[SOC FIS] Postcapitalist Desire

Published by Repeater Books An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd Unit 11 Shepperton House 88-93 Shepperton Road London N1 3DF UK www.repeaterbooks.com A Repeater Books ebook original 2020 1 Copyright © Mark Fisher 2020 Introduction copyright © Matt Colquhoun 2020 ISBN: 9781913462376 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re- sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. CONTENTS Introduction: No More Miserable Monday Mornings Note on the Text Lecture One: What is Postcapitalism? Lecture Two: “A Social and Psychic Revolution of Almost Inconceivable Magnitude”: Countercultural Bohemia as Prefiguration Lecture Three: From Class Consciousness to Group Consciousness Lecture Four: Union Power and Soul Power Lecture Five: Libidinal Marxism Appendix One: Course Syllabus Appendix Two: “No More Miserable Monday Mornings” Tracklist Introduction: No More Miserable Monday Mornings Matt Colquhoun Atrocity Exhibition In the introduction to his unfinished book, Acid Communism, the late Mark Fisher — famous for his love of post-punk, jungle, and a range of contemporary pop-experimentalists — surprised friends and fans alike by writing positively about the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Fisher had previously been scathing about the legacy of the counterculture. He had once declared on his k-punk blog, for instance, that “hippie was fundamentally a middle class male phenomenon” defined by a “hedonic infantilism”.1 For him, the hippie’s characteristic sloppiness, “ill- fitting clothes, unkempt appearance and Fuzzed-out psychedelic fascist drug talk, displayed a disdain for sensuality”.2 For Mark Fisher, there was no greater crime. The hippies, as if trapped in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type scenario of their own devising, were guilty of passively and mindlessly giving in to the pleasure principle, and the “price of such ‘happiness’ — a state of cored-out, cheery Pod people affectlessness — [was the] sacrifice of all autonomy”.3 As far as Fisher was concerned, to self-induce a stoned stupor, chemically or otherwise, was to do capitalism’s work for it, as if driven by a Freudian “repetition compulsion” to artificially implement capitalism’s cognitive capture from within, demonstrating the human organism’s “marked … tendency to seek out and identify itself with parasites that debilitate but never quite destroy it”.4 Instead, on his k-punk blog in particular, Fisher offered another path. This path did not require the superficial primitivism of showering less and smoking more, nor was it akin to a New Age overreliance on positive but hollow affirmations. If we are to take our psychedelic dream of emancipation seriously, and if it is to have any contemporary relevance whatsoever, we have to realise that nothing can be achieved by getting off your head on drugs. This was not a moral point, however, but an acutely political one. The point was, instead, “to get out through your head”, through the application of a “psychedelic reason”, “auto-effect[ing] your brain into a state of ecstasy”.5 Fisher furnished his alternative with the seventeenth-century philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, where this “psychedelic reason” lies in wait, ready to be uncovered. “Spinoza is the prince of philosophers; really, the only one you need”, he writes.6 Before Deleuze and Guattari, Freud and Lacan, it was Spinoza who held the key to exorcising that parasitic demon of modernity, the capitalist ego, from one’s mind. He notes that Spinoza “took for granted what would later become the first principle of Marx’s thought — that it was more important to change the world than to interpret it”. Spinoza attempted to do this by constructing a reflexive ethical project that was “effectively psychoanalysis three hundred years early”.7 Fisher continues: Vernacular psychology has it that emotions are irreducibly mysterious, too fuzzy and indistinct to analyse beyond a certain point. Spinoza, on the other hand, maintains that happiness is a matter of emotional engineering: a precise science which can be learned and practiced … In tune with popular wisdom, Spinoza is clear that what brings wellbeing to one entity will [be] poison to another. The first and most overriding drive of any entity, Spinoza says, is its will to persist in its own being. When an entity starts to act against its own best interests, to destroy itself — as, sadly, Spinoza observes, humans are wont to do — it has been taken over by external forces. To be free and happy entails exorcising these invaders and acting in accordance with reason.8 