A battle of the old guard vs imagination, here and now in my community

Capitalist realism came with its knives out

Hello,

A break in scheduled programming this week, because I need to tell you about a real-life battle for the very values I’ve been championing in this newsletter, now playing out in real time in my community.

Almost exactly a year ago, I moved to Devon, southwest England, and embarked on a life-changing course of study at Dartington College, with some of the most brilliant poets, thinkers, and storytellers in the world. I was already a writer; I’d been dabbling with the imaginal for a while. But my MA in Poetics of Imagination was a lightning bolt. It brought me into daily, lived contact with the deeper, truer, more beautiful imaginal realm I had begun to sense somewhere before and beyond the deadening of the modern everyday.

Last Thursday, I sat in a room full of around 60 students excited to set out on their own versions of this journey. The new cohort at my college. Many of them had moved here from across the world—from Australia, from India, from Argentina, from South Africa, from the US, from all over Europe and the UK. They had spent years saving for this, quit jobs, left their homes and families, rented houses—restructured their entire lives.

Then, at the tail end of their welcome week, less than four days before classes were due to start, they were called together and told that all courses had been postponed, indefinitely. That the MAs they had already moved here for—had uprooted their lives for—were not going to happen; not now, and with zero guarantee about ever.

This decision was made following a financial review conducted over the summer, the details of which I am not privy to—though earlier conversations with the administration have suggested that the MAs at this institution (which also operates as a fancy wedding venue, among other things) are financially viable. The decision was made by a board of trustees at whose head sits a man who has been involved with the college for just a few months. A board of trustees that sent no representatives to this meeting, forcing the gutted teachers to break news of this, their worst nightmare, to the students.

I would struggle to adequately express the energy in that room. The devastation, the disbelief, the rage. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t long before the BBC and ITV were on campus. [For some reason Substack won’t let me add hyperlinks above, so here are some links the old-fashioned way: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-66820639, https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2023-09-15/heartbreak-for-students-of-a-prestigious-devon-college-as-courses-postponed.]

As of this week, the administration seems to have backtracked somewhat: some classes are going ahead, though the enrolled students I know still have no idea whether they’ll be able to get degrees out of all this, and the teachers have been horribly mistreated. They’re doing what they can for the sake of the students, but nobody could commit to work for very long under such circumstances.

It’s the story we’re seeing around the world: institutions are crumbling, and individuals are drawing together to self-organise and offer mutual aid in the wake of their failure.

Everywhere we see this, it’s a war between, on one hand, the calcified minds and structures that still hold power in a death grip, who make their calculations based on a wildly incomplete set of data that doesn’t factor in life itself, and who falsely universalise a fatal set of self-serving values; and on the other, individuals and communities who are still in touch with the multiplicity and richness of possibilities that always persist in a living world, because multiplicity and richness are the basic qualities of life itself.

In this instance, the battle lines are particularly stark because the college is a school for arts and ecology; the courses facing the chop are on imagination, regenerative economics, and ecological design thinking. We’re literally watching entrenched neoliberal thinking strangle imagination and regeneration, in the name of a “pragmatism” that is in fact just a failure of vision. If one of the writers I work with wrote this into a novel, I’d tell them it was too on-the-nose.

In his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher wrote:

What counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business.

I’d love to know what Fisher would make of the world today, now that several centuries have passed since 2009. That’s something we can sadly never know: he died by suicide in 2017, a week before Trump’s inauguration. Good God, how the whirlwind has whipped up since then. The breakneck pace we’ve reached on this trajectory to societal collapse.

But though the old guard is proving merciless in its death throes; though 13 years of Tory rule have gutted the UK’s communities and services; though there is now no escaping climate catastrophe; though the collapse is already upon us; and though the forces of capitalist realism are quite literally working to murder imagination with their business ontology—though all of this is true, I can’t help but wonder if Fisher might be a little more hopeful than he was back in 2009.

Because the story playing out all around us now, in ways so obvious that I simply wouldn’t permit them in fiction, is that there is nothing natural or inevitable to the ideologies that have ruled Western societies for so long. And because this deadening system is neither natural nor inevitable; because the mode of realism it has claimed was always so deeply flawed and abstracted from the truth of this world—because, in other words, it was always a lie—now that it is cracking, there is an opportunity to see the deeper, truer, more beautiful world that was always there, before and beyond it. To see beyond capitalist realism to what it had been obscuring: the multiplicity and richness that is the truth of life.

If I’m honest, I always feel self-conscious and inadequate writing direct commentary about political or economic matters. I grew up surrounded by economists, so I know full well that the way I experience the world—through story and emotion and a hunger for transcendence—holds little value with the self-appointed pragmatists of our society. (No shade here to my dad and brother, who are far more imaginative than most economists I’ve met.)

But that version of pragmatism is itself just a story, and a much more recent and flimsy one than this: that our species quite literally and demonstrably survived and came to prosper on this Earth because of our capacity for story, emotion, and transcendence. Because of our imaginations. That is the whole point of humans.

Imagination has been under attack for centuries, maybe even millennia. But I sense a change in the air. An awakening memory of the deep, rich truth of life with its multiple possibilities. I sense that the capitalist realists sense this too, and that’s why they’re behaving so erratically.

This afternoon, I’ll meet the would-be new cohort to share some of what I learned last year. To try to take them back to the Paleolithic, to the origins of humanity—a time when humans carried in our very bodies a felt sense of meaningful cosmology. When human society seems to have been structured around imagination, meaning around the capacity to access expanded states of consciousness in which we could ascend to the imaginal realm. When we worshipped not spreadsheets or budgets or even cognition itself (that most meagre of forms of human intelligences), but rather the stories and images we brought back from the otherworld, which told us of a reality far larger and deeper than the material everyday, and told us, moreover, of our place in it.

Thanks for reading.

Love,

xx Ellie