The Unnameable Thing: Exhaustion, Sameness, and the Realism of How Capitalism Subsumes

 

We inhabit a historical moment defined not by progress, but by a "pervasive atmosphere" that blogger and writer Mark Fisher famously termed Capitalist Realism in his 2009 book of the same name. It is the widespread realization that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. This is the "suffocating" cultural logic of our time—a state where we are no longer able to imagine a future that is not even a slightly different version of the present.

 

This internal colonization is what philosopher, theorist, and Catholic theologian Byung-Chul Han identifies as the violence of positivity. Unlike the "disciplinary society" of the past, which functioned through "No" and "Shalt Not," the modern "achievement society" functions through the imperative of "Yes." We are no longer subjects of a sovereign power, but "entrepreneurs of the self," driven to achieve until we reach a state of total neural exhaustion.

 

In this landscape, capitalism acts according to what philosopher Gilles Deleuze and political activist and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari in their work Anti-Oedipus (1972) called the "unnameable Thing"—a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, much like the creature in John Carpenter’s movie The Thing (1982). It is capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything it touches. Even the most radical subversions are digested and returned to us as commodities.

 

We see this occur in what Deleuze & Guattari define as the "system of equivalence" which assigns a monetary value to every cultural object reducing all human interactions into abstract, quantitative exchanges. Whether it is religious iconography, pornography, or even Das Kapital itself, the system strips the object of its ritual power and rebrands it for the "consumer-spectator" trudging through the ruins. The Che Guevara T-shirt is the ultimate emblem of this metabolic process: a revolutionary ideal manufactured by industrial giants who never meant to foment change, sold to an individual who uses it to signal a "meaning" already lost to society in the undercurrents of mass production and profiteering.

 

Mark Fisher’s most haunting question in Capital Realism (2009)—"How can a culture persist without the new?"—echoes through our current state of "zombiesque repetition." If the young are no longer capable of producing novel surprises, we lose everything to hackneyed sameness. T.S. Eliot, in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), argued for a reciprocal relationship between the canonical and the new. The new defines itself against the established, and the established reconfigures itself in response.

 

However, under the weight of late capitalism, we face an exhaustion of the future that does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested or modified by fresh eyes. No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it. When we lose the ability to innovate, the past becomes a museum of dead styles—a "build-your-own-bowl" approach to history where we select pre-packaged aesthetics without any genuine connection to their origin.

 

This cultural stagnation finds its perfect literary portrayal in Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), a post-apocalyptic novel about a fungal infection called “Shine Fever” that turns victims into mindless, repetitive automatons. The "fevered" in her novel are the literal embodiment of Mark Fisher’s "consumer-spectator" and Byung-Chul Han’s "achievement-subject." They are reduced to a lifeless routine, repeating the motions of a world that has already ended.

 

The protagonist in Severance, Candace Chen, navigates a reality where capitalism has stopped progressing and has instead curdled into a loop of brand names. Her attachment to Clinique 3-step lotions and A.P.C. T-shirts is not just nostalgia; it is the "consumerist malaise" of an individual who can only define themself through the system of equivalence. Ma’s use of zombie imagery offers a chilling metaphor for the achievement society: the fevered are not traditional monsters; they are creatures reduced to routine, mindlessly repeating the habits of their former lives—like a mother setting a table or a family bowing their heads in a silent, rhythmic grace. They are content in their lifeless routine, much like the modern worker committed to a zombiesque repetition under the pretense of productivity.

 

The modern individual’s complaint of "Nothing is possible," that Byung-Chul Han notes in The Burnout Society (2015), is the direct result of a society that pathologically insists "Nothing is impossible." When everything is encouraged and everything is available, the sense of self corrodes. As Han notes, “The violence of positivity does not deprive, it does not exclude, it saturates.”

 

This saturation leads to the "obesity of all current systems"—of information, of production, of communication, and of consumption. We are "liminal figures," swept in by a tide of brands and marketing, unable to truly define our surroundings because our surroundings are perpetually the same. The future looks like a repetitive loop of Urban Outfitters, Sephoras, and Chipotles—a world where "build-your-own" is the only choice we have left, a choice that only reinforces the homogenization of the individual.

 

Deleuze & Guattari suggest that when beliefs collapse at the level of symbolic elaboration, all that is left is the Thing—a system that grows not by excluding us, but by saturating us with a "violence of positivity." Late capitalism reduces consciousness to a Cartesian-esque distinction between mind and body. While our minds are subjected to a constant barrage of conditioning signals and media, our somatic identity is left to toil in the workplace, committed to an "ineluctable monotony."

 

Burnout is not just a personal failure; it is the inevitable conclusion of a society that has replaced the "no" of discipline with the exhausting, homogenizing "yes" of positivity. Until we can break the "suffocating" logic of Capitalist Realism and rediscover the capacity for the "new," we remain like the fevered: mindlessly repeating the rituals of a system that has already consumed our future.