In this sense, Fisher’s blogospheric rallying cry was to argue that we already possess everything that we need to escape the confines of capitalist realism — that ideological straitjacket that keeps us compliant and unimaginative; the external invader constricting our minds, bodies, and the self-realisation of our being today. Drugs like acid or ecstasy might loosen up the mind to a certain degree, but they neglect the other, more lucidly existential parts of human subjectivity (our capacity to reason, our political agency), leaving them to rot and atrophy. In this sense, the problem with drugs, Fisher argues, is that they “are like an escape kit without an instruction manual”.9 “Taking MDMA is like improving [Microsoft] Windows: no matter how much tinkering $ Bill [Gates] does, MS Windows will always be shit because it is built on top of the rickety structure of DOS”.10 The drugs, then, are all too temporary — “using ecstasy will always fuck up in the end because [the] Human OS [Operating System] has not been taken out and dismantled”.11 As fun as they may be, in the grand scheme of things, and as the old song goes, the drugs don’t work, they just make things worse… However, when the hippies “rose from their supine hedono-haze to assume power”, Fisher continues — addressing the aesthetic ubiquity and cultural power of the counterculture that has lingered long past the movement’s political usefulness — “they brought their contempt for sensuality with them”.12 Culturally speaking, the shadow of this moment is long. With the new sensuality of post-punk eventually defeated, Fisher connects the virulence of this “anti-sensual sensibility” to the cultural yuppies of the 1990s, epitomised by the Young British Artists, alongside the adjacent rise to power of Britpop’s “laddishness”. It is hard to deny the prevalence of the counterculture’s negative trajectory when framed in this way. Whilst at first it seems like there is little more than a similar predilection for round teashade sunglasses connecting the Beatles’ John Lennon to Oasis’s Liam Gallagher, for instance, in fact the counterculture’s cul-de-sac of passivity — or, as Fisher puts it, its “hey man, it’s all about the mind!” sensibility — was as much the driving force behind the “bleary, blurry, beery, leery, lairy” vibe of Britpop hedonism as it was for the acid tests of the bohemian unwashed.13 This is apparent as soon as we cast an eye over the acid mundanity captured in two songs — the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (1967) and Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova” (1995). Thirty years apart, from two (politically) distinct worlds, the bond of a psychedelic melancholia nonetheless binds them together. The same hauntological and melancholic transference can be seen in John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 performative sit-in, “Bed-Ins for Peace”, the rotten husk of which re- emerged from the funereal white cube of the Tate Gallery in the form of Tracey Emin’s 1998 work “My Bed”. This superficial regurgitation of Sixties concerns under the melancholy of Nineties capitalism resembles the fin de siècle decadence of the previous century — a nightmarish and fumbling autopsy of a long-dead dream, albeit devoid of any of its proto-modernist self-awareness. Britpop, in this sense, was truly an atrocity exhibition, curating a fashion-show procession of neoliberal spectres and zombies, now haunting and stalking the psyche. The Abstract Ecstasy of Psychedelic Reason It is fair to say that nothing from this period of Fisher’s blogging days — a particularly productive August in 2004 — constitutes “putting it lightly”; his critiques are barbed and often wholly negative. So how did this Mark Fisher transform into the Fisher of Acid Communism? Despite this unflattering appraisal from the mid-2000s, it seemed that Fisher later softened his opinion on the counterculture as a whole. And yet, despite appearances, this transformation was not so extreme. Fisher instead took it upon himself to move beyond his barbed critiques and work towards the construction of a positive political project — a project that still had his Spinozist “psychedelic reason” at its heart. It seems that, in the process of constructing such a project, Fisher had begun to newly appreciate the political potentials of the counterculture’s best cultural and aesthetic offerings — at least in their original socio- political context. These potentials were not to be found in the surrealist abstractions of a bourgeois Pink Floyd concert, repurposed nostalgically and apolitically

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