Make Art God (Part One)
An alternative reading of The Odyssey: A story about art under capitalism and the counterculture in disguise — read through and against Mark Fisher, Adorno and Horkheimer
Part One: The Telemachy
“Tell the world: destroy religion but make art god” – Atta Boy, Can’t Hardly
I. Celebration and Mourning
The late Mark Fisher has become something like “the cool philosopher” of the 21st century1, shorthand for signalling an anticapitalism that is wrapped together with pretentious taste. He thinks intuitively. What is the revolution without good art? Why doesn’t art feel revolutionary anymore? Is it because the revolution died? Fisher wraps these ideas neatly into his articulations of capitalist realism and hauntology and they rang true for a generation that seemed to lack a real counterculture, which to Fisher, was the time of Joy Division and Kubrick films, a time when the avant-garde could be commercially successful and capitalism seemed contingent.
It's no longer the case. Capitalist realism is Fisher's name for "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it" (Capitalist Realism p. 2). It is everything Fredric Jameson said of postmodernity, the pastiche, the revivalism, the imitation of dead styles in the imaginary museum, except it has been made permanent and chronic. Because unlike postmodernity, "capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism2," Fisher writes. "On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living” (Capitalist Realism p. 8).
The culture industry metabolizes counterculture and feeds it back to us as aesthetic only, leaving us stuck, haunted even, by the promise of futures that never came. Fisher identifies the sound of this despondency, “the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened” in the objectless rage of Cobain and Nirvana.
Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realising it is a cliché. The impasse that paralysed Cobain is precisely the one that Fredric Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in 'a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles in the imaginary museum.’ (Capitalist Realism p. 9)
And imitate we do. Our sonic capacity in the 2020s seems confined to digital pastiche of the genres that came before – we retreat into the distorted fuzz of analog, the familiarity of lo-fi bedroom pop, the cosplay of whatever new indie band or rapper is winning the algorithm, and the dopamine hit of pop sped up, distilled, and blended into hyperpop. The spirit of indie, which surrounded groups like Joy Division in a flaming aura, has been replaced with the genre of "indie," a still decal that does not burn or flicker, mass-printed onto a thousand shirts so we can all signal our alternative-ness. This cultural exhaustion, a feeling that we are haunted by what was lost, is what Fisher, borrowing from Derrida, calls hauntology, and what I was thinking about as I watched Nolan's The Odyssey.
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A Nolan film is one of those few cultural focal points that is both mass market and auteurial, something like this generation’s Kubrick film. But whereas Kubrick was making films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), an innovative riff off The Odyssey’s structure that looked ahead into the future and identified the limitless potential of humanity ahead, Nolan’s The Odyssey is a faithful adaptation of the original poem that locates that barbarism in civilization which never left.
The opening scene is given to Travis Scott as the blind bard, singing of the Ithakans failed return home following their victory at the Trojan War. He sings a song about the confused exhaustion that came to the Akhaians after their triumph. We are met with surreal scenes of soldiers on sandy coasts meandering about, tired and aimless, with remnants of the wooden Trojan horse strewn around. Soldiers after war are veterans, and veterans who cannot return home get no glory, it’s a specific kind of objectless pain visible in Sinon’s, played by Elliot Page’s, contorted expressions.
The blind bard’s song echoes another from the actor who plays him, Travis Scott’s 2017 psychedelic trap anthem Butterfly Effect. “For this life I cannot change”, inflected by a hazy reverb, as he goes into the luxurious excesses of a lifestyle that are all an irreversible chain reaction of his music career. Because despite the lyrics that are triumphant, the sound is mourning. Not of the life he has which is glamorous and extravagant, of course not, but a mourning of what was lost to fame and success, a feeling that he can’t return home, surreal and hypnotic like his sound. His life out of his control, an irreversible butterfly effect.
Nolan chose Travis Scott to draw a connection between the ancient oral storytelling that preceded the Homeric epic and the way hip-hop is passed down. But in the same way hip-hop has been metabolized and frozen by its commodification, forced to mourn its own death in perpetuity, the bard is stuck singing the same songs of a future that was promised after victory, the future that never returned home. In this way, Travis’s xanned-out trap was the only response left available, no other choice but to embrace his own commodification and make it his life that he cannot change, celebration and mourning wrapped all into one, celebration that is actually mourning.
