of slaugther, hatred and pornification.
I am not certain about any of my thoughts anymore. I’m not even certain of my soul.
I recently took part in ‘beyond the scroll’ an event held at the exciting ArtBomb in Doncaster. These talks and performances came for everything that could be accounted for, and they were brilliant. I performed ‘Non-stop inertia: I’m too busy to meet you’ with my friend John Wright, fellow member of the largely historic artist collective ‘the Retro Bar at the End of the Universe’.
The performance went well, but I was haunted by a sense of deadness, of merely going through the emotions.
“This is something I do, this kind of thing? Right?”. Yet, what has vanished since the last time we did this performance in the 2010s is a sense of life that could be different.
The political and the personal are recklessley misunderstood by our focus on the binary between altruism/empathy Vs selfishness. There is no real seperation – even though our personal lives aren’t other peoples lives, when we lose sense of meaning in one, the sense of meaning is lost in the other.
I like many, have countless thought attempts to reach for an escape route that are continously foreclosed by images and accusations bubbling up from our state of omnicrises. Woke and anti-woke are already antiquated words in our era of Trump 2.0, yet these categorisation both became dominant in an age where accusation became the one remaining conceivable action for a population that could once more no longer see a way out.
Yet, as Fisher reminded us, ‘all of this is temporary’.
The dark night of the political soul may feel endless, but yet, it may end tomorrow….
I sure hope it does, because it is unbearable…for me…and for you…
John B Ledger 