Everything Solid Dissolves into Air: Desire against Capitalist Realism

Clara Serra and Laure Vega

In a society where the horizon seems closed, where sensitivity is trapped within each body, where each identity is presented as watertight and where culture has been reduced to an endless succession of remakes, we are struck by a crisis of desire. This desire is caught between two poles: on one hand, the simple subsistence of the status quo as we know it, like a desire frozen in repetition; and on the other, a regression toward an idealised and unreachable past. Faced with capitalist realism, which no longer just presents itself as the only viable political-economic system left, but also precludes the ability to imagine any coherent alternative, the question arises: Is a desire possible that transcends this dynamic without being devoured by it?

In this context, subjective conditions seem to be headed for historical inertia: desire has been reduced to resignation or to nostalgia for a past that never was, whilst capitalism captures every attempt at escape or transgression. And yet, might we dream of a project that is not restricted to being a dispositif for verifying reality, nor trapped in reaffirming what already exists, but is rather constructed from the interstices of a totalising reality? If the erosion of the value system that once sustained earlier forms of order and stability has left a void, is it possible for answers to germinate there? Such answers would not swing between nostalgia or resentment, but emerge as assertions of power, as forms of desire that do not react to the existing order, but create something new.

The question is not only whether or not postcapitalist desire can exist, but how the conditions of possibility can be constructed so that such desire might emerge. What socio-cultural ecosystem can host it? What forms of life, practices and values can produce the necessary conditions for transformative desire to become possible? More crucially, how can we resist and overcome the cultural suffocation that seems to dominate everything? How can we reawaken a political imagination that has been cornered by capitalist dynamics, the acceleration of time and the uniformity of representation? 

In opposition to moral resistentialism, which not only absolves responsibility, but also exhausts the possibility of any real action that could change the established order, we propose a journey through questions about the possibility of postcapitalist desire. This is not an abstract or theoretical issue, but a profoundly practical one: it is about thinking about and creating the conditions for desire not only to survive, but to reinvent itself, expand and become a force for political transformation. This desire must be affirmative, capable of looking towards the future without falling into despair or cynicism. It must not accept the boundaries of the present, but rather must push them towards new possibilities.