II. From Inception to The Odyssey
The Odyssey (2026) comes sixteen years after Inception (2010), another Nolan film about a father trying to get home. But 2010 was a very different time. I was eight years old and sufficiently indoctrinated into the ideology of Western liberal democracy. We were hunting down Soviets in Call of Duty, my parents were replacing their BlackBerries for smartphones, the radio played Katy Perry’s hit summer single California Gurls, and social media’s global chatroom made it feel like everyone was doing the same. This was the triumph of modernity, the end of history3. The spoils of Western liberal democracy’s complete totalization fell to me and I accepted them greedily. This was also the year that Nolan’s Inception came out, and while I didn’t see the movie until later, it tracked perfectly with the times.
Inception is a shiny machine of a movie, elegant mechanical parts that click together in a clean logic. It follows Dom Cobb, a specialist in industrial espionage who is able to enter one’s unconscious and manipulate it, an ‘extractor’. He and his team are hired by uber-wealthy financier Saito to infiltrate the dreamscape of some wealthy target and implant an idea. Cobb is a fugitive of the law, falsely implicated for the murder of his wife, of which he is not entirely blameless either, and is unable to return to his children. Executing this mission is his path to erasing his criminal record and reuniting with his family.
But Inception is not a movie about return, it is about going in deeper. In his essay The Lost Unconscious, Fisher reads Nolan’s Inception as a metaphor for capitalism’s totalization of the psyche, locating a particular kind of hauntology in the film. The dreamscape, which has traditionally been depicted as surreal and blurry, difficult to traverse, is instead visualized as sterile and structured, completely navigable, used as the backdrop for action scenes the same way the streets of Shanghai would be used for a Fast and Furious film. Inception could be thought of as a depiction of the tendrils of capital seeping into our mind, totalizing our unconscious, swinging through it like a jungle gym. The celebratory tone reaches down into and stems from its intricate technical production: the cafe explosion scene, slow-motion cameras combined with high-pressure air cannons and a bit of post-production CGI that captures the fine-details of debris mid-air during an explosion, the ambiguity of a dream removed and turned into comprehensible spectacle, so finely detailed and granular. The technical achievement is commensurate with the mystery of dream and thus we allow one to replace the other – and this replacement is itself a kind of mourning, the dreamscape’s opacity exchanged for a dream machine’s illumination.
The mourning shows up in the plot through Mal, Cobb’s wife who committed suicide believing she was still dreaming, a tragic casualty of modernity. She survives only as a projection of Cobb’s guilt, haunting his missions and attempting to sabotage them. She is the foil to Cobb’s clean technical execution, erupting at the wrong moments, in precarious places, dragging the team down into Limbo, the emotional register of grief intruding on the celebration of corporate espionage. As Fisher says, Mal is the ghost of his past disrupting the present, the trauma Cobb (and late-capitalist society) must keep at bay to execute the mission at hand, to continue the forward march of progress.
But something changed between 2010 and 2026.
The Odyssey begins twenty years after celebration, after the Trojan war. In the first scene, Penelope in her grief insists that the bard stop his songs of the past, she’s sick and tired of them. When the movie arrives at Odysseus4, played by Matt Damon, he is stuck on Calypso’s island, a psychic dreamscape of sandy plains, airy clothing, dizzying sun, and a ceaseless wind – a return to the surreal dream landscape.
And in the scenes that unfold next, the scenes of Odysseus recounting his adventures, gradually regaining his memory, we see the transition from a man reveling in his victories in Troy to a man that is broken because of those victories. Every step he made towards home, away from the war, the cyclops, the laestrygonians, the Scylla, he sheds more of his crew, more of his ego, more of the warrior myth, the constant back and forth of the timeline blurring the line between Odysseus the hero and Odysseus the man. When he finally sails past the sirens whose song is his own war sung back to him, the song that asks whether he wants to go home in the first place, he is tied to the mast wailing in agony for that glory he sheds. Celebration and mourning wrapped up together, but the mourning is much louder this time.
