Hang on Tight and Spit On Me: A Review of Postcapitalist Desire by Mark Fisher (Fisher's Ghosts, Part 8)

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(Edit: I mis-attributed the cover, thankfully Mr. Colquhoun caught it and tweeted the correct information. As noted below, now, the cover is by Johnny Bull. A link to his shop has been added.)

Last Thursday, our local bookshop finally got in the copy of Postcapitalist Desire that I ordered back in October of last year – it’s a beautiful book, with a glossy hard cover and a solid binding, the Hunter S. Thompson-ish image of a skeleton on the cover, produced by Johnny Bull who did the painting on the cover of The Weird and the Eerie. The book was edited by Matt Colquhoun, who blogs over at Xenogothic and who I understand is also a photographer (he also co-hosts a podcast on Deleuze and Guattari called – I shit you not – Buddies Without Organs). I was honestly surprised by its packaging – you see, I hadn’t heard anything about the actual, physical object. I just knew that there was a collection of transcripts of the final five lectures Mark Fisher — the subject of one of our longest-running series — gave coming out, and I wanted to read it.

The class, Postcapitalist Desire, for which you can easily find a syllabus online, was something of a workshop where Fisher was talking through the concepts that were going to go into his last book Acid Communism (previously discussed here,) and it was going to meet for fifteen sessions but Fisher passed away after the fifth one. He took his own life in January of 2017. This fact, for me, hangs over the whole of the book: this brilliant man, who seemed to be an enthusiastic and gentle educator (frustrations about “depressive hedonia” among his students aside), talking about the possibility of a world that could be free, died before the sixth lecture could be held.

It seems to me that this fact can’t help but haunt the book. Colquhoun’s other publication, Egress, was responding directly to the event (perhaps, I admit, I should read that – the introduction to Postcapitalist Desire is quite well-written, and clarifies a number of comments).

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So I read the book almost straight through. Started it on Friday, finished it on Saturday. I’ve been emotionally hung over ever since, largely for the reasons outlined above. It’s almost poetic, in its own way: Fisher’s philosophy is a school of thought obsessed with loss and haunting (his second major publication, if this tips you off, was called Ghosts of My Life, pictured at right), of thinking through the missed off-ramps on the road to the hellscape we find ourselves passing through, of wondering what might have been. It’s a philosophy that rejects the nostalgic (defined by a replaying the past endlessly), in favor of the hauntological (the banished imaginaries of futures that were anticipated and never came to be).

In this lecture series, he was thinking through the moment in the 1960s and 1970s when the New Left emerged, the alliance between labor and the counterculture that promised to remake the world by unleashing a new kind of subjectivity that would change the way we lived in the world. Of course, the moment that was going to be the triumph of the New Left turned into the most crushing defeat, the reason that Hunter S. Thompson said that you could “go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”

Fisher wanted to figure out why it failed. He wasn’t convinced that the whole project should be tossed out, but instead that a core of it could be salvaged, shorn of its narcotic tendencies and plugged into a new apparatus: a (to use a Deleuzo-Guattarian term,) Nomad War-Machine powered by Psychedelic Reason.

Of course, this required an examination of what had gone on before, a sorting through of the wreckage and a meditation upon its meaning. It meant asking questions about the nature of desire, and asking if desire and capital were always entwined, it meant sorting through not just the familiar, heavyweight theorists like Freud and Marx, Marcuse and Lukács, Lyotard and Jameson, but also feminist thinkers like Ellen Willis and Nancy Hartsock, and historians like Jefferson Cowie and journalists like Naomi Klein. It was a magnificent attempt to synthesize a diverse range of viewpoints.

The book ends, in a somewhat gothic fashion, with the discussion of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, which Lyotard called his “evil book”, and which has a reputation in some circles as being somewhere between the instructions for assembling the most complicated piece of IKEA furniture imaginable and Lovecraft’s Necronomicon: obscure, unhelpful, and potentially harmful to read through – there’s some implication that reading it is part of why Nick Land was Like That.

Lyotard was obviously dealing with some things.

Lyotard was obviously dealing with some things.

To some extent – and this is not a review of Libidinal Economy, I have not read it, and don’t intend to until after I’ve read A Thousand Plateaus, at least – Fisher suggests that this is unwarranted. He suggests that, while Libidinal Economy is negative in its outlook, there are glimmers of something else inside.

The thing inside is Accelerationism.

