The Worlds Map
“The map is the territory and nothing really matters”. In a world where reality has been replaced by ‘representations’ everything has become a spectacle, everything has become meaningless. Tragedy feels routine. This collapse of engagement didn’t occur in isolation. Thatcher's slogan ‘There is no alternative’ became a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy. Taking over our imagination, it became “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.
The normalisation of crisis has produced a cycle of dependency on emergency measures, without ever suggesting systemic change. The same neoliberals that sought to eradicate all non-police/military functions of the state turned to it to resuscitate capitalism after collapsing under the weight of itself in 2008. The banking crisis made us hyper aware of the failures of capitalism, however we remain stuck in a state where capitalism occupies all capacity of the thinkable. Anticapitalism is spread wide across the plane of capital, however through its commodification and absorption it merely reinforces the notion that there is no future outside this system.
“We live in a contradiction… where all existence… is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead they have decided to say that the rest is horrible… our democracy is not perfect, but it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, ect”. Capitalist realism has no offer of a better future, its default logic is anti-utopianism. Paradoxically the horrors seen within capitalism such as war, poverty & environmental degradation reinforce capitalist realism rather than challenge it. We have become convinced that these things are natural and inevitable, portraying any attempt to prevent these as ‘naive’ & ‘utopian’. We are so startled at the horrors of the world we accept the immensity of them as a natural fact. Engagement has been replaced with spectatorship, presenting a belief in the possibility of change as a terrifying danger. Will we end up watching our world collapse as we continue to be told the future has already come and its name is the present?
CMYK Screenprint
20 x 25cm