Like Cobb, Odysseus is also haunted by a projection of his guilt manifest in the goddess Athena. But unlike Mal, the mourning that actively sabotages, Athena is a north star for Odysseus, providing guidance and clarity. Ultimately, through fate and circumstance, he is the sole member of his crew that makes it back. He plots an insurrection on the suitors and slays them dutifully. And when he is finally reunited with Penelope he discloses the movie’s message outright: what was the Trojan war even for?
These two Nolan films, sixteen years apart, exhibit how much has changed. Whereas Inception was an original screenplay, a celebration of the triumph of modernity, The Odyssey is a retreat back to the source material, a dreamlike fantastical film that is about return, a rejection of modernity. Certainly the films represent Nolan’s own growth as a director, and perhaps as a father. But these films also represent the spirit of their times. In this sense, The Odyssey may have been a curiosity to Fisher, a hauntology where the mourning is louder than the celebration, a blockbuster success that also carries in it an opposition.
III. The End of History Is Only The Beginning
That gloomy island of Ithaka is a place not unlike where we are today.
In both the film and poem, we are dropped into the tune of the bard’s hauntological songs, to scenes of a house infested with suitors that feast and folly on Odysseus’ livestock and drink. There is a sense that something is terribly wrong. Telemachus, the son who never knew his father, and Penelope, the wife who has been kept twenty years waiting, can only watch in horror as their house is taken over, what little hope they held of Odysseus’ great return withering away. The suitors represent a blasphemous abuse of Zeus’ law, xenia, the kindness one must always show a guest should they be a god, and could be said to represent the potential of barbarism within civilization, a theme both Homer and Nolan circle.
Fisher says that we are “haunted not by the apparition of the spectre of communism, but by its disappearance” (Ghosts of My Life p. 19). In the same way, Ithaka is haunted not by the ghost of Odysseus appearing, but gradually disappearing, and Ithaka is left paralyzed, listening to songs about the future that never came, stuck dealing with the parasitic suitors, something like our own vapid consumerism and depressive hedonia5.
Telemachus tries to protest the suitors’ behavior, the disarray they have thrown the house into, maintaining that his father is coming back. But they tell him to get real, to accept his father’s death and find his mother a worthy suitor. Critique of capitalism is often met with a similar kind of pragmatic bluntness: “To ‘get real’ is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you’re either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers” (Capitalist Realism p. 11).
And that leaves us where we are now, the end of history, a place not too dissimilar from Ithaka. All the problems that were at one point soon-to-be solved have been revealed to be permanent conditions. “Poverty, famine, and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope these forms of suffering could be eliminated are easily painted as naive utopianism” (Capitalist Realism p. 16).
We are like Telemachus, the child left behind, the next generation, perpetually waiting for Odysseus’ great homecoming, the revolution that never came. Should we give up and resign to the suitors who tell us Odysseus is dead, who tell us our protest is LARP of something long gone, resign ourselves to depressive hedonia? We are like Penelope. The way we spin the loom by day and unspin it by night, our art and politics forever reconfiguring itself, all in an attempt to delay the inevitable, our great trick on its last legs, our hope running thin. We tell the suitors we will be ready once we finish spinning our loom, and we extend this time by unravelling it at night, but we can only keep our zeal about us for so long.
We are like Ithaka. News arrived to us one day that the Trojan war had been won and that glory was to arrive shortly with the return of Odysseus. We waited and waited, one year turned into ten, and that promise never arrived. Now our home is in disarray, and instead of delivering on its promise, modernity has given way to a latent barbarism, the suitors applying Zeus’ law with a lack of faith, a reflection of our own godlessness. We are faced with an ever-approaching dystopian situation that Penelope will have to take one of these suitors’ hands in marriage, resign her love and “get real”, a resignation to the stern reminder of capitalist realism, that there is no alternative, no revolution on its way. The suitors tell us that we have no other choice, that Odysseus is dead. But Odysseus continues to haunt us like the revolution that is neither alive nor dead, only not yet, and increasingly never.