Let’s talk about this. If you’ve heard of Accelerationism, then most likely it’s been attached to Right-Wing extremism of one variety of another. I’ve heard Steve Bannon described as an Accelerationist, but if so he’s a particularly mild sort. The term has also, at various points, been applied to both Nick Land and Slavoj Žižek, which goes to show the word’s plasticity. It’s also been self-applied by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, on the left (Left Acceleration previously mentioned, not in any great depth, here). For simplicity’s sake, let’s refer to these by their internet-speak acronyms: R/Acc and L/Acc; there is also U/Acc, or “Unconditional Accelerationism” but I’m not sure what to make of that crowd.

Žižek also provides the perfect reaction image for whenever someone suggests I should read more Nick Land.

Žižek also provides the perfect reaction image for whenever someone suggests I should read more Nick Land.

Accelerationism is, frankly, the idea that there are forces in society which need to be pushed further, accelerated to the highest possible degree to escape the stagnation that we appear to be falling in to. For people on the Right, these tendencies which need to be accelerated tend to be Capitalism or (the supposedly inevitable) race war. On the Left, they tend to be things like the tendency toward self-direction and a sort of radical interconnectedness – things generally thought to be decelerated by Capital (which is why I tend to bring up David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” in the context of L/Acc). Please note, though, this is my understanding of the idea, there has been a lot written about it from a variety of perspectives.

There’s also what I call “Vulgar Left Accelerationism” (vL/A, possibly?), which needs to be acknowledged as existing, but which everyone can acknowledge as being pure idiocy: this is, essentially, the standpoint of the Bernie voter that switched to Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections – we can’t make things better right now, so let’s make it as bad as possible to trigger a possible revolt (this is why, at least colloquially, I’ve heard Žižek labeled as an Accelerationist – a label I don’t generally think applies).

You could look him up on Twitter, but why would you.

You could look him up on Twitter, but why would you.

In Postcapitalist Desire, I feel there is the best articulation of Mark Fisher’s philosophy as an accelerationist project. In the eleventh lecture, he was going to tackle Nick Land’s “Machinic Desire”, and while Mark Fisher’s work regularly references Land on its way to other points, I feel that a direct reading of it is something of a rarity. For those who are unaware, Nick Land was Mark Fisher’s advisor at the University of Warwick, and (not to over-reference H.P. Lovecraft), had the most Lovecraftian arc to his oeuvre of any thinker I’m aware of – it started by reading the work of Georges Bataille in terms of Libidinal Economy, picked up a speed habit and seemed to go downhill from there (Nick Land is still alive, and last I heard – I believe – living and working in Shanghai, he’s still active on the Right, advising people to read things from the Order of Nine Angles, and I feel like that about sums up everything that you need to know about Nick Land [and if you’re unaware of what O9A is, do yourself a favor and stay that way.])

I think we can read in this lecture series a desire to recover what parts of Nick Land’s – admittedly compellingly-written – theory work could be recovered and incorporated into a framework borrowing from Marx, Deleuze, and Guattari. Largely, this has to do with understanding Desire, and specifically the question of why people lust after their own destruction and subjugation. The central problem here is articulated in a passage from Lyotard (which, incidentally, gives this piece its name), which proposes that:

the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion is was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening. (p. 19)

To this, Fisher has an addendum, though:

not far beneath Lyotard’s ‘desire-drunk yes’, lies the No of hatred, anger and frustration: no satisfaction, no fun, no future. These are the resources of negativity that I believe the left must make contact with again. (p. 19 - 20)

Hang on, someone might say here: since when is the left not negative? Leftists continually attack one another and the most popular image of us is of an ungendered person with a hammer-and-sickle t-shirt and candy-colored hair shaking their finger in moralizing admonition. Or of an antifa super-soldier. God, it’s impossible to tell whether we’re supposed to be easily crushed weaklings or an overwhelming threat these days: I wish the fascists could come up with a schedule for the oscillation.

It is perhaps trite, but I enjoy this picture of Mark Fisher, because it reminds me of the offices of many of my professors from undergrad.  It was the one used in the OpenDemocracy piece.

It is perhaps trite, but I enjoy this picture of Mark Fisher, because it reminds me of the offices of many of my professors from undergrad. It was the one used in the OpenDemocracy piece.

Negativity, in the philosophical sense is best summed up in a simple phrase that Mark Fisher apparently used with openDemocracy writer Adam Harper: “Negativity, not pessimism!” which I might paraphrase by quoting a firmly nostalgic singer-songwriter, Rocky Votolato as “hopeful, but not optimistic.” The willingness to see the world as a dark and unfriendly place and consider how it might be different – looking at the shadow and conceiving the shape of the thing casting it.

