“Ifthe engIne ever StopS, We’d All dIe”7is desired, the fact that it is obviously not desirable is perversely taken as theproof that necrocapitalist misery is necessary for social order and stability. As Mark Fisher writes:If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine, and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that it is to say, capitalism’s ostensible “realism” turns out to be nothing of the sort.Necrocapitalist practices are thus reinforced on the level of ideology by a wonderful and terrible double-bind of perpetual threat: things must be this necrocapitalist because, if they were not, our society would be even more necropolitical and wretched than it is now. That is: necrocapitalism’s own horrors are perpetually taken as proof of necrocapitalism’s necessity, even its own self-prophlyactic. We ingest the poison to keep ourselves from becoming even sicker. Elsewhere in Capitalist Realism Fisher extends this point by way of Badiou:Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism. “We live in a contradiction,” Badiou has observed:a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian—where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone—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 all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in the condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill
Gerry Canavan8Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.The realism here is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion (5).In this way Fisher suggests that moral critiques of capitalism thus have the opposite effect to what one might expect: they reinforce, rather than undermine, the appeal of hurting others to perpetuate the social order. Rather, he suggests, we must focus on pragmatic critiques of capitalism that show its supposed “realism” to be self-refuting, as these are the only sorts of critique that might break the spell.NecrofuturismThe reading of Snowpiercer that follows attempts just such a demonstration. In particular, I propose a new category called necrofuturism to denote those capitalist-realist anticipations of the coming decades that anticipate the future as a devastated world of death, and yet simultaneously insist that this world of death is the only possible future. Necrofuturism arises from the juncture of two superficiallycontradictory propositions:(1) CAPITALISM WORKS. As Žižek writes of capitalistideology’s self-understanding:“capitalism itself is presented in technical terms, not even as a science but simply as something that works: it needs no ideological justification, because its success itself is its sufficient justification ... Capitalism is a system which has no philosophical pretensions, which is not in search of happiness. The only thing it says is: ‘Well, this functions.’ And if people want to live better, it is preferable to use this mechanism, because it functions. The only criterion is efficiency” (25).But also, and at the same time:(2) CAPITALISM DOES NOT WORK. Bogged down by its own self-destructive tendencies, capitalism is producing a broken future.
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