It is into this paralyzing state of affairs that the grey-eyed goddess Athena comes down from Olympus in Book I. Disguised as Mentes, she does not confirm to Telemachus if his father is dead or not. She issues the original call to action of the hero’s journey: go to Pylos, go to Sparta, ask for news of Odysseus. She closes the instruction with the line that ends the waiting: “You should not go on clinging to your childhood” (Od. 1.296–297). Telemachus heeds this call and leaves Ithaka, and seemingly by fate this is when Odysseus wakes up from his psychic slumber on Calypso’s island.
Indeed, Ithaka may be like where we are now at the end of history, but it is also where Homer’s great epic starts.
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Fisher states in the final paragraph of Capitalist Realism that “the long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity.” He speaks of a collective potential that can shine brightly in a dark night, “we must convert widespread mental problems,” affections that are induced by capitalism’s alienating power, “into effective antagonisms. Affective disorders are forms of captured discontent; this disaffection can and must be channeled outwards, directed towards its real cause, Capital” (Capitalist Realism p. 80). There is a transcendence in this articulation, that we must expand the limits of our imagination, channel our collective dissatisfaction into something that can dismantle the powers that be.
Yet Fisher never sounds completely at ease in this transcendent exit. Indeed, if Fisher is accused of being pessimistic, or perhaps nostalgic for his particular formation of counterculture, it is also true that the transcendent exit Fisher describes in the final line of Capitalist Realism, “from a situation where nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again” feels like obligatory leftist optimism, a discordant happy note at the end of a somber requiem.
And still, there is a potent optimism embedded in his writings that I am drawn to, and I intend to draw all the way out. I recognize it most when he writes about popular modernism. About Joy Division: “when I first heard them, aged 14, it was like that moment in John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness when Sutter Cane forces John Trent to read the novel, the hyper-fiction, in which he is already immersed: my whole future life intensely compacted into those sound images” (Ghosts of My Life p. 52). Popular modernism represented something to Fisher that should have unfolded but never did. He wants it to come back, and in this sense he is advocating for the return of counterculture, distinct from the return to counterculture, which is the nostalgia he gets accused of. Fisher is specific that it is material conditions not generational geniuses that made popular modernism possible: art schools that admitted working-class kids, a dole that functioned as unofficial arts funding, public broadcasting that put the avant-garde on the evening airwaves (Ghosts of My Life pp. 8–9, 21–24). Popular modernism was a brief period when the means of producing the avant-garde were held nearly in common. This is what distinguishes it from transcendent romanticism, it is in fact an immanent exit6.
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Indeed if we look back to The Odyssey, the end of history is similarly overcome through an immanent exit. All of Odysseus’ great feats at Troy and at sea have already occurred, his transcendence is pushed into prehistory. The story of The Odyssey, a story of a homecoming, a restoration of the home from barbarism, a shaking Ithaka out of stuckness, begins with Odysseus rejecting Calypso’s transcendent offer of immortality.
But that immanence Fisher reaches for, the return of that culture that counters the hegemonic force of democratic liberalism while still being mass market and influential, has been closed off by capitalist realism, his own conclusion. This is the root of his pessimism, because where he feels the truest, where he writes about Joy Division and popular modernism, is not where he can take his project. He must reach for the transcendent reality beyond capitalism realism, beyond the scope of our imagination, because he is operating from the standpoint that the counterculture has become historically unavailable, that it died, and that it died twice.
According to Fisher, it was under postmodernity that the counterculture was incorporated into the system, rock n roll’s commoditization, the first death. What distinguishes our moment is no longer just incorporation, the belated commodification of subversive material, but what Fisher calls precorporation: “the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture” (Capitalist Realism p. 9). He hears the transition in the passing of the torch from rock to rap: rock’s death with Cobain confirmed the “defeat and incorporation of rock’s utopian and promethean ambitions,” while hip hop’s global success “presupposed just the kind of precorporation by capital,” any “naïve hope that youth culture could change anything” replaced by “the hard-headed embracing of a brutally reductive version of ‘reality’” (Capitalist Realism pp. 9–10), a second and terminal death.
