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The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot’s claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.

— Mark Fisher

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No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it.

Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living.

The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography or Das Kapital, a monetary value.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Mark Fisher (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.