INTRODUCTION CONTRIBUTORS ABOUT

Capitalist Realism

Callum Figgis

Cold. Grey. Efficient. Alexandra Peters’ Breakneck (2024) is a stark testament to the prevailing narrative of Capitalist Realism, coined by the late Mark Fisher.

A concept established in his seminal work, the titular capitalist realism is the concept that since the end of the Cold War, the economic system of capitalism is no less a law of absolute reality than something akin to the rotation of the Earth. In Fisher’s own words, since the end of history in 1991 and the fall of the USSR, ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’ In several distinct ways, Breakneck by Alexandra Peters is the apotheosis of this idea of inevitability.

The industrial pipes of Breakneck are a cold silver, running in straight lines from one end of the room to the other, punching through walls and curving down into the floor, implying a greater work of machinery hidden just beneath our feet. In that lens, we as the viewer are only seeing one tiny piece of the machine. Just one segment of three of the pipes that make up a vast skeletal machinery underpinning everything, presumably including the entire art exhibition in a meta-contextual sense.

The piece is intentionally grey, to make a statement about the so-called ‘realism’ of capitalism and corporatism itself. It is a frequent theme in art that grey colour tones or otherwise a lack of colour reflects the idea of stagnant realism—that nothing is going to change, and this is all reality will ever be. That the grey pipes that make up the machinery of corporate capitalism will always exist.

The existence of colour itself insinuates that there is more to the society in which we live than just two choices: black or white. The greyness of Breakneck harkens back to the famous campaign slogan of Margaret Thatcher: ‘There is no Alternative’, which is a quote that Mark Fisher himself adapted into the title of his book.

There is also the fact that greyness reflects a lack of individualism. It reflects a cold, sterile environment. It is bleak and stagnant—unchanging and slow. Living within such a status quo, it may even appear impossible for any of it to change.

The 1993 novel The Giver by Lois Lowry depicts a dystopian community filled with people genetically modified to have monochrome colour blindness. They are incapable of perceiving shades outside black, white, and variations of grey, removing the capability to understand the more subtle details of their world, and rendering them incapable of thinking outside the box or exploring their own creativity, for which they have none. Due to this inability, they cannot comprehend a world outside of the one they already inhabit.

It is only when the main protagonist is ‘given’ the ability to perceive colours by the titular character—one colour at a time—that he can question the black and white community in which he lives. He begins to perceive the world in the full visual spectrum, and starts questioning why the society he calls home is the way it is. Each new colour that he can see builds upon this growing cognitive dissonance until eventually he feels compelled to act against the Community in ways that make him persecuted by its authorities.

The Giver shows that perceiving colour, after a lifetime of living in a society of black and white, causes one to be liberated from the dystopian superstructure. On the reverse side, the story shows us that by distilling reality down to just two shades, black and white, one may be psychologically manipulated to draw an uncomplicated view of objective reality.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in her time attempting to underdo the preceding Labour policies of public ownership with bold new measures of mass privatisation, coined the now infamous phrase of ‘There is no alternative’. The Tory had insisted that there is either this, meaning neoliberal capitalism and corporate domination, or there is everything else which has ‘obviously’ failed.

In a similar stroke of horrifying, unimpeachable certainty, Breakneck is hinted to be far vaster than all the other art pieces with which it shares space. The bulk of the structure is implied to be running underneath the floorboards, and between the walls, and through the ceiling. Perhaps, across the entire city of Melbourne. The uncertainty of how much of it that cannot be seen is something that makes it seem—paradoxically—even more tangible.

By seeing capitalism in the open, through this lens, we can easily critique it—perhaps even undermine it. Although, as Mark Fisher’s work has suggested, what makes capitalism so seemingly invincible is how invisible it seems. To him, capitalism seems like the unimpeachable base reality upon which everything else is built. The foundation of metaphysics itself. Only when we see the pipes of the system out in the open do we realise that the system exists at all.

George Orwell’s seminal masterpiece Nineteen-Eighty-Four captures this pivotal recognition of a system. In Orwell’s story, Oceania is a global dictatorship that is presented to be grey, colourless, and stagnant. This life of greyness goes on seemingly without any hint of development or ongoing shifts to the status quo. The main character, Winston, along with millions of others, have been psychologically manipulated by the state into believing that nothing will ever truly change.