Gangster rap7 neither merely reflects pre-existing social conditions, as many of its advocates claim, nor does it simply cause those conditions, as its critics argue — rather the circuit whereby hip hop and the late capitalist social field feed into each other is one of the means by which capitalist realism transforms itself into a kind of anti-mythical myth. (Capitalist Realism p. 11)
In other words, hip-hop, and all the sound that came after it, was formed in the incubation tank of capitalist realism, a time when neoliberalism had totalized the horizon of what’s possible. Hip-hop’s own ‘get real’ ‘kill or be killed’ attitude is taken as evidence of this. Any disputes against this claim, and I have many8, are beside the point because it’s not an issue with hip-hop but the conditions under which hip-hop was formed. And to an extent his observations carry weight. Indeed, the mass-market has been dominated by a type of rap, trap, and pop that feel like they arrived ready for commoditization. We could even update Fisher’s grim diagnosis of street rap to today’s hyperpop, a contemporary avant-garde9. Despite the experimental sound, it revels in its own commodification, doing something between reflecting the current digitally fractured landscape and causing those conditions. It feeds into the “late capitalist social field” as the logic of accelerationism, produced by conditions shaped by accelerationism and thus reifying it. In sum, Fisher’s points are well taken, but I cannot help but feel they hide the exit.
IV. Odysseus Was Never Dead
Odysseus was never dead. Ithaka does not stay stuck. The stuckness that hangs over the film and poem is banged against by every scene, Nolan’s rapid fast-paced editing, Homer’s chronological scattering, until it is finally dislodged by Odysseus when he arrives home and slays the suitors. Despite Ithaka being none the wiser of Odysseus’ existence, it is only when Telemachus leaves Ithaka does Odysseus start coming home.
Perhaps the counterculture was never dead either. Nearly down to the word, Fisher’s description of Joy Division reminds me of my own experience with Travis Scott’s psychedelic trap music. I first heard Butterfly Effect at age 15, my friend’s older brother showed it to me, and we blasted it the entire summer of 2017. Just like Fisher says of Joy Division, it would not be a stretch to call Travis Scott, an “unwitting necromancer who had stumbled on a formula for channeling voices, apprentices without a sorcerer. We know all the words as if we wrote them ourselves, we followed stray hints in the lyrics out to all sorts of dark chambers, and listening to the albums now is like putting on a comfortable and familiar set of clothes… But who is this ‘we’? Well, it might have been the last ‘we’ that a whole generation of not-quite-men could feel a part of. There was an odd universality available to Joy Division’s devotees (provided you were male of course).” (Ghosts of My Life p. 52) It may be strange to say Travis Scott was countercultural, but he channeled the spirit of a generation who only knew capitalism, hustle culture, “getting our bag”, into a hedonistic chant that bared the debauchery of capitalism back in its face. It is a malicious compliance with our permanent transformation into passive consumers so much so that even our creative production is just a reflection of our hedonistic consumption, and there is something transgressive there.
To read counterculture in The Odyssey turns it into something that is fated to return when we look for it, never having really left us. It must stay illegible, disguised on the island as Odysseus is for half of the original poem, in order to prevent its own incorporation. As it relates to hip-hop, what Fisher identifies as hip-hop’s “hard-headed embracing of a brutally reductive version of ‘reality’” that made it easily absorbed by capitalism, precorporated, is precisely the mechanism, the cunning illegibility, by which the counterculture prevents being incorporated. The force of counterculture is then not merely in its oppositional content or personal affection but a discrepancy internal to its form that frustrates its complete identification with the logic administering it10.
“The naive hope that youth culture could change anything” which signalled something real in rock, got packaged into a commodity and sold back to us, an empty signifier. Hip-hop, which by its original form in MCing, DJing, breaking, and graffiti, rejected that inauthenticity, and really possessed its countercultural power in its undergroundness. This is the nature of hip-hop present from its roots, which has always preferred illegibility, graffiti was always done under the cover of night. Of course, hip-hop was not immune to commoditization, incorporation as Fisher calls it, neither was rock. But even then, just like the incorporated work of Joy Division or Nirvana, the countercultural charge never leaves. Jay-Z literally told you “he’s Che Guevara with the bling on,” and while I’m not saying Jay-Z was a comrade, there was a feeling in his music that resonated, that the revolution need not be broke, an escalation of the counterculture that does so in disguise11. Travis Scott’s malicious compliance engaged in a similar kind of authenticity that resonated, a much different register albeit, a similar kind of disguised counterculture.
