ABSTRACT

Jameson makes explicit the link between the betrayed moment of liberation and what he sees as the impossibility of negation in a consumer, capitalist society. He argues that in late capitalism all potentially resistant energies or movements are incorporated into the mainstream: potentially subversive ideas, for example, are denigrated and robbed of their power by being turned into fads. Mark Fisher mentions as an example the fact that anti-capitalist narratives are widely disseminated in Hollywood, and suggests that these films perform our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. There are, today, subcultures or cultural communities that could be described as genuinely oppositional. The incorporation of potentially resistant energies defuses the very possibility of subversion represented for Marcuse by the forgotten moments of liberation that the ‘brother clan’ betrayed.