



The End of Capitalism[?]: Kata Geibl Feature Author ········· Taylor Dorrell

Published ······ April 2, 2020



From the series Uncanny Valley (2017) by Kata Geibl

“For it is the end of the world that is in question here; and that could be exhilarating if apocalypse were the only way of imagining that world’s disappearance (whether we have to do here with the bang or the whimper is not the interesting question)... Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world….” Fredric Jameson, Future Cities. (2003)

“...the point is to reflect upon a sad fact that we need a catastrophe to make us able to rethink the very basic features of the society in which we live.” Slavoj Zizek, Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communism. (2020)



I



Uncanny Valley: Living in Images of Our Desire, Images of the Future





From the series Uncanny Valley (2017) by Kata Geibl





“a Utopian wish fulfillment wrapped in dystopian wolf's clothing, and think it is only fair and prudent, as far as the nastier sides of human nature are concerned, to vigilantly scrutinize apparent nightmares of this kind for traces of that different and more egotistical drive toward individual and collective self-gratification that Freud found living on insatiably in our Unconscious.” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (1989)

From the series Uncanny Valley (2017) by Kata Geibl



“But I think it would be better to characterize all this in terms of History, a History that we cannot imagine except as ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here.” Fredric Jameson, Future Cities. (2003)





From the series Uncanny Valley (2017) by Kata Geibl









II



There is Nothing New Under the Sun: Religion and Capital



From the series There is Nothing New Under the Sun (2019) by Kata Geibl







“For a nation to create art. It must have its ideal, its god. America’s god is the dollar: so its architecture has produced skyscrapers, its sculpture produces machines, its pictorial art is the cinema.” Harold Loeb, editor of Broom. Found in El Lissitzky’s ‘Amerikanizm’ in European Architecture. (1925)



“It would be abusive or sentimental to account for such new "religious" formations by way of an appeal to some universal human appetite for the spiritual, in a situation in which spirituality virtually by definition no longer exists: the definition in question is in fact that of Postmodernism itself... Marvin Harris has devoted part of an incongruously passionate indictment of postmodern times to a denunciation of the emphasis of the new fundamentalisms on success of whatever type (life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness -- mostly financial), reminding us that no previous human religion on earth has ever valorized such things, let alone promised them.” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (1989)









From the series There is Nothing New Under the Sun (2019) by Kata Geibl

“...the imagination of catastrophe still retains the forms of a near and a far future category; if the atomic exchange has grown distant, the greenhouse effect and ecological pollution are, by way of compensation, ever more vivid. What we need to ask is whether such anxieties and the narratives in which they are invested really "intend" the future (in Husserl's technical sense of posing a genuine object), or somehow convolute and return to feed on our own moment of time.” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (1989)

“Perhaps, however, what is implied is simply an ultimate historicist breakdown in which we can no longer imagine the future at all, under any form -- Utopian or catastrophic. Under those circumstances, where a formerly futurological science fiction (such as so-called cyberpunk today) turns into mere "realism" and an outright representation of the present...” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (1989)



From the series There is Nothing New Under the Sun (2019) by Kata Geibl



“The problem is then how to locate radical difference; how to jumpstart the sense of history so that it begins again to transmit feeble signals of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia. The problem to be solved is that of breaking out of the windless present of the postmodern back into real historical time, and a history made by human beings.” Fredric Jameson, Future Cities. (2003)



“It replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition. More and more, more is more.” Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace. (2001)



“In the same way, yesterday's terror of the overcrowded conurbations of the immediate future could just as easily be read as a pretext for complacency with our own historical present, in which we do not yet have to live like that. In both cases, at any rate, the fear is that of proletarianization, of slipping down the ladder, of losing a comfort and a set of privileges which we tend increasingly to think of in spatial terms: privacy, empty rooms, silence, walling other people out, protection against crowds and other bodies.” Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (1989)