Of course, Fisher says this is exactly the pitfall of capitalist realism, in its totalization it forces the counterculture to retreat into a commodity form that plays nice with the system. This is precorporation in action. But I locate Jay-Z and Travis Scott, two artists who have more than capitulated to the system, to show that a sound can arrive with a destabilizing force while also embracing its commodity form. Is there a concern that the disguise becomes permanent, and thus lacking a countercultural force? Absolutely, rock did not arrive any less incorporated than hip-hop, but its countercultural punch became hollow with its gradual commoditization, and thus had to be left behind. Of course, Jay-Z and Travis Scott have also long since been rendered hollow, but their sounds were not dead on arrival the way Fisher describes. The location of counterculture is ever-shifting and moving through disguises, but it never dies.
The market legibility that Jay-Z and Travis Scott possess should then be understood as a condition of immanence, a belief in capitalist realism similar to Odysseus’ belief in his gods, which does not preclude negotiation within that mythology. Odysseus does not triumph over the fate assigned to him by Olympus, he negotiates through it, dances with it, and produces something beautiful in that discrepancy between himself and mythology. He neither waxes his ears nor jumps into the water towards the Sirens, he is instead suspended between divine myth and reason, producing something beautiful and tragic as he is tied to the mast sailing towards home. The question of the immanent exit is rather artistic, then. Under the mythology of capitalist realism, art must dance with the commodity form it occurs as, disguising its latent countercultural force. The story of Odysseus’ own disguises maps on to this well, if at any point he revealed too early it could have cost him his life, the discrepancy commoditized before it can slay the suitors, but if revealed at the right moment, it is that striking note of the bow that silences everyone and precedes revolution.
Is this permission for passivity? To wait for the arrival of Odysseus to come save us? Fisher, borrowing the concept of interpassivity, the opposite of interactivity, describes how a film like Wall-E “performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity” (Capitalist Realism p. 12). The commodity does not suppress our dissent but rather expresses it on our behalf, so that nothing further is required of us. On this reading, the countercultural charge I hear in Travis Scott is not resistance surviving inside the commodity, it is the commodity’s finest feature.
But the poem depicts this interpassivity in the suitors. They hear the bard’s songs every night, consume it as dinner entertainment while the house rots underneath them, mourning performed so thoroughly on their behalf that none of it ever obligates them, and in the same breath they insist Odysseus is dead.
“Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost. They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back” (Derrida, quoted in Ghosts of My Life, p. 19)
The suitors may applaud the bard every night, much like we applaud the anticapitalist film, but they are secretly glad because they do not really believe Odysseus is coming back. When rumors spread that Odysseus is indeed back on the island but in disguise, they cry nonsense and continue to act in their godlessness. It’s those true believers who recognize, Argos the hunting dog, Eumaeus the swineherd, Eurycleia the old nurse, Telemachus and Penelope. They do not listen to the bard's songs as entertainment but as affective truth and they all have a part to play on the day of retribution. In the poem, recognition is not the spectator’s pleasure, but rather turns them into a coconspirator. That is the recognition I am after, sure it is a belief that counterculture is alive, which alone costs nothing, but it is also a ticking feeling in me that I need to act, the same feeling that drove Telemachus off his gloomy island in search of his father.