Let’s return to the text. Fisher makes the case for an L/Acc reading of Libidinal Economy very succinctly in the first lecture, claiming that the book’s actual argument was “that there’s no possible retreat from capitalism – there’s no space of primitive outside to which we can return, we have to go all the way through capitalism” (p. 45). If every corner of the world has been enfolded into the structure of the capitalist system, then it is impossible to build anything untouched by it. What this means is that what is needed is not exactly to retreat from the world (as post-civilization writers might argue), but to build our means of escape from the things this world has already and surpass and supersede it.

I’m getting off into the weeds here.

This book is a valuable read. Not simply because it contains work by Mark Fisher and his thoughts on these subjects, but for the reading list it contains – which, admittedly, is available on the internet, immortalized (for certain values of immortality) in the Goldsmiths system. It shows source texts, and models Fisher’s interaction with them (as well as displaying his pedagogical style, which I appreciated), and the responses of his students. One could make the argument that, beneath the surface of this text lies a model for what Colquhoun – and others – have taken to calling “The Fisher-Function”, which I understand Egress treats a bit more explicitly.

The Fisher-Function

I believe, but I am not sure, that this poster was associated with the Eulogy in question, found through Mahan Moalemi’s website.

I believe, but I am not sure, that this poster was associated with the Eulogy in question, found through Mahan Moalemi’s website.

Okay, so a bit of work indicates that the term was coined by Robin MacKay – director and editor at Urbanomic – in a eulogy to Mark Fisher. The “Fisher-Function” isn’t something that I’ve seen described in much detail (there’s a website for it, but it’s set to private), and as an outsider to the circle of people discussing it, I’m not sure I could properly do so. I suspect that it would be improper to call it a methodology, and may be more accurate to call it a role that is adopted by a person from time to time, a sort of outsider-folded-within a structure who can provide a new perspective on the structures being discussed, described, and worked with.

As mentioned, MacKay coined this term, saying:

So I’ve been trying to think of what remains after the physical body’s gone, when the singularity of a life can no longer rely on that frail support and needs other carriers. I try to think about it in a way I think he’d appreciate: in terms of an abstract, impersonal force acting in the present tense. The spectre isn’t a matter of pretending he’s still here in person—as if the notion of a ‘person’ wasn’t precisely what was at issue—or of commemoration or superstition, but—to use a word of his own invention—a question of hyperstition: What is the Fisher-Function? How did it make itself real, and how can we continue to realise it? Many of us naturally feel a need to ensure this is a moment when the force he brought into our world is redoubled rather than depleted. And to do so, to continue his work and our own, we have to try to understand his life, and the consequences of his death, at once horrifying and awakening, as a part of the Fisher-Function. And I don’t simply mean the intellectual contributions that we can appreciate, extend, take forward into the future; I also mean what we need to learn in terms of looking after ourselves and each other, right now. [italics original]

Of course, Deleuze claimed to be a Marxist, and Guattari was a trained Lacanian, but it’s hard to say definitively what either of them actually were.

Of course, Deleuze claimed to be a Marxist, and Guattari was a trained Lacanian, but it’s hard to say definitively what either of them actually were.

Forgive me for another long aside: I realize that I was trained as a literary critic instead of a philosopher, but we tend to work with similar texts. Part of what draws me to writers like Fisher, as well as Deleuze and Guattari, and the Frankfurt School, is rooted in this difference in education. One thing that was always emphasized to me was the separation of post-modern thinking from Marxist thinking. As I wrote in a piece I put together a long time ago on postmodernism (or post-modernism. I should standardize my spellings). many original postmodern thinkers were Marxists or of a Marxist persuasion, but were reacting to changes in the world around them, differences between the world that they were working in, in the middle of the 20th century and the world that came before that. To take a fairly minor example, Foucault was not saying that everything should be like a prison, he was saying that everything was like a prison. For another, Baudrillard was not saying that everything should be reduced to mere representation, simply that it was reduced to mere representation.

Part of what drew me to Mark Fisher, and other thinkers that I discovered through him, was a willingness to ignore the strict division that my education made it seem was enforced here. If the post-modernists were those interpreting the world made by the modernists, then they were actually describing the world defended as just and natural by the anti-Postmodernists – the contemporary right-wing ideologues, the Jordans Peterson and “Intellectual Dark Web” types, of the world – and providing the means to mount an assault.

the Image is Burial’s self-titled album.  Fisher could be said to be use popcultural touchstones only for certain values of pop culture, honestly.

the Image is Burial’s self-titled album. Fisher could be said to be use popcultural touchstones only for certain values of pop culture, honestly.