Big Brother, the story's principal antagonist, is depicted as all-knowing and all-powerful. But most importantly, omnipresent. Offices, hallways and even personal bedrooms are punctuated by telescreens decorated by the dictator’s terrible gaze. There is no escaping his sight or presence. By this same token, the pipes of Breakneck are implied to be everywhere, permeating all of society with their grey, bleak network that keeps pumping through them the continuation of the status quo. As inevitable as the ground beneath our very feet.

The principle and most obvious difference between Breakneck and Nineteen-Eighty-Four is that Breakneck is implied to be even stronger than Big Brother could ever dream to be. This is because its strength derives not from it being visible in all places, but rather almost utterly invisible. This is so that its existence is accepted more as a fact of reality than anything standing out, obvious and in your face. Breakneck is more horrifying than Big Brother could ever be because most people do not even know that it exists. And after all, you cannot fight and dismantle something that you cannot even see. It is the Jaws Effect; the concept that seeing the monster makes it less scary because it is far more tangible. The human fear of the unknown by contrast makes the invisible more invincible and thus seemingly undefeatable.

While most of Breakneck is implied to be invisible, a crucial distinction is that it still obviously reveals itself at all. Thus, it serves as an instrument by which capitalism can remove its seemingly impenetrable facade. And it is so stark because it is explicitly different to the vast variety of random images and seemingly unrelated concepts that we see every day. It is the purest distillation of capitalism, exposing itself for what it truly, truly is.

After the true reality of the universe exposes itself, the viewer is incapable of unseeing it. The grey pipes of corporate capitalism cannot be unseen, only remembered that they exist during every interaction with everything else. This is very similar to when an individual may be exposed to the hard details of socialist, Marxist and communist ideologies, thus building political and class consciousness. After being inducted into such a worldview, it becomes increasingly difficult and eventually impossible to see the world through any lens that is not the Marxist one; constantly analysing every aspect of the world through the lens of class relations, class interests; as well as the relationship between forever wars and corporate interests, among many other social ills.

In the movie They Live, the main character Nada comes into possession of a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the world as it truly is; one secretly ruled by shape-shifting aliens (the upper class) who have enslaved humanity with mindless consumer capitalism. In a fit of disillusionment and radical realisation of the true nature of the world around him, Nada unleashes his wrath upon the aliens with guns and fury.

Interestingly, the world that Nada sees through the sunglasses is black and white, reminiscent of the previously explored ideas around the meaning of colour in a cold, unchanging society. Nada’s sunglasses essentially reveal his world for what it is; one of stagnancy and the perpetual continuation of the drab status quo, in contrast to how it might appear on the illusory surface—one of constant, dynamic and exciting change.

The greyness of Breakneck harkens back strongly to the greyness of the world seen through Nada’s sunglasses, or through the ‘lens’ (literally in the film’s case) of Marxist philosophy. It reveals the world ever so briefly for what it truly is and emphasises the fact that even seeing a tiny bit will blow wide open just how fake everything else is.

The problem, of course, is that while ideologies like Marxism help expose the truth of the world, putting on those sunglasses—seeing the world through that ‘lens’—is not nearly enough to enact widespread change to the system. For real change to occur, there must be widespread realisation and disillusionment with the status quo. So much so that revolution, mass mobilisation and thus social change becomes not just a vague possibility, but an absolute inevitability.

By making connections and comparisons to other works exploring the grey status quo of oppressive societies, we can sketch out four key aspects that make Breakneck so effective in its social message. Four aspects that sometimes only exist in isolation in the other works mentioned. These four aspects are: Lack of colour, mundanity, omnipresence and invisibility. It is those last two aspects working in tandem with each other that are truly effective. If the pipes of Breakneck were completely invisible, there would hardly be any work to analyse. And if they were everywhere across the room in which they take place, they would be too obvious. It is the fact that they are visible in a small amount and are implied to cover so much more space, all throughout the ceiling, walls and floor, that the message of the artwork becomes truly resonant.

But, for as unbeatable as Breakneck appears to be, as for these pipes themselves… what are they made of, exactly? They are in fact made of leather and carpet. Overwhelmingly soft, tearable, and flammable. The only parts of the pipes that are metallic are the joints and ends, but most of them regardless are still incredibly yielding and vulnerable to damage. Perhaps this is what Peters is trying to tell us. The machine, while mostly invisible, efficient, cold, stark and omnipresent, is still soft. It can be destroyed, or undermined. One can only know for certain of the pipe’s vulnerabilities if they were to touch it, and feel how soft it is—for the structure to be exposed and observed fully. For the facade to be broken and exposed as truly illegitimate, even fraudulent. However, of course, that is against the rules of the exhibit itself.