But adjudicating whether the counterculture is alive or dead will only leave us stuck on the island, haunted by the future that never came. My point is that we must believe regardless. We must be Telemachus and go looking for counterculture whether we know it’s alive or dead. We must be Penelope and unwind our loom by night for as long as we can. We must be Argos, Eumaeus, Eurycleia, and love art even if it’s in disguise. And if the The Odyssey is indeed a story about the coming of counterculture, fated to return only when we set out to look for it, potentially here right now, disguised in a beggar’s rags, or as a shiny commodity, testing who is loyal for the day of retribution, if that idea seems oddly religious, then to that I’d say, “tell the world: destroy religion, but make art god.” (Atta Boy, Can’t Hardly)
What a tease. Is this polemic supposed to pass for argument? You barely explain what “make art god” means — and what little you do say sounds suspiciously like the transcendent exit you accuse Fisher of settling for. Your claim that counterculture is alive but in disguise is unfalsifiable by design, every dead scene is evidence of a better disguise? This is exactly the theology Fisher warned against.
Incisive! Dear reader, Part One was written from an intuition that felt true, and defended no further than my intuition could carry it. After all, Part One was only the Telemachy. There is a harder articulation of the problem, the death of art under capitalism, and a stronger articulation of my immanent exit, making art god, that I have saved for Part Two. It picks up on the predecessor to Fisher’s ideas, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which argues that this stuckness is not a symptom of post-70s capitalism but the destiny of enlightenment itself, a claim they built out of the same poem I find my counterclaim through.
Part Two meets them there, in close readings of The Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Odyssey. Everywhere they read the cunning homo economicus, I read the beautiful artist. It is nearly thrice the length of Part One and more theoretically engaged, which is why I chose to split them. And it addresses the question I myself am dying to answer: if counterculture survives in disguise, how do we tell the authentic from the counterfeit, how really does art survive under capitalist realism and still retain a countercultural force? Part One is about feeling and believing, and Part Two is about art and love.
I’ll publish Part Two next week, subscribe to stay updated.
Works Cited
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press, 2002.
Homer. The Odyssey of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Harper & Row, 1967.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.
Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, 2014.
Fisher, Mark. “The Lost Unconscious: Delusions and Dreams in Christopher Nolan’s Inception.”
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 1992.
Bluemink, Matt. “Anti-Hauntology.” 2026
Harsh, Philip Whaley. “Penelope and Odysseus in Odyssey XIX.” American Journal of Philology 71.1 (1950): 1–21.
Winkler, John J. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. Routledge, 1990
Murray, Gilbert. The Rise of the Greek Epic. Oxford University Press, 1911. — cited within DoE, p. 260 n. 7.
The spirit of modernism, not be confused with modernity, can be seen in its 20th century art. Hemingway’s meandering plots, Kahlo’s deconstructive paintings, the artistic rejection of traditional answers to life’s questions. Postmodernity was then a step beyond rejecting traditional answers, but rejecting all answers. Capitalist realism is Fisher’s articulation of an inescapable postmodernity.
In this essay I mostly engage with the “end of history” as a term that has extended beyond Fukuyama’s book of the same title which popularized the term in 1992. His idea of the end of history is more nuanced than how Fisher, and popular culture, evokes it, but it is ultimately the feeling that Western liberal democracy has established itself as the de facto and conclusive ideology
Much like the original poem, which spends Books I-IV with Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, the movie does not arrive at Odysseus until about thirty minutes in
Fisher’s twist on the term depressive anhedonia, the psychiatric term for a depressive condition marked by the inability to feel pleasure, that signals a depressive condition marked by the inability to do anything but seek pleasure, the endless dopamine-treadmill of late-stage capitalism
A transcendent exit requires an outside; an immanent exit admits none. I define these fully in Part Two.
Street rap/ hip-hop, as I’d prefer to call it, “gangster rap” was a media label applied after the fact
Fisher clearly wasn’t listening to enough The Roots
The avant-garde of music is impossible to pinpoint to one category like hyperpop. It’s so splintered, and by the time a genre-label arrives, the sound may have already lost its experimental edge. I use hyperpop as a small and not representative example because it’s what many arguing against Fisher use. See Anti-Hauntology by Matt Bluemink (2026)
This is paraphrased from p103 of Dialectic of Enlightenment with regards to Adorno and Horkheimer’s description of “good art”. It will receive full engagement in Part Two.
I intentionally pick a very enterprising and capitalist artist to make the point, the artist who literally became a corporation, to show that counterculture can exist in a contradictory form.