What makes Mark Fisher compelling is that, I feel, he was like a forerunner or time-lost visitor from the next epoch, a sort of Anti-anti-postmodernist, dialectically mixing and remixing the marxist and postmodern thinking into something new. He communicated it with popcultural touchstones, weaving in and out of the highbrow and the populist in such a way that what might have been obscured if it were written in something like the French high academic style.

If I were to try to propose an interpretation of what the Fisher-Function is (and I do not think I’m the person to do so, mind you), it would be as a kind of anti-prism: synthesizing diverse perspectives into a coherent light by which our surroundings can be read. Taking the detritus of low culture and the theory of high culture, and fashioning them into those Deleuzian new weapons, ready to be distributed to the masses.

Problems with the Text

Cover of The Worst is yet To Come by Peter Fleming.  Frase’s book is more hopeful, but there’s a negativity to Fleming’s text that can’t be dismissed.

Cover of The Worst is yet To Come by Peter Fleming. Frase’s book is more hopeful, but there’s a negativity to Fleming’s text that can’t be dismissed.

All of this being said, there are still some issues with the text that I think need to be acknowledged. While Fisher stresses that he’s discussing “postcapitalism” instead of “Marxism”, he is still taking a Marxist stance in many places, and I feel that does somewhat limit what he’s attempting to do. We cannot assume that Postcapitalism is necessarily going to be the balm that we expect it to be – Fisher references Peter Frase’s Four Futures in one lecture, but another book of similar import might be Peter Fleming’s The Worst is Yet to Come, which Fisher couldn’t have read due to the simple fact that it came out after his passing.

I take a somewhat anarchistic stance on things, and in my mind, Capitalism is an expression of a deeper problem, and just as Capitalism will attempt to capture movements against it, I feel that this deeper problem will happily save itself by abandoning the vehicle of capital and infect any new order that we build, creating a predatory post-capitalism (McKenzie Wark suggested something similar in her book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?) to my mind, this deeper problem is the tendency of hierarchies to become permanent (I don’t reject hierarchy as such, but I do think that their tendency to become entrenched and permanent is the root of much human-caused suffering).

This doesn’t mean that the book isn’t a profound read. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think there is incredible value in it. However, despite the fact that I call myself a “Fisherian”, I do think there is more that needs to be considered.

For example, it’s held up in the text that the bourgeois can’t develop awareness of the class system. Some students question it, and I think that Fisher’s embrace of this idea is more an article of faith than a well-thought-out position. It’s essentially a restatement of an idea that Marx (I imagine) received directly from Hegel in the form of the Master-Slave dialectic: the idea that the socially powerful are unable to think of the contingency of their position because they are enclosed completely within the system that they have created, and the supposedly subjugated are able to conceive of the outside of it because they encounter its breakages – they can see the light through the gaps.

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As time goes on, though, I wonder about this. I do not think, mind you, that the super-wealthy will become aware of the class system and assume that it needs to be done away with, I don’t think we have any hope of a multi-billionaire class traitor deciding to give us the freedom that his class-position relies upon denying. However, I don’t think that we can say that the kings and lords of the feudal system were necessarily ignorant of the contradictions inherent in feudalism: they may have believed themselves somehow inherently better, but Louis XVI couldn’t have been ignorant of the fact that he was a mortal man, destined to die, when he was in his prison cell.

I think, honestly, this is one of the primary weaknesses of the Marxist line of thought: I think the bourgeoise can become aware of the class system, and will deform it in an effort to maintain it – after all, how do you explain the events of the world around us without this? How do you explain the fact that so many of the ultra-wealthy are preparing for the catastrophic failure of civilization?

Perhaps one of the contradictions of capital that the Marxists have failed to exploit is the fact that these people – especially after Marx, which many of them have read – are aware of the class system, but have to disavow that awareness. They know it but cannot speak it, because to say it in good faith would require them to abandon all of their stolen wealth.

Or perhaps I’m thinking through it too much.

In conclusion the book was a melancholy joy to read, like having an unexpected last visit with a friend moving on to their next chapter. While this book is over, and I’m not sure I’ll necessarily get to read anything else by him, I suspect that Mark Fisher will continue to haunt many things I read for years to come.

Fisher’s photo, as used in BMI’s obituary.

Fisher’s photo, as used in BMI’s obituary.

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